Project: Homevest
Industry: Financial services (international mortgages)
Service: Content strategy and execution
Summary
Homevest, a digital mortgage platform for non-residents interested in buying properties abroad, needed to increase its online visibility and attract qualified leads. Backed by Venrex, an early Revolut investor, Homevest raised £1.3 million in venture capital.
After collaborating as a freelance content writer, I was brought on to lead the SEO content strategy. I took ownership of content planning, creation, and scaling production.
Goal: Increase organic visibility and qualify property buyers in Romania, Spain, and Portugal. This included improving SEO performance and generating qualified leads.
Action: Developed an SEO content strategy focused on long-tail keywords and topic clusters to capture high-intent search queries and build authority clusters.
Results: Starting from a low domain authority and limited rankings, we built over 200 articles, which generated 4M organic visits and €13.9M in customer conversions.
Our collaboration focused on 3 core areas:
SEO content strategy
Content creation
Scaling content production via freelancers
SEO content strategy
I led the SEO content strategy, targeting long-tail keywords and building topic clusters to establish authority in mortgage topics.
Our goal was to provide useful information and remain top of mind when someone decided to move forward with their mortgage process.
The authority we built in Romania – growing from 0 to 10K organic traffic in 10 months and ranking for main keywords in Google — helped us later replicate the same strategy in different markets. First in Spain, and then in Portugal.
Content creation
We prioritized content based on search intent using a structured workflow:
Keyword research → social listening to capture the pain points of the audience → analyzing competitors → creating the brief → outlining the structure for the article, including the heading and subheadings, to make sure it meets the user’s intent
We invested time in crafting content briefs to build a strong foundation for our articles, but we also wanted to test, optimize and adapt on the go, so we published rapidly to gather feedback.
A content checklist I put together to make sure I made the most of each article.
When I worked on this project, AI was still in its early stages, but we were able to be cited as a source in ChatGPT or Perplexity thanks to a strong SEO foundation.
Scaling content production via freelancers
As a small team, outsourcing content was the best solution to accelerate our growth and experiment in a new market.
My strategy included:
Setting a clear goal: vet at least 3 freelancers to work with and develop the content
Finding talent and testing them
Preparing briefs and content guidelines
Setting a workflow and feedback loop
Portugal outperformed other markets in conversion rate because we chose to give a personal touch to the content and include first-hand experience. We found a freelancer who had taken a mortgage as a non-resident, so his inputs were very valuable in our process.
Here I’ve shared more about my experience with outsourcing content writing at Homevest:
The outcome
Over 16 months, we published 200+ blog articles, leading to:
2,500+ ranking keywords (80 in Google's top 3)
4M organic visits
€13.9M in customer conversions
Petru Dimulescu, who was one of the co-founders of Homevest and the CEO, has described our work experience this way:
“It was an absolute joy to work alongside Delia for more than 2 years. She has a knack for learning new things very quickly, proven by delivering strategies for multiple markets and products in a short timespan. She is great at upholding quality while keeping a good tally of the delivery.
When she joined, Homevest had just over 5K impressions/month at a CTR between 2–3%, and about a year later, our SEO game was top-notch with approximately 550K impressions/month with a click-through rate of 5%. I would love to have the chance to work with her on any future project. She is a gem.”
Catalina Rascanu, one of the freelance writers I managed, shared her impressions:
“Delia provided me with well-structured, detailed SEO briefs, which made the writing process clear and efficient from the start. Communication was always smooth. Delia responded promptly to questions and provided feedback that was clear, specific, and easy to implement.”