Built, grown and sold: a financial planner lead generation site
This one isn't client work. It's a site we built ourselves to connect people looking for financial advice with planners. It started from a blank domain in early 2019, became a dependable lead source, and was sold for six figures.
Enquiries delivered to financial plannersLifetime total. Owner's figure
- ~6K
- Estimated monthly organic traffic at peak*
- 20+
- Enquiries a month at peak (owner's figure)
- $10k+
- Monthly profit at peak (owner's figure)
- Sold
- For six figures
*Ahrefs third-party estimate of organic traffic, not analytics data. Enquiry and profit figures are the owner's own records.
Why financial planning
Financial planning has the economics that make search worth doing properly. A new client is worth a lot to a planner, people look for advice when they have a real decision to make, and trust decides who gets the call.
That combination means a relatively small number of searches can be valuable, provided the site is the one people trust when they land on it.
What we built
A site designed to help people find and compare financial planners, with pages built around the searches people use when they're ready to talk to someone. Every page had one job: turn a visit into an enquiry that a planner would want.
Because it was our own money, every decision was judged the same way: does this produce more enquiries, or just more traffic?
How it grew
The chart above is the whole story, volatility included. The site went from nothing in early 2019 to around 2,000 estimated monthly visits within about a year, then held roughly there while competitors and Google updates pushed back.
Sustained work on content, authority and the commercial pages took it through a second growth phase to a peak of around 6,000 estimated monthly visits. Over its life it delivered more than 1,000 enquiries to financial planners, peaking at 20+ a month and over $10k a month in profit.
It was then sold for six figures. A search-driven lead source with a track record is an asset someone will pay for.
What it means for clients
Most agencies have only ever spent other people's money. Building and selling our own lead sites is a different discipline: you find out quickly which work produces enquiries and which just produces reports.
The same thinking goes into client work. Start from what a lead is worth, target the searches closest to a decision, build pages that convert, and judge everything on enquiries.
Data disclosure. Organic traffic figures are Ahrefs third-party estimates based on rankings and search volumes, not analytics data, which is no longer available for this site. Enquiry, profit and sale figures are the owner's own records. The site's name is withheld because it now belongs to someone else.