This client came to us looking to fill some specific goals. They were looking to increase property rentals and bring in new leads for homeowners looking for a property management company. Their site traffic had been hit hard in July 2014 by a couple of Google updates and quite a lot of conflicting NAP information that was propagated around the web.
They had some interesting challenges, including a template website that we were locked out of altering many elements of. We were not able to access many key components of SEO, including URL structure, sitemaps, and head tags. Additionally, the particular CMS that this website was hosted on has a tendency to spontaneously generate thousands of spoofed URLs.
Our Strategy
Since our on-site actions were very limited, we hit where we could with gusto. The only things we could do on-site were add content, and update several (but not all) of the page titles and meta descriptions. We began by updating the titles and descriptions across the site, and began creating optimized content for pages that did not have any content at all, as well as for the areas they were looking to grow – specifically property management. With the cooperation of their CMS company, we were able to manually install rel=”canonical” tags on each individual page in order to address the rampant URL generation issue.
We carefully reviewed their backlinks, and uploaded a disavow tool to webmaster tools. We manually created and uploaded a static XML sitemap file to the server, a rudimentary option that needs to be updated each time a new page is added to the site, but a necessary move. Finally, we set them up with a few main local listing aggregators to address the conflicting NAP information.
Our Results
Within 8 weeks, we were able to increase the organic traffic by over 150%. New users to the site increased by over 160%.
As a result of a targeted and optimized social campaign, we started to see an healthy uptick in social engagement, and page likes increased by eight-fold.
The location and keyword targeted landing pages that we created for them began to rank on the second page of Google SERPs, and their overall keyword rankings grew stronger. We also saw them jump to position #1 for the term oceanfront vacation rentals.
At the bottom line, they started receiving a lot more calls for vacation rentals, and also started receiving leads for property management that were directly generated by the website.
