The Housfy SEO Case Study is not a project of our own, but the strategy of one of our clients. Housfy, the real estate company out to shake up the property market, and well on its way to doing it, thanks to key points such as:
Anyway, let's get into it. The real estate sector is a competitive and rather tough niche, with typically high budgets, high-CPC keywords and a very specific target customer.
It hardly seems the best environment to kick off a brand-new project and succeed with it. But that's the great thing about the startup world: it poses big challenges that push us to get better every day.
As we mentioned earlier, today we'll talk about Housfy. You've probably seen their ads on TV. In the spot, a friendly dinosaur tells you to step into the 21st century to sell or buy your property through its online platform, which charges no commissions and only earns through a fixed fee when the sale closes.
If you want to watch or re-watch that ad, here's the video:
With the intro out of the way, let's get to the point!
Man does not live by SEO alone
First of all, it wouldn't be fair to take credit for the success of a project like Housfy in isolation. And before we start showing data, we want to highlight that this project works several traffic acquisition channels besides organic, and one of its strongest points is paid traffic via AdWords, managed alongside Elogia in an outstanding way.
We also want to highlight the work of Housfy's technical team led by Miquel A. Mora, where any technical request always gets a "yes" as an answer, and the great commercial and leadership work of Albert Bosch.
Organic traffic evolution in these few months of work
In just 4 months after the initial audit, we were able to multiply x3 the starting organic traffic the site had.
The Housfy project joined iSocialweb in mid-September 2017, and in the following Semrush chart, you can see the evolution of organic traffic over these last 4 months:
As an interesting data point, the estimated cost of the keywords ranked through the organic channel represents an estimated saving of $7,400 per month for this client versus PPC channels (AdWords).
In the visibility index shown by the Sistrix tool, we can see how the Housfy.com domain has been gaining increasing reach and authority over the past few months:
Key points of the SEO strategy
Here are 3 of the strong points of the strategy used with this client, although obviously there were more:
1. The importance of content quality. The project had a baseline problem that was somewhat hard to fix: it generated many URLs with thin content and a high similarity rate among the different URLs of property listings and their groupings by SEO-valuable locations. Together with the client, we decided to give these URLs 100% unique and original content produced manually. The goal was to have quality content that satisfied user search intent and was relevant to Google in the niche. The SEO effect was positive: keywords improved in Google's SERPs, visits rose and this directly drove client acquisition for Housfy.
2. Defining an information architecture clustered by core services and customer needs. We analysed the project's initial site structure and spotted several shortcomings and improvements to apply immediately. We restructured the entire site and the domain sitemap, focusing on the main services Housfy offers to its customers, reassigning the architectural level each content cluster should have. The result was a better distribution of the domain's link juice toward the main categories, and therefore better rankings for those.
3. Variations in the site's internal linking. We optimized the internal linking across the Housfy domain. The goal was to give greater weight and authority to the main sections or hub pages so Google's crawler would treat them as more relevant on the site. With these changes we also aimed to efficiently improve how link juice should be distributed across the different URLs.
These actions, combined with the rest, enabled the project to reach Top positions for important keywords such as:
Housfy SEO Case Study summary
In just 4 months we were able to multiply x3 the organic traffic the project had when it came into our agency. It's a project in a competitive niche of significant difficulty, yet growth has been steady and positive, as shown in the charts above.
Factors that drove the change:
Solid management of all site content. Control and optimization of content with a high risk of thin and similarity content.
A proper link-building strategy. Brand-focused, prioritizing the origin and provenance of links, along with anchors and their contextualization.
Correct implementation of the site architecture. Built around the importance of section categorization, the different indexing levels, and proper distribution of link juice from the domain toward the main categories.
It's hard to set a ceiling for this specific project, and in fact we have many ideas to push it much higher. We must keep working on the SEO actions defined in our roadmap and implement them to improve the project. At iSocialWeb we're confident it can reach significantly higher levels within a relatively short period. So in a few months we'll be able to write a part two of this article and show you the evolution achieved by then.
An SEO effort shaped by a clean, non-aggressive link-building strategy combined with alignment with the client's development team (Housfy in this case) is the foundation of success for any online project in the medium to long term. Running regular audits to see how things evolve and gauge the project's real state is essential to hit the targets set.