Growing Monthly Organic Traffic by 70.48%: Real Estate Case Study

Disclaimer: As a white label SEO agency, we keep the names of the websites we work on confidential to respect our partners.

1. Following an initial backlink health check of the website, we noticed that the client’s site was receiving an unnatural amount of poor quality backlinks as a result of a potential negative SEO attack. This resulted in an in-depth pruning of their backlink profile to weed out and disavow the questionable links.
2. To further combat this unnatural link spike, we executed our own outreach campaign to build the authority and rankability of under-performing landing pages on the client’s website.
3. Many long-form articles and blog posts were struggling to break into the first page of the search results for important keywords.
4. Technical drawbacks on the site included hundreds of internal redirects (which impacted loading speeds) and missing breadcrumbs (which impacted user experience and navigability).

Conducting A Thorough Backlink Health Check

With backlinks being one of the most effective tactics to boost your rankability, it’s important to consistently monitor your website’s backlink profile to identify any potential spammy links or in the worst case, a negative SEO attack.

A negative SEO attack is when somebody else (usually a competitor) builds hundreds if not thousands of unnatural and spammy links with the intention of getting your website flagged by Google and in turn, getting you a manual penalty.

Google is pretty good at spotting and ignoring spam in “most cases”, but you should still keep an eye on the domains and links pointing to your site to make sure that none were missed.

One way to spot a negative links-based SEO attack is to look at the link velocity (how frequently your website is receiving new backlinks) of your link profile on Ahrefs.

To do this, enter your domain into Ahrefs’ Site Explorer tool and scroll down to the Referring Domains graph.

Look out for any sharp spikes within a short space of time – if you do, you can investigate further by clicking on the Backlinks report.

Top tip: Switch to One link per domain, select the Dofollow filter and finally, click the New backlinks option – this’ll help narrow down the results.

Executing A Targeted Link Building Campaign

Having tidied up the client’s backlink profile, the next step in the strategy was to secure new backlinks from topically relevant websites to underperforming pages so as to continue to build authority.

But when it comes to building new links, how do you go about choosing which pages to target?

One way to do this is via the Top pages report on Ahrefs’ Site Explorer.

As the focus is on underperforming pages, click on the Traffic dropdown and select “Declined”. If you want, you can also do the same for Keywords. Then, click Apply and Show results.

Top tip: remember to also select the correct country that your website targets.

The tool will show you all of the pages where the traffic has declined.

Top tip: you can change the order to see which pages lost the most traffic by clicking on the Change column.

However, from the original screenshot, we can see that two important product pages (which are already bringing in a lot of visitors) have seen some substantial drops.

These would make great examples of pages that need a boost with backlinks.

Having followed this same approach, we built backlinks to the pages that were falling behind from our clients website using a mix of both keyword rich and branded anchor texts. This is reflected in the site’s domain authority which has seen steady growth over the past twelve months.

Learn more about our link building services.

Optimising Long Form Content to Target Low Hanging Keywords

The client’s website already had an active blog section where they were regularly publishing long form content. However, these pages were struggling to climb the search results pages for important keywords.

We focused our content strategy on identifying and optimising these pages for low hanging keywords that the client was already ranking for.

Low hanging keywords are search terms that you’re ranking for just outside the first page of the search results i.e. positions 11 – 20.

You can find these via the Organic keywords report in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer – just enter your domain or the URL of the page that you want to optimise.

Click on the Position dropdown, select 11 – 20 then click Apply and Show results.

Filter the list of keywords so you’re left with search queries with less than 25 Keyword Difficulty

You now have keywords ranking just outside the top 10 positions that are relatively easy to rank for.

Once we picked the low hanging keywords, we carried out competitor analysis and content gap analysis to identify where the client’s page was falling behind in comparison to the top ranking competitors.

This involved looking at factors like:

• What additional information was included by the competitors
• The keyword density of the target keyword along with relevant phrases
• Whether the competitors included additional types of content such as images, videos etc.
• The heading structure, page title and meta description
• Whether the existing content on the page addresses the user intent for the target keyword

Improving Page Performance by Removing Internal Redirects

When implementing 301 redirects, one thing that webmasters often forget to do is update internal links that used to point to an old URL, with the new URL.

This may seem trivial, but if you have hundreds and potentially even thousands of these internal redirects, then it can significantly impact Google’s crawl efficiency of your website. This is because an extra step is required for the server to try and load the original URL before it redirects to the new URL. As a result, it takes longer for the desired page to load. 

The aim is to reduce the amount of requests that the server has to make by updating the internal links so that they point directly to the desired page.

You can find these using the Internal backlinks report on Ahrefs’ Site Explorer.

Filter the results by clicking Target HTTP Code and selecting 3XX Redirect.

You can now see all of your pages that contain internal links that redirect to another page.

To fix this issue, open each of the pages from the Referring page column and find the anchor text that is listed on Ahrefs. 

Then, update the internal link so that it points to the new page instead of the old page.

Making this simple fix can drastically improve your site’s overall load speeds (better for user experience), as well as optimises your crawl budget as Google is able to crawl and index more pages due to the reduced number of server calls made.

Improving User Experience by Implementing Breadcrumbs

Another technical element that was missing from the site is breadcrumb navigation (aka breadcrumbs).

Breadcrumb navigation is a list of links that convey the user’s location on a web page.

By implementing breadcrumbs, you will be:

• Improving user experience by showing the user where they are on your site.
• Reducing bounce rates as it helps guide users to other relevant pages on your website.
• Improving crawlability of your pages thanks to the internal links within the path.
• Improving indexability as they show search engines which pages are closely related to one another.
• Improving rankability as breadcrumbs often get displayed in the search results page.

Implementing breadcrumbs differs based on the type of website you have and the platform that it’s built on – you can check out our guide here.

• The number of users increased from 86,650 to 155,395
• The number of sessions increased from 130,516 to 222,498

On top of this, the number of keywords that the client is ranking for in the top 10 positions of the search results doubled from 4,321 to 8.686.