Case Study

Background and Brief

Douglas and Gordon are a large estate agency in southwest London, with a goal of being the number one property agents in their region. The agency had made search marketing a key part of their marketing effort, and yet, search traffic to www.douglasandgordon.com had declined over the past year. With the focus 100% on paid search, effectiveness was also down, and cost per conversion – as measured by the numbers of registrations and requests for viewings from visitors that arrived from search – was unacceptably high. 

Douglas and Gordon approached MediaVision to improve traffic generated from search from buyers and sellers, increase conversion rates and lower overall costs at the same time.

Strategy

MediaVision analysed the corporate website and past search performance, and recommended sharing the search budget between both paid and organic search efforts. The resulting budget would enable MediaVision to increase results while cutting the overall search budget by 33%.
Thorough search phrase analysis would be undertaken to determine the content requirements to rank for the most popular phrases – both branded, such as “Douglas and Gordon,” and non-branded, such as “London Estate Agent”. New content would be created and optimised to tie into the client’s promotional campaigns.

To build a strong channel to in-market buyers and sellers who are not yet familiar with the agency, both SEO and PPC would be monitored monthly on non-brand phrase performance. The client identified these “shoppers” as crucial markers to the success of the marketing effort. MediaVision would also provide costs per conversion between SEO and PPC, so that budget can be proportionately allocated.

All other online marketing activities would be compared similarly providing Douglas and Gordon data to value different types of users entering the site.

Results

250% increase in non-branded traffic from search
Impressively, non-branded traffic from organic search grew by 250% in just 12 weeks. The reduction in PPC budget had no negative effect on the volumes of traffic generated.

Conversions to leads up 80%
All other key conversion metric data improved showing that visitors from non branded search were more likely to book a viewing and register on the website. Trust is the key component, as users are more likely to convert when clicking from organic search than from paid search.
The graph below shows the increase in conversion from the smaller increase in traffic (April to May). This meant that not only did the strategy deliver more traffic but also generated a higher than proportionate increase in conversions.

75% drop in cost per conversion
As a result of the increase in traffic and conversion efficiency, the cost per conversion decreased dramatically; cost per conversion through search dropped by 75% within just the first 12 weeks.