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Local SEO
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It is common practice for estate agencies to perform SEO actions on their websites in order to improve their online visibility. However a focus on improving ‘local SEO’ rankings specifically can birth wondrous results.
Local SEO is the focus on improving an estate agency's search engine visibility for a local audience. This is done through the optimisation of maps listings and offices pages for localised keyword searches, such as ‘London estate agents’, ‘estate agent in my area’ or even ‘estate agents near me’.
The localised nature of the estate agent service speaks to the importance of being able to promote to a targeted area, making local SEO an extremely effective channel for acquiring highly relevant users. Especially for larger agency networks, local SEO offers the unique opportunity to promote their many local branches to local audiences, raising their profiles online as efficiently as a high street presence.
Local SEO practices, such as claiming, optimising and regularly updating your ‘Google My Business’ profile, optimising offices landing pages for the localised keywords you’re trying to rank for and acquiring high-quality backlinks and ‘citations’ from locally-relevant websites and directories, can lead to an increase in local brand awareness online and directly boost lead conversion.
As part of a larger local SEO campaign that covered all of Dexters’ 60+ London offices, our mission was to achieve top local rankings for each of the offices in their area of service. Some offices are more difficult to optimise and rank than others, depending on the local competitive landscape and the popularity of target keywords. But thanks to the thorough local SEO process that we put in place, covering on-page SEO, local link building, page speed improvements and citations management, we achieved top 3 local rankings across the board.
One of the best achievements of this campaign was ranking Dexters Surbiton in top 3 organic search results and in the local 3-pack for the keyword “estate agents in surbiton” in as little as 3 months (from no ranking in Google Maps for the office before the start of the campaign).
The complexity of Acorn’s new website, which includes multiple sub-brands with their own network of branches, presented a real local SEO challenge in terms of retaining and improving individual office rankings. Tasking us with the digital architecture of merging their extensive sub-brands in a single domain, each of them with duplicate pages which raised content quality issues from an SEO point of view, our plan of action extended outside local SEO, but focused heavily on bringing the visibility of all local offices pages forward.
Simplifying the website architecture and URL structure, paired with a solid canonical setup that deals with the duplication issues, a focus on optimising page content with the right local keywords and improving the internal linking structure through dynamic popular searches links, brought office pages to the top deck.
These onpage SEO changes brought massive improvements to organic rankings of local offices pages and strengthened their visibility in Google maps as a result. The screen below shows an Acorn office ranking #1 in organic search results and #2 in the Google maps results (John Payne brand).
Robinson Jackson required more visibility of their brand in Thamesmead, a secondary area covered by the Plumstead and Woolwich office. Without a dedicated office page, they required a digital competitive edge.
To achieve this, we created a new Thamesmead landing page, all optimised with primary keywords and enriched page content. As a result of this very focused effort, the page secured the top #1 spot for the searches “estate agents in Thamesmead” and “Thamesmead estate agents” in just 23 days. Where before the Plumstead & Woolwich office page was ranking only on page 2 of Google.
