Case study: SLO Home Store real estate broker website.
Goal: expand site depth and focus on keyword set.
poliARC was contracted to re-structure this web site with attention to enhancing its SEO and using the site structure to get more targeted web traffic to its public MLS listings as well as its own MLS and historical sales data features. Based on the SEO updates performed by poliARC the site saw a 400% increase in search traffic by the end of the first month of the changes being active.
The original website was what I’d call very linear in its structure: all of the files and pages were at the site’s root level and the internal link structure didn’t foster user-friendly exploring of the content. When we design the structure of websites, poliARC takes the silo approach. Where similar content resides in appropriately named directories. This is done for a couple reasons. First, it’s very easy to crawl and creates human and search engine friendly URLs. The new subdirectory names, then, we apply to our main keyword set. In this case by service offered by SLO Home Store, location of properties, prices, and user desired user actions acquired from examining the keyword phrases most used and applicable to the real estate market (i.e. find, search, research, etc.).
From this point, think of your site’s structure similar to a good filing system in your office: putting all your documents into one large folder doesn’t make much sense – you categorize them by folder, and within each folder (or subdirectory) all the files that pertain to that category reside. Simple and straight forward, but on top of keeping you sane with a large website, it also makes it SEO friendly by guiding topic and depth by structure.
Through our initial research, we found that a very large portion of organic traffic comes from specific property address searches. As such, the MLS and property search pages were set up to exploit that search trend. Within the first month, the site saw a 250% increase is this type of organic traffic, and a 400% increase on search traffic overall in the first reporting period.
poliARC also created various “quick searches” that queried the MLS listings database. This had two major effects: first, it “created” many more “pages” on what was originally just one search page. By creating these quick search links by price and location, the dynamic content of the results page “created” many many more pages within the site, all specific to the types of searches we encountered when researching real estate in certain areas and prices ranges. Moreover, this made the site very fast for users and therefore made for a better experience: they could see what they wanted with one click, and then adapt as needed rather than starting from scratch. The website acts like a guide and a resource rather than merely a resource. Not only did the crawling activity increase by over 500%, but since the quick searches created a lot of applicable content, the search terms that resulted in one of the pages being in the search results page increased by about the same amount.
We then added dynamic meta titles and descriptions to all the pages based on the quick searches and search phrases coming into the site to further increase applicability. At the core, all of the above resulted in giving SLO Home Store a much larger net online, but also much more applicable results: the links created exactly the content the user is seeking.
In short, when marketing this real estate web site… it was all the geeky aspects that made the difference: site structure, dynamic content, and link design, as well as the standard enhancements of keyword focus and content creation / uniqueness. Using the tools that real estate agents have available to them, and using them in a way that gives website visitors exactly what they’re looking for in one or two clicks.
