ApartmentGuide.com is a national rental marketplace where apartment seekers can search by city, neighborhood, price range, features, and floor plan. The site monetizes through advertising sold to corporate and private rental companies that list their properties for lease. Despite a strong brand and a wide inventory, ApartmentGuide.com had limited visibility in organic search across most of its core markets. A handful of pages reached the first page of Google for major cities, but the site was missing from results for the geo-specific terms apartment hunters actually use. ApartmentGuide.com was indexed for only 70 city-level keywords and had effectively no presence on neighborhood searches, which is where the highest-intent traffic lives. The objective was to improve rankings for geo-specific terms, increase relevant organic traffic, and connect with apartment hunters searching for neighborhoods near their jobs or schools.
The work focused on connecting ApartmentGuide.com to the way apartment hunters actually search, by neighborhood and proximity to work and schools.
We knew that a winning strategy would be based on buyer personas, analytics data, and social media listening.
We decided to create new content that would be segmented to meet the needs of three customer persona types across the 27 major market cities. Social media listening allowed us to find topics that mattered to the Retired Persona, Young Family Persona, and Young Single Persona.
Topic insights were coupled with geographic keywords to guide content creation across website content, blog posts, and social media postings. This resulted in useful content that provided value to apartment seekers. Because the Google search engine rewards content that satisfies searcher intent, we began to see more content pages appear on the first page of Google search results.
The campaign rebuilt the SEO foundation in four steps.
The objective behind every step was the same. Build web content that connected directly with how apartment hunters search, neighborhood by neighborhood, city by city. Total keyword coverage grew from 70 to 599 across cities, towns, and neighborhoods.
After adding the expanded and useful content, 139 ApartmentGuide.com web pages appeared on the first page of Google search results. Forty percent of these pages appeared in the top-most position on the search result page. Across the broader campaign, 46 percent of the new content pages ranked in positions one through four in Google search.
This jump in search engine visibility caused the monthly number of visitors to climb from 1.2 million to 2.4 million apartment seekers. Year over year, August organic web traffic increased 195 percent, an impressive gain of over one million visitors compared to the same month the previous year.
The traffic gains converted directly to ad revenue from apartment advertisers paying for visibility on the platform. ApartmentGuide.com captured an additional $79,000 per month in ad revenue from rental partners, a direct result of more apartment hunters reaching the site through geo-specific search.
