Our client is a group of East Vancouver Realtors who live and work in the area, and offer their own unique perspective on the latest happenings in our market and community.
The client had a website which generated almost no traffic so they decided to call us.
Together, we were able to transform a few hundred visits a month into hundreds of visits each day!
Blogging is a long-term strategy that requires dedication and a lot of patience. There are tons of articles everywhere about how blogs are important and how it can increase your business. Writing high-quality blog posts takes time and don’t expect rewards in the first weeks unless you wrote a revolutionary article about a hot topic in your market.
The client knew that it was not going to be easy and that they had to invest a lot of time and effort to make it work. Their website was launched in July 2013 and they have been writing posts since the beginning. Initially, there was a minimal return for their efforts; however, they stayed focused on their goal and even increased the frequency of publishing new blog posts. Almost 380 blog posts have been published since the website was launched which is in average 11 blogs per month!
Number of blog posts per month (July 2013 – July 2016)
Their effort started paying off in January 2015 and the number of organic visits has been rapidly increasing since then. In 2016, the blog generated over 28% of their organic traffic (a few thousand visit a month).
Organic traffic to blog (July 2013 – July 2016)
In order to maximize benefits of blogging, we have implemented structured data for articles. These markups clearly determine the headline, image, publish and update dates, content of an article as well as the author.
Structured data may trigger rich snippets which make your website more visible in search results as well as Google and other search engines can use that data to index those articles better.
Our current goal is to generate leads from this traffic.
Keyword research is something that should be done before you start creating web structure, therefore, even before the graphic design! We may spend hours explaining what keyword research is and how to do it, however, in a nutshell, keyword research tells you which search queries your potential clients may use to find the services/products you provide. This information is essential for success in search engines.
Based on the keyword research, we could more easily organize information on the website, determine navigation structure and create a landing page for most keywords. There are three main patterns of how users search for real estate information in East Vancouver:
The website structure was created based on those search patterns. The client did a great job and provided content for all landing pages.
We have been tweaking the content of those pages in order to achieve both better rankings and higher CTR (click-through-rate). The result of this process is impressive.
Organic traffic to landing pages (May 2014 – July 2016)
The client had had a mobile version of the website since the launch of the website. The website was already mobile friendly according to Google and actually was pretty good, however, there were some limitations and problems that we wanted to get rid off.
In November 2015, we made the website responsive and did pagespeed optimization including CloudFlare implementation. Gzip compression was enabled, images were compressed, server response time was reduced, etc.
We expected a decent improvement of organic traffic from mobile devices, however, the results surprised us.
The first signs of improvement were noticed in the following month. There had already been hundreds of mobile visits per month but the volume of traffic doubled even though December is a typically slow month in real estate.
However, the biggest improvement came in January. Organic traffic from mobile devices increased by 707.95% in comparison to November.
Organic traffic from mobile devices (May 2014 – July 2016)
Note: There were some bigger updates of Google Algorithm in mid-January so we can not quantify how much it boosted traffic. But we already saw an amazing increase in the first week of January which happened before the updates.
Having a nice looking website with a good amount of traffic is not the end of the story. The main goal of WeLoveEastVan.com is to generate new leads and help close deals, and that’s something we would like to focus on a bit more in the future, even though, we have been seeing a nice increase in goal completions recently. We hate to disappoint you but conversion numbers will stay between our client and us.
There is no simple recipe of how to improve organic traffic. Nowadays, there are tons of factors which may affect your rankings but if you do things right and work hard, you will get rewarded.
Due to the fast moving and competitive nature of our business, we knew it was vitally important that our three websites achieved the following goals:
Since 2013, Guaranteed SEO have worked tirelessly to ensure our requirements are met and our goals achieved. We’re pleased to say the hard work from both ourselves and Guaranteed SEO is paying off. Our websites now rank highly for well over tracked 200 keywords, and our monthly SEO reports help the business better target our clients, generate relevant advertisements and increase website leads and improve conversion rates.
