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A real estate company had been in business for over 5 years and while it was operating successfully and turning over a good profit, the client was interested in invested in SEO as a long-term strategy to increase online engagement and leads.
The reason why SEO optimization was such an attractive avenue for this client was because cost-per-click in the real estate niche is quite costly.
While the client’s link profile had some valuable links, there had been little work done when it came to on-site optimization.
When it comes to SEO perspective, real estate is a competitive space in SEO. The reason why is because of a popular lead selling niche for professional SEOs that allow them to make passive income.
The result of that is that many of the sites that occupy Google’s first page result the most profitable SERPs are incredibly optimized.
This may have increased the challenge of meeting the client’s goals, but it certainly did not make the task impossible by any means.
How We Helped Rank A Real Estate Agency
The first thing we did was set up a series of priorities. Those were as follows:
- Push core keywords into top positions. The core keywords the client want to rank for were all on Google’s 3rd page or below.
- Increase search visibility for longer tail keywords. Long-tail terms which were relevant to the site were not ranking well at all. That was despite the fact that they were relatively uncompetitive. This was because of a mixture of poor on-site optimization and a lack of inbound links.
- Expand location-specific pages and increase rankings. The site already had a number of location pages targeting specific cities and regions in the United States. Unfortunately, these pages were poorly optimized with very little content.
- Make sure that the site was optimized correctly. The site for the company had very little rich and unique content which was hurting SEO. On top of that, URL duplication and keyword cannibalization was holding back the site.
Once those issues were identified, it was time to come up with a strategy and a way to implement them.
The central strategy was:
- To address on-site weaknesses resulting from a lack of content, as well as duplication issues and keyword cannibalization.
- To build overall domain authority using a targeted link building campaign.
- To build the authority of key internal pages through the use of targeted links.
The first step was to make sure to optimize the company’s site as well as possible.
The site first came to us with a very small amount of content across all of its key pages. While the important pages did indeed exist, and were targeting highly relevant secondary keywords and location-specific keywords, they consisted of not much more than just a couple lines of text.
This was the clearest problem from the jump, and we worked with the client to populate these crucial pages with rich and unique content that was both engaging to read and was highly optimized to rank for location specific and long tail searches.
Key SEO landing pages were quickly populated with at least 1,000 words and keyword focused content. The pages were also optimized from a conversion rate perspective.
The next step was to ratify URL duplication.
URL duplication can be an SEO killer and due to a large number of incorrect links, many of the pages on the site were duplicated due to mixed case URLs as well as trailing dash inconsistencies.
To fight duplication, we set up an automatic redirect for all trailing dash variations to the trailing dash version. We also set up hard-coded canonical tags on all pages throughout the site. We also had to manually remove the few remaining duplicates.
The final on-site step was to end keyword cannibalization.
A number of keywords were being targeted by two or more separate pages on the site.
Wherever possible the site was directed to consolidate the pages into one version and then 301’d the other pages over to it.
In other cases, the site added NOINDEX, FOLLOW meta tags to pages so while they were still accessible to users, one only page was indexed by the search engines.
Once these on-site issues had been reconciled, it was time to start an aggressive and well thought out link building strategy.
Top Real Estate Link Building Strategies
The site had a lot of room to grow and it needed it to remain competitive within the highly competitive niche of real estate sites. For that reason, we need to build a lot of link equity for the site to make sure that it would rank on the first page for the targeted terms.
As a result of that, it was decided to focus on people the most powerful types of white hat links we could find. The concentration was on finding high metric relevant domains so we could build the authority of the site with fewer links so that the link velocity appeared natural to Google and other search engines.
First, we made it a priority to set up a foundation of links with “safe” anchor text. After that, we targeted the central keywords and internal pages with more targeted anchor text. At the same time, we made it a priority to be careful throughout the process to maintain safe and natural anchor text distribution as to not raise any concern for any major search engine algorithms.
Realtor SEO Results
Following the site audit and on-site SEO optimization as well as consistent and responsible link-building efforts, the site grew month-to-month. This client used us for SEO for multiple locations.
After an 8-month period, organic traffic was up an astounding 93.91%. On top of that, the new users on the site had increased by over 85.43% with 853 new visits in July compared to just 460 six months previous.
What perhaps was most telling, however, was that leads generated by organic traffic increased by an astounding 191.6% between the first and eighth months of the campaigned, with just 72 in the first month turning into 210 in the eight.
On top of that, the conversion rate improved by 50.41% despite the site not being redesigned and no conversation rate optimization taking place.
The increase in conversation rate shows that the traffic our actions were bringing was highly specialized to show that the links we built were highly targeted and relevant to the site.
Keyword rankings also improved vastly, which should not at all be a surprise.
- Keywords in the top 3 places increased from 9 to 21, an increase of 133.3%.
- Keywords in the top 10 places increased from 24 to 40, an increase of 66.6%.
- Keywords in the top 20 places increased from 57 to 146, an increase of 156.1%.
Across the 33 core keywords that were being tracked, there was an overall increase of 546 places. That reflects the fact that a number of high volume and value keywords entered the first page of Google’s SERPs.
If you are interested in improving your site’s outreach and increase your leads and revenue, contact us at today to find out what kind of on-site and link-building efforts you can make to help your site and company reach its full potential.