First Rate has taken the top prize for the IAB Australia Awards 2011, in the Organic Search (SEO) category for our client Focus Property.

The awards were held last night in Sydney and we’re all stoked to have claimed the top prize amongst a high calibre of entrants. Judges commented that our entry was

“a very well laid out entry with a nice focus on the right aspects of SEO. The point of differentiation is that they ticked criteria for SEO but went above and beyond focusing on Longtail strategy.”

Award Winning Case Study: The Power of Longtail, Focus Property

The state of play

Focus Property is Sydney’s leading property management firm. Currently managing over a 1/4 billion dollars worth of residential real estate with in Sydney’s CBD. Focus Property enlists services such as sales, letting and property management.

Our client operates in a highly competitive market with many large and established players, such as Ray White, LJ Hooker, Run Property and the Carrington Group. The competitors had strong presence in not only the property management segment but also the sales and letting segments.  Focus Property realised that an increasing amount of new business was being generated through the web as buyer behavior evolved, especially through the search engines.

The Strategy

First Rate was engaged to help improve search engine visibility and drive qualified organic leads and increase footprint. While there was a significant traffic available for head terms such as “property management”, these would not be best for converting into high quality leads. This is because they were generic and at the research phase of the buying cycle rather than being brand focused in their search queries.

First Rate discovered Focus Property had service offerings in 118 suburbs that had sufficient volume to blanket the long tail search market.  Long tail local keywords were focused on because collectively the volume of these keywords was large and anticipated that conversion rate and lead quality would be greater. This was consistent with focus on generating high quality traffic. Personalized landing pages were created for the target suburbs, giving more personalized pages and relevant content. Suburb pages were created and optimized for terms such as “<suburb> property management” and variants of that. This would then result in high quality localized leads.

Tactics

Content would be needed to target the identified keywords for example, “Bondi Property Management” and no 1 for virtually all terms relating to suburb name, property management as above. Working with Focus Property, we created pages for each of the 118 target suburbs, containing information and photos specific to each suburb Information was sourced from a number of locations such as the Australian Bureau of Statistics. This created rich content for the search engines, as well as creating a relevant, personalized landing page experience for prospects as originally forecast.

Results

We saw not only a significant increase in unique visits and visits from organic search but also an increase in ranking for head and secondary terms securing the head term as ranking number 1.

• In 12 months traffic jumped from 481 visits per month in Dec 09 to over 3300 unique visits per month in Dec 10.
• Monthly visits from non-paid, non-brand organic search increased 15 fold (from roughly 110 visits in Dec ’09 to over 1,700 visits in Dec ’10).
• #1 ranking in Google for head term “property management” achieved in early 2011.
• Top 5 rankings for a variety of secondary terms.



Get in touch with our team for more information about the power of longtail or SEO.

experts@firstrate.com.au

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When building an international SEO strategy, the debate most webmasters face is what strategy to pursue when going global…

The choice is normally between having a ccTLD (country code top level domain e.g. .co.uk, .co.nz) plan vs. a sub-domain approach (uk.domain.com) vs. a sub-folder (.com/Spain or .com/India) strategy. There is no right or wrong answer in choosing one of these strategies as each has its own advantages and disadvantages, some of which are mentioned below.

ccTLDs

Advantages

1.       Local Country TLDs present an advantage in penetrating the local market as they can be perceived to be more trustworthy from local visitors to the site

2.       Benefits from targeting in local search engine as attaining various types of local links may be slightly easier

3.       Provides the strongest geo targeting signal used by Google

4.       Server location is less relevant as a geo targeting factor

5.       This approach works best if your company has a smaller footprint or a simple product offering.

Disadvantages

1.       Can require more maintenance to manage all these sites and can be more expensive

2.       Link building scalability is tough since more link building would be required to cover all the different domains

3.       There may be cross-domain tracking issues or complications when setting up web analytics.

Sub-Domains

Advantages

1.       Easier to set up and provides an effective way to establish sites as different identities while still retaining the global corporate branding

2.       Can rank alongside the main domain in search engine results for two/more very similar pages

3.       Possible to “host crowd”, i.e. have more than 2 results of the main domain in search results (although recently sub-folders can now rank too)

4.       Sub-domains can be treated as a semi-separate site and can be hosted on a different server; therefore links from these can have slightly more value

5.       Global brands with bigger product offerings and larger footprints might be better to use this approach.

Disadvantages

1.       Sub-domains can be treated as a separate site, therefore don’t inherit the main domain’s SEO benefits and require their own link building effort

2.       Can be more difficult to setup and more expensive

3.       There may be cross-domain tracking issues or complications when setting up web analytics.

Sub-Folders

Advantages

1.       Content is hosted on one site which is easier (and likely cheaper) to set-up, handle and maintain. Tracking can also be easier

2.       Easier to manage when dealing with a country speaking different languages (e.g. Canada)

3.       Sub-folders can be registered individually in Webmaster Tools and geo-targeted to the country you are working in

4.       Link juice is flowing to sub-folder within just the one domain (that probably already has good site authority) which only enhances the value of the sub-folder and the site as a whole

5.       Similar to sub-domains, global brands with bigger product offerings and larger footprints might be wise to use this approach.

Disadvantages

1.       Ranking in local SERPs can potentially be hard because of competition from local country players

2.        Perception from search can vary. For example, some European countries prefer a ccTLD over a .com domain when clicking on a search result. Hence a sub-folder might not be preferred over a ccTLD in this case.

3.       There is a small chance that duplicate content issues can arise (different websites targeting multiple countries and languages with largely the same content). The likelihood of this is minimal especially if your site is geo-targeted properly.

Personally I think “perception” or the “trust” factor is the most important element. Trusting a local domain (especially for long-tail terms) is likely to have a higher click through rate (leading to higher traffic and greater conversions) especially if you want to be perceived as an international brand. However, if you are restricted by a CMS, a sub-folder strategy is another option that you can work with. To determine what works best for you, consider a Cost-Benefit analysis for all three strategies and always remember to apply and follow the general principles and tactics that are usually recommended by search engines when optimising your site.

Rohit Padgaonkar
Senior Internet Marketing Consultant

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Mark Baartse, Consulting Director at First Rate will be presenting a session onCross Channel Attribution at the upcoming eMetric summit in Melbourne 16th – 17th November. Mark will speak about how to optimise the true value of every click on the path to conversion.

We know that users cross channels, yet we continue to do a bad job of reporting on and optimising to multiple clicks that cross channel. Mark will speak about case studies that use cross channel and multiclick attribution to get a true view of the value of each click – regardless of the channel used. After the session you will be able to optimise your media spend, to the real contribution of different channels, helping you to get the most for every media dollar.

We’ll also be running a Search Marketing Bootcamp session for eMarketers wanting to understand practices better or to brush up on their skills.

It’s free! and will take place in the exhibition hall – check it out here

Chat to the First Rate team in the exhibition hall about any niggling issues or find out what’s next for the future of search and performance.

Take your personalised code from the First Rate flyer in the delegate bag to stand no. 5 to see if you have won a nifty iPad.

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