New and off-the-plan apartment platform Urban.com.au engaged Social Garden to develop an SEO growth strategy and grew from 30,000 users per month to more than 300,000 users in just a couple of years. Read on to find out how we did it.
The challenge facing Urban.com.au was low traffic volume in a highly competitive search market. Their monthly traffic was 30,000 users per month, in an industry where multi-billion dollar companies invest millions each year in SEO — so the goal was to cut through that noise and make Urban.com.au top of mind for users searching online.
We used a range of on-page content, off-page growth, technical SEO, and conversion rate optimisation to bring Urban.com.au to the top of organic search rankings. We also migrated domains and merged 36,000 articles from a newly acquired company — all without a hitch.
"We wouldn't have grown Urban nearly as quickly as we did without being able to collaborate closely with Social Garden, on both our growth strategy as well as the execution."
With help from our AI keyword research tool, we identified an opportunity to increase high-value traffic, working alongside the Urban team to implement a programmatic SEO strategy to greatly expand the number of keywords the website ranked for. The strategy worked. It significantly increased Urban's relevance for hundreds of thousands of new search queries, and resulted in a jump in traffic to more than 2 million users per year. Social Garden also managed the strategy, recruitment, and training process for Urban's editorial function. This led to the employment of eight freelance journalists who produced hundreds of articles each month.
Our off-page strategy focused on featuring various industry players and producing high-quality, localised, and relevant backlinks through large-scale content production. Urban has gone from relative obscurity on search engines to become a top-100,000 visited website globally, and Australia's #1 dedicated platform for off-the-plan real estate.
In a collaborative effort with Urban.com.au's product team, we developed an ongoing technical auditing process that identifies opportunities to improve speed and user experience. This process not only helps the website perform better in search engines, but also delivers a better experience for the end users. We used a range of proprietary and third-party tools to make impactful technical changes to the website. For example, we reformatted the JavaScript in the site's header, which had been inhibiting Google's ability to crawl all of the content on the platform (and had reduced rankings as a result). These technical SEO changes have enabled the platform to increase its ranking from ~3,000 unique search terms to 150,000.
Over three years...
Urban.com.au ranked for 150,000 unique search terms across search engines after our SEO strategy was implemented
Urban has grown to become the largest platform dedicated to brand-new property in Australia
Monthly web traffic increased from 30,000 to 300,000 users
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