Jul 29 2011
First Rate Wins IAB Award for Organic Search (SEO)
First Rate has taken the top prize for the IAB Australia Awards 2011, in the Organic Search (SEO) category for our client Focus Property.
The awards were held last night in Sydney and we’re all stoked to have claimed the top prize amongst a high calibre of entrants. Judges commented that our entry was
“a very well laid out entry with a nice focus on the right aspects of SEO. The point of differentiation is that they ticked criteria for SEO but went above and beyond focusing on Longtail strategy.”
Award Winning Case Study: The Power of Longtail, Focus Property
The state of play
Focus Property is Sydney’s leading property management firm. Currently managing over a 1/4 billion dollars worth of residential real estate with in Sydney’s CBD. Focus Property enlists services such as sales, letting and property management.
Our client operates in a highly competitive market with many large and established players, such as Ray White, LJ Hooker, Run Property and the Carrington Group. The competitors had strong presence in not only the property management segment but also the sales and letting segments. Focus Property realised that an increasing amount of new business was being generated through the web as buyer behavior evolved, especially through the search engines.
The Strategy
First Rate was engaged to help improve search engine visibility and drive qualified organic leads and increase footprint. While there was a significant traffic available for head terms such as “property management”, these would not be best for converting into high quality leads. This is because they were generic and at the research phase of the buying cycle rather than being brand focused in their search queries.
First Rate discovered Focus Property had service offerings in 118 suburbs that had sufficient volume to blanket the long tail search market. Long tail local keywords were focused on because collectively the volume of these keywords was large and anticipated that conversion rate and lead quality would be greater. This was consistent with focus on generating high quality traffic. Personalized landing pages were created for the target suburbs, giving more personalized pages and relevant content. Suburb pages were created and optimized for terms such as “<suburb> property management” and variants of that. This would then result in high quality localized leads.
Tactics
Content would be needed to target the identified keywords for example, “Bondi Property Management” and no 1 for virtually all terms relating to suburb name, property management as above. Working with Focus Property, we created pages for each of the 118 target suburbs, containing information and photos specific to each suburb Information was sourced from a number of locations such as the Australian Bureau of Statistics. This created rich content for the search engines, as well as creating a relevant, personalized landing page experience for prospects as originally forecast.
Results
We saw not only a significant increase in unique visits and visits from organic search but also an increase in ranking for head and secondary terms securing the head term as ranking number 1.
- In 12 months traffic jumped from 481 visits per month in Dec 09 to over 3300 unique visits per month in Dec 10.
- Monthly visits from non-paid, non-brand organic search increased 15 fold (from roughly 110 visits in Dec ’09 to over 1,700 visits in Dec ’10).
- #1 ranking in Google for head term “property management” achieved in early 2011.
- Top 5 rankings for a variety of secondary terms.
Get in touch with our team for more information about the power of longtail or SEO.
