How We Tripled Revenue For This Real Estate Agent

In this case study, I’ll show you HOW we helped our client to:

…while navigating in the highly competitive world of real estate.

So keep reading to learn the exact strategies & techniques we implemented to achieve those incredible results.

A Closer Look At The Case Study Site

When this real estate client came to us, the site had been operating for over 5 years, turning a good profit through paid search.

The client wanted to invest in SEO as a long-term strategy for lead generation through search marketing, as the cost-per-click for keywords in this niche is costly.

The client’s link profile had a couple of good links, but there was little done in terms of on-site optimisation.

On top of that, the home-buying niche is very competitive from an SEO perspective, as it is a popular lead-selling niche for professional SEOs allowing them to make a lot of passive income.

As a result, most of the sites occupying the first page positions for the most profitable SERPs are very well optimised, with powerful, manipulated off-site metrics.

With that in mind, we decided that our main priorities were to:

But, as you can imagine, it wasn’t all smooth sailing.

We had to overcome a few challenges along the way…

The Biggest Challenges We Had to Overcome

As I said earlier, this client worked in the highly competitive world of real estate and was spending a small fortune every month.

Indeed, the site was relying on paid traffic (PPC) rather than organic search traffic (SEO), which means that they had to pay quite a bit of money to bring traffic (and leads) to their website every month.

The thing with this technique is that it works… as long as you pay.

When you stop paying, your traffic drops completely. And no traffic means no visitors, no transitions, and no revenue.

This is exactly why the client wanted to turn things around, start investing in SEO and build a solid, long-term strategy.

So, to recap, these were the biggest challenges we had to face:

Now that you know what we were up against, let me show you what we did…

Creating The Plan Of Attack

The central strategy was to:

1. Address on-site weaknesses resulting from a lack of content, as well as duplication issues and keyword cannibalisation.
2. Build the overall domain authority using a targeted link-building campaign.
3. Build the authority of key internal pages through the use of targeted links.

1. On-Site Optimisation

Before doing any kind of off-page SEO (A.K.A link building), it’s crucial to take care of your on-page SEO.

Why?

Because no one wants to link to a poor-quality, under-optimised website!

Here is how we did it:

Content Issues

The site came to us with very little content across all key pages.

Although pages did exist targeting highly relevant secondary keywords and location-specific keywords, they consisted of little more than a contact form and a couple of lines of text.

Key SEO landing pages were all populated with at least 1,000 words of well-written, keyword-focused content.

Through the liberal use of CTA boxes and text expanders, the pages were still well-optimised from a conversion-rate perspective.

URL Duplication

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 stop this duplication, we set up an automatic 301 to redirect all trailing dash variations to the trailing dash version.

We also set up hard-coded canonical tags on all pages across the site.

Then, to remove the duplicates from the index, we submitted an up-to-date sitemap for crawling and indexing, then manually removed the few remaining wanted duplicates from the index.

Keyword Cannibalisation

A number of keywords were being targeted by two or more separate pages.

Where possible, we consolidated the pages into one definitive version and 301’d the other page over to it.

Other times, all pages served a purpose for user experience and conversions.

In these cases, we added NOINDEX and FOLLOW meta tags to the unneeded pages so that they were still accessible to users, but only one page would be indexed by search engines.

2. Link Building

We needed to build a lot of link equity to the site if it were to rank on the first page for the target terms.

So it was decided to focus on building the most powerful types of links we could.

We concentrated 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.

Once a good foundation of links with “safe” anchor text was established, we began targeting the central keywords and internal pages with more targeted anchor text, while being careful throughout the process to maintain a safe anchor text distribution.

The Results Are In

With the recommendations from the audit actioned in late October and links being pointed at the key internal pages, traffic continuously grew month-on-month.

By mid-July, organic traffic was up 93.91% compared to November 2015, with July receiving 1,146 compared to 591 in November.

Similarly, the number of new users had increased by over 85.43%, with 853 new visits in July compared to 460 in December.

Return On Investment

The number of leads generated by organic traffic increased by 191.6% between November and July, with the site receiving 210 leads in July compared to 72 in November.

The conversion rate improved by 50.41%, despite the site not being redesigned and no conversion rate optimisation taking place.

This increase shows that the traffic our actions were bringing to the site was highly targeted and relevant to the site.

Each fully converted lead landed the client £1000s. Assuming each conversion netted exactly £3000, with a conversion rate from online leads of roughly 0.5%, this meant that organic went from making £1080 per month to £3150.

Extrapolated across the year, this is an increase of £24,840 per year through SEO, with a total of £37,800 brought in through organic SEO.

Keyword Improvements

February 2016 and July 2016, the number of keywords ranking in Google.co.uk increased significantly:

Tracked Keyword Improvements

Across the 33 core keywords that we track in-house, there was an overall increase of 546 places.

A number of high-volume keywords entered the first page, and a number of highly competitive terms entered the index and continued to ascend the SERPs rapidly.

Wrapping It Up

Here you have it:

The strategies we used to…

If you want to increase your search traffic or recover from a penalty, please get in touch with us.