We recently took Avery's website from pulling near-zero traffic to an unprecedented 20,000 monthly page visits. All it took us was six months – a timeline many thought was “impossible.” How did we achieve this feat? We'll let you know, but here's the background story.
The business covers the highly sought-after areas of The Smoky Mountains, Destin 30A & Panama City Beach in Florida, and Gulf Shores and Orange Beach in Alabama.
Avery Carl and her expert team have helped hundreds of investors find their perfect rental property. The Short Term Shop works closely with clients to assist them with finding the best investment property, executing the purchase, and even negotiating closing terms.
Avery’s clients love her and her company for a no-nonsense, professional, and customer-focused business ethos. If you want to buy the best investment property possible, just call Avery Carl.
Here, we review the web development work we did on The Short Term Shop’s website and how ArdorSEO helped Avery’s site stand out with new features.
Real Estate SEO Transformation: Before and After
When we first began in January 2021, Short Term Shop's website wasn't doing well enough as far as real estate SEO goes. At the time, it had lesser organic reach and wasn't appearing in search results for its niche.
Admittedly, these factors set the scene for a poor real estate SEO run, but we knew something had to change at some point. Besides our conviction, we know that existing SEO tools offer essential guidance regarding the direction we had to travel in for a successful real estate SEO campaign.
For us, this was an opportunity to transform this real estate website into the lead-generating powerhouse it ought to be. So we made that our choice, and we're so grateful we did!
The site now ranks in Google's top three results for all its real estate keywords and generates a significant amount of monthly organic page views. Plus, the leads have increased by 266%! All of this is thanks to real estate SEO.
If your website is in a similar situation, don't hesitate to try real estate SEO - you won't regret it!
A chart showing Avery Carl’s organic traffic search results.
The Turning Point for The Short Term Shop’s Real Estate Website
We worked hard on effective real estate SEO, and it paid off significantly. The Short Term Shop's site traffic and converted leads skyrocketed in 6 months. Avery Carl and her staff currently average 15K organic page visitors monthly! That's a rise of over 60% compared to figures before us working on the site!
This is a big deal, as the site went from non-visibility to around 15K monthly organic page views during the past year.
Wait till you read about the lead conversion story: it's been one dreamy real estate SEO journey for us!
Lead Conversions from Search Engines
Everyone knows that real estate SEO is mainly on lead conversion. Any focused real estate website will work on its lead conversion bearing the competition in mind. Thankfully for us, the website engagement of convertible leads is doing noticeably better than that of specialized rivals.
The Short Term Shop's bounce rate was 13%, a whopping 11% lower than the industry average. Visitors from various search engines love to spend ample time on the STS website. Individual sessions last an average of a little more than five minutes. That's twice as long as visitors spend on average on rival real estate websites!
Strategies We Used to Improve Traffic and Get Qualified Leads for The Short Term Shop
Real estate website owners sometimes realize the significance of search engine optimization for their business models a little too late. That doesn't have to be; our tried-and-true strategies can help.
A successful search engine optimization plan is like an intelligent machine with several parts. These all work together to promote a business's development and its website.
Creating keyword-rich web pages for The Short Term Shop was a hit across search engine rankings, with excellent, relevant content supporting every page. Likewise, we built a strong network of backlinks to the website and optimized it for easy navigation.
This step helped increase traffic to the site and improve the website’s position in search engine results pages.
Consequently, we attracted more visitors and generated more leads. Thanks to our efforts, we achieved our goal of improving the website's visibility and driving more traffic.
The main strategies we employed to help Short Term Shop attain its success are listed below.
Focusing on Local Keywords in Short Term Shop's Service Areas
The real estate industry is competitive. Real estate agents typically take the rivalry to search engines and battle for visibility there. About 97% of homebuyers used the internet to search for a home in 2021. Realtor sites all jostle for a piece of that statistical pie. How can anyone avoid getting left behind?
Our strategy was arrow-straight: use real estate SEO to show our client’s website to the right people when they conduct a Google search. That’s what sets businesses ahead of the competition on search engines.
Fun fact about Google: the search engine rewards buyer-friendly real estate keywords. Including these keywords on websites and instructional content is one way to draw targeted traffic that converts quickly.
We started by developing several brand-new property sites that aimed to rank for almost all "real estate agents" keywords. That move will register on any search engine almost instantly.
Then, we added worthwhile, specially written information to these pages to draw a steady stream of clients who would like to purchase through their website.
Significant keyword research also helped to ensure that every sentence delivers the maximum power in its punch. With the volume we got, we had to control keyword stuffing, a practice that could ruin all the good work we’d done so far.
Beyond that, we oversaw the real estate content strategy distribution through the proper channels.
Right now, we're also considering new keyword research and local SEO strategies to dominate local SEO.
Building Strategic Links into Real Estate Websites
“Link building” is getting other websites to refer back to a single site – The Short Term Shop, in this case. It positions a website as a local SEO authority in its subject, making it one of the most popular local SEO techniques for enhancing a website's Google rankings.
If you had to boil down your processes into a single SEO strategy, it has to be strategic linking. That's because your site will rank higher faster when you're able to create more links.
There are three kinds of links:
- backlinks,
- external links, and
- internal links.
Internal links connect your educational content to other pertinent pages on your website.
External links tie your content to quality content from other reputable websites that may provide value to your customers in a non-competitive market.
Backlinks are links to your website's content from other relevant websites. We gained organic backlinks to our website by creating high-quality, in-depth content and ranking it in the top three search results. These results are positive and just what we expected from the SEO strategy.
Creating Informational and Valuable Content
There’s no better way to improve your SEO and generate new traffic than creating authentic, relevant, and valuable content for your visitors. Several confusing and overwhelming real estate niche topics require simplifying for your target customers.
Creating authentic content and placing relevant real estate SEO keywords helps potential homebuyers and investors better understand the industry. This brings more traffic to your website, well beyond your wildest imagination!
Do you know that understanding the ROI of rental property is a topic in high demand? Of course, not many people understand it the first time. Unfortunately, way fewer real estate SEO tips mention it at all. So, how do you tailor visible content to cater to that information need?
The answer is surprisingly simple: create a blog post or video that explains ROI calculation on rental property investments. Such content will be helpful to potential investors.
More than that, using such content, you can demonstrate your industry expertise and build credibility for your business. People trust your brand and your team all the more for it: only a solid real estate SEO strategy can guarantee this.
Google and other search engines focus on authentic and relevant content in their ranking algorithms. They want to ensure that their users get the best information possible when they search for a term. Therefore, the search engine results page does its best to show the most relevant websites that fulfill these requirements (or user needs).
Since January 2021, The Short Term Shop has posted loads of informative content to generate better local search optimization leads. This content drive also helps position the business as an authority in local real estate.
Optimized Website
On-page SEO is a critical aspect of website optimization - it encompasses everything from site structure and navigation to content and user experience.
A website's technical function includes assessing how quickly it loads, how intuitive it is to visitors, and its compatibility with various devices and web browsers. It’s also essential to ensure that you fix any deprecated links or poor-quality visuals.
Since most users now access information via innovative devices and high-speed internet, a business cannot afford technical issues with its website in the face of many competitors.
Therefore, we've applied the best optimization techniques to benefit Avery Carl's website over the past year.
Mobile-Friendly and Quick-Loading Website
The typical consumer or end user searches for everything online. Businesses need their websites to be fast and optimized for visual appeal on mobile devices. Once there’s the tiniest deviation from what they expect, they’re quick to seek an alternative—yes, using a search engine!
For The Short Term Shop’s website, we've shored up on-page SEO and ensured that the content loads quickly enough for mobile web users — in less than a second.
Avery Sold $621 MILLION in Real Estate with Ardor SEO!
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Consolidating Effective Messaging
Customizing your messages to the many visitors who approach your business is the simplest way to establish a relationship with your prospects. Leads automatically self-identify with the product or service you offer.
They’re aware that you comprehend their needs and challenges, and tailored messaging makes them confident that you can provide a solution through tailored messaging.
By promoting your leads with calls to action, you can help shape their experience as they trust they’re working with a firm that can solve their problems.
Resolve Technical Problems
Just as people feel bad when a webpage loads slowly, pesky Google Ads and bad aesthetics make them cringe in horror. Potential customers are unforgiving when a site exhibits technical issues like poor-quality images or broken links. It makes their quest to find help difficult and time-consuming. Search engine algorithms will repress and sometimes delist a site with excessive technical issues.
Therefore, you need to ensure that all links within your content are live and functioning and that picture quality is excellent to keep the user experience on your website as simple and enjoyable as possible.
In addition, having a simple and intuitive website design makes it easy for visitors who came through organic search results to stay there longer.
The Right Link Building for a Real Estate Business
We’ve already discussed the three link types on which to focus. These internal, external, and backlinks help to improve the SEO performance of your content significantly.
While internal and external links are excellent on websites, backlinks are the workhorse you need to build subject matter authority. Backlinks are a link on other websites that directly link to your website. As an unspoken rule, it's best to attach links to long-tail keywords for optimal SEO performance.
Stay Updated
Search engines like Google monitor the activity on your website. They want to see regular content up and live, which tells their algorithms you’re putting in the work to create content for visitors.
Uploading new content regularly is the most obvious way to keep your website fresh, but optimizing and repurposing old and existing content also works like a charm.
If you have an old blog post that still gets lots of traffic, repurposing the content into a video or infographic shared on social media can drive more traffic to your website. While you're at it, try throwing in some newly-researched long-tail keywords.
GMB Optimization
One excellent technique for real estate SEO that brings in new clients for brokers is Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business). Setting up a GMB account enables users to access current information about your business.
Google Business Profile dramatically increases your visibility on Google Maps search results pages and generates crucial leads for your business! A solid marketing strategy any company can leverage.
To help The Short Term Shop rank high on local SERP (search engine result pages), we produced GMB articles with the necessary keywords and geotagged images. In addition, we finished and improved the GMB profile section. To cement the website’s position in local search results, we created citations that only a few sites can match.
How You Can Increase Traffic From Qualified Leads
Source: https://www.statista.com/
Increasing traffic is an excellent goal, but you need only the right leads to your website. If you get 100,000 visitors a month, but only 2% of them are interested in real estate, that isn’t beneficial to your business.
A qualified lead is a potential customer that you know is interested in your product or service. To qualify a lead, you can offer them something valuable in return for their information, such as a written guide or webinar replay on how to buy your first rental property.
The free but handy guide will help separate those interested in real estate investing and those who are not. That allows you to add more qualified leads to your database, leading to a higher ROI.
The Trusty Cash Flow Calculator
The trusty cash flow calculator on The Short Term Rental Shop’s website is an excellent example of giving your customers something tangible in return for their information.
The calculator is designed to help property investors understand the concept of operating cash flow and check just how profitable a potential rental property may be. Property investors find this tool extremely helpful and are likely to seek the Short Term Rental Shop services when buying their new rental property.
Giving their website visitors access to such a valuable tool helps build trust and credibility for the real estate agency. It shows that they care about investors, have expertise in the industry, and are likely to help make good property investment decisions.
More Customers, More Houses Sold, and Financial Freedom
You created a real estate agency because you’re passionate about helping people find the perfect home or property investment. Buying a house is a big deal for many people, and they need companies like yours to help guide them through the process.
Wrapping Up
The real estate SEO case study above shows how we – ArdorSEO – can make your business more visible online so that you can focus on helping people buy their dream homes.
A solid SEO strategy will help you increase organic search traffic, increase qualified leads, and ultimately make more sales. All that is even better when you have the right real estate SEO services to assist you.
Why not leave the worries and stress of SEO to us? We’ll bring in the customers, and you close the deal. Imagine a future where you have a constant stream of new customers and a healthy income stream.
FAQ
You might find some quick-fire SEO tips online, but real estate SEO doesn’t have “hacks” in the real sense. Each optimization process has to be planned and executed over time to get the best results. Consider our case study above: it’s no hack, but it will set you on the right path.
It is possible to handle real estate SEO yourself, but that’s not necessarily the best way. Between keyword placement, link optimization, and content management, there are so several other things to do in-between. You can take them all, but you might not have the time for other site operations.
You might have to use SEO tools to help you automate the entire optimization process. Thankfully, you can find solid options and services like ArdorSEO.
SEO efforts take time to start showing results. If we were to put a number on it, six months is closer to the average. That’s enough time to get organic responses from search engines and other lead channels.
You can start by taking a quick Google search of your real estate site. Your real estate business sorely needs SEO if it doesn’t appear in the first five search results. However, search engine optimization is a continuous process, so it’s a practical requirement for your real estate business.
In today's world, digital experts are affordable and employ teams of experienced professional IT and content professionals. Our team is a vibrant mix of talented real estate professionals and writers who live, breathe, and create an all-things-real estate. If you find yourself too busy or overwhelmed by the things you must do to soar to the highest visibility to both buyers and sellers in your area, don't be shy - discover real estate SEO experts.
