Ranking “Money Pages”: The $311,000 End-Around Strategy Used by Sites Like LendingTree and Student Loan Hero

Here’s the $311,000 linkbuilding strategy that sites like Student Loan Hero and LendingTree use to rank for their most valuable keywords.

“Refinance student loans” is an extremely competitive keyword with 15,000+ monthly searches valued at $300,000+ per month.

Pages that rank are heavily commercial.

So how do you get other people to link to a page that’s just trying to sell something?

Well, you don’t….

Instead of trying to build links directly to their most valuable commercial pages (”money pages”), these sites use an end-around strategy.

They create a new page that's not commercial.

It's informational — and highly linkable.

e.g.: "Student loan statistics."

This page is a natural link magnet. Other writers searching for stats about student loans will Google "student loan statistics", find the post, and then cite it as a source (if they're being good citizens!)

It has 100+ links, including lots of high-DA news and media sites.

(Just a quick note to say that this particular URL is actually a redirect from when LendingTree purchased Student Loan Hero)

But how does building links to a page about student loan statistics help them rank for "refinance student loans"?

3 ways:

1. Domain authority ⛵

Building more links to the website, on the whole, helps to improve rankings across the board.

Think: A rising tide lifts all ships.

2. Topical authority 🎯

Because Google understands that "student loan statistics" and "student loan refinancing" are topically (semantically) related, building links to a related page or resource helps establish credibility on the topic broadly.

3. Link equity 🌊

Every link on your page passes on a bit of authority. Pages with more links (authority) pass more authority to the pages they link to.

This also applies to internal links.

Internal links from pages with lots of links are more powerful.

This is the trick.

So, now that they have this "statistic" page that's generating all of these high-authority, natural links, all they have to do is link from that page to the "money" page to pass on the authority.

Use internal links to send some of the authority from the stats page to the money page. 🤑

Boom!

Links → Student Debt Statistics → Student Loan Refinancing

They rank for 1,200 of the toughest keywords on Google, generating an estimated $311,000/mo in organic traffic.

Ian Howells (from Traffic Think Tank, and former Director of SEO at LendingTree) broke down the strategy for me (and I repeated it back) in a live session we did a while back.

You can learn more by watching: