“The simple fact is - search engine marketing works. iProspect has proven that to us. Specifically, with
our campaign, the addition of sub-domains to our website, along with other modifications to our content
and code, proved invaluable as we were able to increase our site’s top rankings by over 200 percent. This
visibility directly impacted the increase in traffic to our site. Additionally, our paid inclusion
campaign boosted our return on ad spend significantly and within months.”
- Mayur Raichura
- Managing Director, Information Services
Situation
Long & Foster is the largest, most respected real estate services firm in the seven-state, Mid-Atlantic region of the United States. The Long & Foster Website is primarily used to list homes for sale, but is also used as a tool to recruit new real estate brokers.
The company partnered with iProspect to significantly increase their visibility within the major search properties and increase the amount of traffic visiting their site. They were looking to improve the number of actions taken on the site. Actions include: scheduling home viewings, setting up home finder alerts and initiating requests for mortgages.
Challenges
The lack of search engine-friendly content, coupled with the huge number of pages that made up the client’s website, served as major challenges.
Long & Foster offers a variety of services across multiple states, producing a significant amount of content within one main, branded domain. Content was not categorized or focused - making it difficult for search engines to accurately recognize what the website was about. This, in conjunction with the lack of specific keywords in the site’s URLs, body copy, and meta tags, resulted in the site not ranking highly in the search results on phrases on which their competitors were being found.
Solution
Campaign strategies and recommendations from the iProspect team included the implementation of keyword centric sub-domains for each of the services offered, and geographic regions served, by the client. iProspect also researched and recommended naming conventions for these new sub-domains.
The iProspect team then recommended that the client create custom content for each top level sub-domain page and subsequently provided content guidelines to aid them in this creation. iProspect also created templates for optimizing Long & Foster’s dynamically generated pages.
Additionally, meta data was composed and optimized. The site map and sub-domain links were added to the footer of every page to enhance the structure of the content, as well as provide an easy path for search engine spiders to follow. And finally, iProspect implemented a comprehensive paid inclusion campaign so the client would experience faster indexing and refresh times within Yahoo!. This quick turn-around allowed iProspect’s campaign management team to analyze the performance of individual URLs more quickly and frequently so campaign enhancements could be recommended sooner.
Results
Today the Long & Foster Website is found within all the major search properties when performing searches on many phrases related to buying and selling homes in the mid-Atlantic region. This has helped improve brand recognition, and also increased traffic to the site. Many of the users reaching the site are scheduling home viewings, setting up home finder alerts, or initiating requests for mortgages.
Monthly search referrals, from organic search engine optimization efforts, to the Long & Foster Website have nearly tripled since the start of the campaign with iProspect.
Overall search engine visibility has increased by 212%. Position one rankings alone have increased by 44%.
The return on ad spend on Long & Foster’s paid inclusion campaign has increased by 77% since the beginning of campaign.
