Upside Realty - Content Development Case Study
The Upside Realty challenge
Entering Australia’s established real estate market isn’t easy for a new entrant. Upside Realty had to compete against the franchise groups, independents and classified websites. They chose SEO as one of the main battlegrounds to obtain market share.
How could they compete against such established brands in the SERP’s? Using a mix of keyword research and competitor monitoring, Indago saw a hole in its competitors’ strategies that could be exploited.
The research showed that building detailed suburb pages beyond their competitors would drive large volumes of qualified traffic.
The challenge was ensuring that the collections of pages each featured sufficiently unique content to avoid Google’s penalties – all while being churned through auto-generation and bulk updates.
Our methodology
Based on research, for which we looked at search engine guidelines, competitor real estate suburb pages and what statistics were readily available via API’s, we established a benchmark for a ‘minimum viable content’:
- Meeting user expectations – Pages need to match the search intent behind a keyword search term to have the best rankings
- Minimum word count – The number of words on a page doesn’t matter – rather the overall value a page gives the user.
- Similar onsite content – Similar written content on a page isn’t an issue if the overall page has enough elements to differentiate it and add to the user experience.
- Automated or scrapped content – Ensure that it is organised; adds value to the user experience to ensure compliance with the Google guidelines
Next, we identified what our competitors are doing in relation to suburb pages. This way, we identified where the opportunity lay (basically, what they weren’t doing)
To back up the findings of our keyword research, we also conducted user surveys. We asked consumers what information they find important when choosing a suburb to live in.
Also, further questions such as what they want most in local areas, why they are looking for property & what would impact most when deciding on which suburb they are going to live in.
Based on our minimum viable content research, competitor research and online surveying – we accumulated enough information to understand the content required for each suburb page.
The results
The suburb pages compete with the likes of Domain and Real Estate and greatly contribute to the site’s overall conversions.
Overall site visibility in the search engines increased by over 154% within the opening year, and traffic increased by 202%.
