SEO Case Study: Boston Luxury Apartment

Bostonluxuryapartment.com is one of over 80 local apartment websites owned by our first client, Boston Pads. It was considered to be one of the most valuable in terms of potential traffic. After launching the SEO campaign for their main site bostonpads.com, this was the second objective brought forth by the client in September of 2016.

Background on the Site

This website was built in 2003, and for many years it ranked on Page 1 for ‘boston luxury apartments’. The website was built on an html framework that was copied across all 80 websites owned by the client. Everything was duplicated across all 80 websites, even the content and page names. The only thing that made them unique was the logo, the domain name, and the color scheme on the top banner.

In 2012, the Google Panda algorithm update was rolled out, penalizing websites that had duplicate and thin content. Given the setup of all 80 websites, this had a big negative impact on organic traffic for all them, including bostonluxuryapartment.com. During this time there were several national apartment portals gaining prominence, which caused their rank to fall even further down in Google search results.

By the time ProSource Media was hired as an SEO agency, bostonluxuapartment.com was nowhere to be found for the main target keyword ‘boston luxury apartments’. It had gotten so bad that the website was receiving less than 4 organic visitors per month in early 2016.

The Goal – Rank Page 1 for boston luxury apartments

The goal was to restore Page 1 position for ‘boston luxury apartments’. It is a highly competitive keyword that receives 1,300 searches a month according to Google Keyword Planner. At the time of campaign launch, the client was unranked on the first 10 pages of Google for the target keyword.

The SEO Strategy:

SEO CONTENT: Write unique keyword optimized content for all of the websites Service pages being added during the redesign. We would also produce content for 373 luxury building pages, one to be built for every luxury building in the Greater Boston area. Our specific deliverables for this campaign included:

• Use Keyword Planner to research all relevant keywords that apply to each page on the newly redesigned site
• Identify a primary keyword, secondary keywords, and long tail keywords for each page on the site
• Implement list of keywords into appropriate service page
• Look for any high value keywords that don’t have a service page associated
• Request service page be built or create blog article topic to focus on those keywords with missing pages
• Developed queue system for luxury building content that tracked the drafting and editing process for all 373 luxury building pages
• Researched building details and recorded date built, number of units, address, rent prices, amenities list, images and building descriptions for all 373 buildings.
• Built and optimized 373 luxury building pages on bostonluxuryapartment.com using all the details recorded during research

SEO Backlinks: Utilize the network of 80 apartment websites owned by the clients to create backlink opportunities for to the luxury building pages. Acquire backlinks from authoritative websites in the real estate niche to improve rank for target keywords. Our process for link-building for bostonluxuryapartment.com looked like this:

• Produce blog articles for the Top 5 Luxury Buildings in each neighborhood in Boston
• Link to the appropriate luxury building page built on bostonluxuryapartment.com
• Post articles to the relevant local apartment website owned by the client
• Research authoritative websites in the real estate and luxury rental space
• Conduct outreach to those websites offering a guest blog post topic

The Results

This campaign definitely took time to come to fruition because of its size in scope. After rewriting the website content initially, the client saw immediate improvements in organic search traffic. In the first 6 months we had 271% increase in organic traffic. Our rank for target keyword ‘boston luxury apartment’ was bouncing around page 5 and 6. That was a big improvement from previously being unranked, but it was a long way to go to Page 1.

Once the luxury building pages were live and we began building links to those pages, we saw exponential improvements in organic traffic and rank. We began to see our rank climb to page 2 for the target keyword. In January of this year we finally popped up on Page 1 where we’ve held an average position of 8 for ‘boston luxury apartments’.

In the past 12 months, bostonluxuryapartment.com has received over 3,100 organic sessions, compared to just 379 in the first 12 months of the campaign. The optimized service page content has been effective at improving rank for targeted keywords. The added luxury building pages improved topical relevance for luxury apartment searches, and the backlinks we built improved overall domain authority of the website. All of this combined to improve overall website rank and organic traffic to levels beyond what the site was seeing prior to the Panda algorithm update.