The client operates a website that works with real estate brokers who focus on bigger pieces of property like farms, ranches, acreage, commercial property, hunting land and farmland nationwide. The client site’s purpose is to garner visibility for its brokers and the properties they are looking to move.
The key challenges we faced on this project were that the client’s current website while ranking organically on keywords the client wanted was in need of being completely rebuilt as it consisted of 3 different web components that had been built in separate coding languages and the stability of the site was starting to falter. The client approached us to consult with the development team they had hired to rebuild this website while preserving any current rankings and working with the development team to ensure that the site was built where it was SEO friendly for future SEO work.
The consulting on this project lasted a bit over a year and close to 100 hours as we had to find a way to preserver current rankings and move the whole website to a new platform using a completely different coding language. We were able to preserve all the current rankings the site had upon launch of the new site as well as achieving a 25% increase in traffic in the first 2 months due to consulting with the developer on how to make the site SEO friendly.
Once the consulting was completed we started an ongoing SEO campaign that consists of content creation as well as off site link building for the client along with continuing consulting as they continue to develop their platform.
Background
- Client profile – The client is in the online real estate market with a focus on commercial properties and bigger plots of land like farms, ranches, hunting land, timber land and so on. The client acts as the marketing arm online for brokers with a focus in these types of properties and assist them in bringing their listings to market online.
- Initial state of the client’s online presence – The initial state of the client’s online presence was such as that it had been piecemealed together using several different programming languages and developers and was in dire need of being rebuilt completely.
- Specific issues affecting their search rankings and visibility – The old site being built on 3 different platforms but made to act as one had many integration issues as well as stability issues. Only 1 out of the 3 platforms was performing reasonably well in organic search.
Objectives
- Consult with the development to team to build a SEO friendly platform as well as preserver the current organic rankings that the client’s site had.
- Increase organic search traffic
- Improve keyword rankings for key terms that the client identified as well as research keywords competitors are ranking on that the client also wanted to rank on organically.
- Enhance online visibility in local search results for all the states that the client’s site has property listings in.
- Increase the number of inquiries on properties listed going to brokers.
Challenges
- Preserving the rankings of the old website while moving to a completely different platform as well as keeping the development on track to make the site SEO friendly.
- Competing in a saturated market where two major websites dominate the space.
Strategy and Implementation
Technical SEO
- The technical SEO on this project was covered in the process of building the new site. Site speed and responsive rendering were all covered as the new site was built and tested.
On-Page Optimization
- Keyword research and implementation – We worked on a list of terms the client provided as well as using keyword gap data to build a massive list of keywords we can work on overtime. We also interact with the client to see if there are any priorities or new keywords not initially covered that they are looking to focus on.
- Content creation and optimization – On this project a big portion of the content creation and optimization is dynamic. We achieved proper SEO in the consulting phase and came up with optimization schemes that could be implemented dynamically as well as optimizing main static landing pages manually. The ongoing content strategy on this project is to add informative blog post to the blog which are optimized and also work as supporting content for the main pages of the site.
- Meta title and description updates – As new content is implemented we are optimizing all metadata as well as continuing to come up with dynamic metadata schemes as new parts of the site are developed.
- Internal linking structure improvements – Internal linking structure and main navigation were implemented in the development phase. We designed this to silo as well as make the site easy to navigate. As we add content to the site interlinking is part of that implementation. We work to link relevant pieces of content to other like content on the site.
Off-Page Optimization
- Link building strategies – A variety of link building strategies are being used on this project which ranges from finding quality sites that would link to us to doing back link profile research on competitor sites and doing outreach to get quality links to the site.
Content Strategy
- Development of informational content that is added in the form of a blog.
- Targeting of specific keywords in the content creation process
Results
- Increase in organic search traffic (25% over the first year of this project )
- Improvement in keyword rankings – When we first started this project in 2021 the site ranked on 92 keywords in the top 3 of Google and 672 keywords in the top 10 of Google. The site as of December of 2024 ranks on 759 keywords in the top 3 of Google and 5650 keywords in the top 10 of Google.
We achieved a very complicated site flip from an old outdated site to a new site running on Azure without losing any keyword rankings the old site had. We increased traffic to the site by 25% within the first 8 weeks of the site flip and have continued to grow web traffic steadily. We have dramatically increased the amount of keywords in the top 3 and top 10 of Google for the site.
The long-term effect on the client’s business has been that due to the increase in traffic and functionality of the site more brokers are coming on board and the business is expanding to international markets as well. Their website currently is the third strongest site in their vertical beating out all other sites in traffic and visibility accept the two giant sites in the space.