SEO Case Study: Lila Delman Luxury Real Estate

Learn how Brave River Solutions increased Lila Delman's search engine rankings and website performance to achieve higher quality leads and traffic.

ABOUT LILA DELMAN REAL ESTATE

More than 50 years ago, Lila Delman was was motivated to shake up the conventional way of life. From 1964, Lila raised a family alongside running her own luxury real estate company. With a passionate admiration for history, Lila relished during the times she was able to teach her children all about the architecture that surrounded their home in beautiful Narragansett. Keeping her aspirations close to heart, the company she built became part of the renowned real estate legacy that continues to thrive to this day.

CHALLENGES

The Lila Delman Real Estate team recently redesigned their website and knew that search engine optimization was key for both growing an online audience and increasing the amount of quality home buyer leads.

A few key challenges and goals included:

• 100% transparency
• Implementation of  proper redirects
• A technical site-wide audit
• Increased bot crawlability
• Proper HTTPS implementation
• Improve internal link structure
• Increase quality traffic and leads
• Increase average session duration
• Rank higher for “luxury real estate”, "waterfront real estate", and location specific search terms 

OBJECTIVES

After carefully outlining the challenges that we hoped to overcome, we began to brainstorm and research which methods would be best to combat these difficulties.

The main objectives included:

• Running a technical SEO audit to find everything that needs to be updated or fixed on the site.
• Optimization of page titles, headers, meta descriptions, and on-page text for better rankings against the most elite competitors.
• Creation of new location-based pages to enhance search intent and user experience.

Our prediction for running an audit and applying the previously stated optimizations were that we would ultimately see a dramatic, positive change in the way that both users and crawlers would interact with the website.

THE LILA DELMAN AUDIT

For Lila Delman's search engine optimization strategy, we sought to optimize their site on both a technical and structural level while also enhancing the meta and on-page content.

TECHNICAL OPTIMIZATIONS

Technical enhancements allow search engines to understand the topic of the Lila Delman site by viewing on-page content from text to images—there were many low-hanging opportunities. Here are multiple examples of the improvements we chose to explore:

• Searching for instances of duplicate content and employing canonical tags
• Scanning for duplicate meta-descriptions, and ensuring that each is unique
• Looking for 4XX and 5XX errors
• Fixing broken links
• Confirming design was 100% responsive and cross-device compatible
• Improving page-load-time and website speed
• Create asynchronous call-outs when available
• Optimize image sizes
• Google “fetch and render”
• Fetch and render allows you to see similarly to what a bot sees when crawling your web pages, including any errors that you may have missed or what you’ve done well with.
• Create xml sitemaps
• Fixing crawl errors
• Adding schema for rich snippets
• Structural Optimizations

STRUCTURAL OPTIMIZATIONS

Creating a clean and organized website architecture increases the user experience as well as the search engine crawlability, making it a top priority. Here are a few key factors that we decided to revisit within the luxury real estate site, alongside our thought processes:

• Looking at the website hierarchy
• Verifying a shallow click depth
• Better structure = happier viewers & more effective crawling
• Evaluating breadcrumbs and schema
• Creating a comprehensive internal linking structure
• Including clear links for related content to connect throughout the site
• Analyze and update URL structure
• Content and Keyword Optimizations

META  AND ON-PAGE OPTIMIZATIONS

Having rich content is equally as important as having an optimized technical web structure. In order for the Lila Delman site to be helpful to viewers, the content needed to be clear, engaging and on-topic—not stuffed with excessive keywords and phrases. The SEO game has changed immensely in the past years, and here are some opportunities we conquered:

• Looking for missing or unoptimized title tags.
• Optimizing listings match searchers intent
• Optimizing page headers
• Optimizing on-page body text
• Optimizing meta-titles and descriptions
• Optimizing images, including alt text and title tags
• Finding thin content and incorporating additional helpful information
• Link Building Optimization
• Creating custom city pages with optimized content and internal linking

RESULTS

All of our work has skyrocketed quality traffic and leads to the Lila Delman website. As you can see in the graph below, the luxury real estate websites traffic dramatically increased within less than a years’ worth of ongoing optimization to the site, along with a few other feats.

Additional accomplishments from our endeavors included:

• 299.72% increase in traffic
• 312.94% increase in users
• 29% Increase in inquiries
• 225.77% Increase in new users

IMPRESSIONS

OVERALL SESSIONS

ORGANIC SESSIONS

RANKING KEYWORDS

TAKE-AWAYS

Our final take-aways from this case study were nothing short of exhilarating. This information will not only help us improve future search engine optimizations, but will hopefully help shine a light on the potential benefits you could experience from optimizing your own business's website.

• By optimizing our service pages, Lila Delman now ranks higher than ever before, outperforming their competition.
• Increasing the internal link structure increased rankings for different search terms
• Re optimizing real estate listing meta tags and on-page content increased site-wide organic visibility.
• Creating location based landing pages / search result pages with optimized meta tags and content not only increased search engine visibility, but has been increasing traffic month-over-month.

CONCLUSION

Lila Delman wanted to not only increase their brand visibility world-wide, but be able to measure and increase quality leads as well as traffic volume. Our Marketing team worked together to devise a complete SEO plan, and ultimately received high quality month-over-month results.

SEO is not a one-time deploy, so we will be continuing to push the boundaries in seeking new ways to enhance our site—and we want to share our experiences with you.

If your business could use assistance in achieving your SEO goals, the Brave River team is armed and ready to help you conquer the SERP and reach new heights—just give our Marketing and Technical SEO Team a call at 401-828-6611. Our greatest motivation is helping your business succeed!