“The real estate market was beginning to cool in 2006, and I was searching for an economical way to find more potential clients to keep my pipeline full.

I wanted to better leverage my website so I began to research search engine optimization and realized it might be time to call in a professional who could dedicate the proper time to improving my site’s search engine positioning.

Initially, I was a little skeptical because of some things I had read about some search optimization scams, but that’s when Roger approached me with an offer I couldn’t refuse—one month of free services.

He sounded like he knew his stuff so I took a chance on him.  He hasn’t let up in his pursuit of improving my search rankings and increasing my search based traffic.  The results have been fantastic thus far.  I couldn’t be more pleased.”

> Sean Remington, President, Sean Remington & Associates

Scenario

In 2005, the United States’ real estate market was red hot, and Sean Remington risked everything to make a career change to become a Realtor in the Albuquerque, New Mexico market.

He was very successful in his first full year, being named Albuquerque Metropolitan Board of REALTORS® Rookie of the Year and earning Platinum Club status with RE/MAX International.  During 2006, however, the housing market began to cool rapidly due to skyrocketing gasoline prices and rising interest rates.  Sean quickly realized his real estate firm would need to do some things differently moving forward in order to keep the pipeline full and his business thriving or risk having to backtrack from growing further to stay afloat.  He needed a way to market his agency which provided consistency, exposure, and value.

Traditional marketing and advertising methods proved cost prohibitive, but Sean Remington & Associates did have a well laid out, content rich website to leverage.  The website had been producing a fair amount of traffic, but Sean wanted to better utilize his website to produce new leads and potential clients via improved search engine results.  He also wanted something long term versus a quick fix or one shot event.  Above all, he wanted an ethical solution that tied into his beliefs and methodologies of doing business.

Solution

To achieve his business objectives of increasing his pipeline, Sean Remington decided to pursue search engine optimization (SEO) with a goal of increasing awareness of his website via improved positioning within the search engine results pages (SERPs).  In order to improve search positioning, Sean’s site required link building and on page optimization strategies.  With a rise in the search engine results pages, Sean believed his site would draw more visitors which would generate more leads and hopefully more clients.

After researching several firms and realizing SEO required more of a time investment than was available to the existing in house staff, Sean Remington & Associates decided to give SMB Consulting, a Louisville, Kentucky based small business consulting firm, an opportunity to help improve  the Realtor’s website traffic and popularity.

The two firms agreed to enter into a working SEO relationship on October 6, 2006.  SMB Consulting’s tasks included improving the overall web presence of the website http://www.NMHomesOnline.com with the designated primary targeted keyword phrase “Albuquerque Real Estate.”  SMB quickly derived a phased improvement strategy to consistently increase the value and attractiveness of the website to the major search engines.

Results

Since October 6, 2006, http://www.NMHomesOnline.com has seen an increase in overall weekly search engine based traffic of 690% which can be broken down as follows:

*–Comparison based on weekly traffic reports during the time period of 7/9/2006-9/30/2006.

SEO process began the week of 10/1/2006.  Last statistics compiled and analyzed on 3/22/2008.

During the week of December 23, 2007 to December 29, 2007, the site saw an all-time high of 1,338 search based visitors.  Google has guided 560 visitors to the site during a seven day period of March 2-8, 2008. 249 Yahoo! visitors landed on the site from June 17-23, 2007, and the most visitors guided to the site from MSN/Live occurred during the week of December 23-29, 2007 when 887 searchers landed on the Albuquerque REALTOR’S® website.  These numbers represent significant increases over the baseline period of July 9, 2006 to September 30, 2006.

In mid-to-late January 2007, the site witnessed its overall ranking for the primary search term “Albuquerque Real Estate” improve to the top 20 for each of the major three search engines including a #3 ranking within Google (up from 150 on October 6, 2006), #5 with Yahoo! (from #529), and #3 with Microsoft’s MSN/Live search engine (not ranked in the top 1,000 on October 6, 2006).  The site has also achieved top 10 rankings at various stages throughout the process for such terms as “Albuquerque NM Real Estate,” “Corrales real estate,” “Albuquerque home sales,” and “Albuquerque Realtor.”  Since these are secondary terms, the rankings and traffic numbers for each aren’t monitored as closely, but there is evidence to support an overall increase in awareness of the http://www.NMHomesOnline.com site for multiple keyword phrases all related to the focal keyword phrase.  As of December 10, 2007, Sean’s site ranks #1 within Google for “Albuquerque real estate” which is the primary targeted keyword phrase.  It has held that top ranking for well over four months straight.

When the SEO process began, there were no top 10 rankings to report in any of the major three search engines for Albuquerque real estate related terms.  As of March 31, 2008, the site had 13 top 10 rankings including 4 top rankings for various terms relative to Albuquerque real estate.

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Sean Remington & Associates SEO Case Study