What does a Marketing Manager do?
Advent Properties is a property management and real estate firm that operates in major bay area cities. When it comes to Advent’s brand, not only must core values be reflected in every interaction; the brand must also be trustworthy. After all, when it comes to property management, homeowners are entrusting Advent properties to manage their investments worth millions of dollars. As a specialized local business, it was crucial for Advent Properties to have an accurate and strong online presence. With an outdated website and limited SEO strategy, it was time for a makeover.
Identifying the obstacle:
With any business, it’s important to have a professional website that is an accurate representation of what that business does. Every two years, companies should look at refreshing their website, and with that, think about if it is an opportunity to re-brand as well. Advent Properties was past that two year mark with an outdated website and brand, so a refresh was crucial to continue its growth in the bay area. We decided our goals would be:
Redesign the website to provide accurate information and improve lead generation
To grow Advent’s digital presence by leveraging search optimization
Hypothesis Strategy:
Change is never easy. Redesigning a website is never easy. Why? Well, there’s a lot to think about. How do we maintain Brand values in a newly designed look? What will evergreen content look like and where will it live? Will SEO figure itself out or is there some kind of strategy behind it?
At the start, Advent properties was ranked on the twelfth page in Google for bay area property management. When it comes to Search Engine Optimization, it is important to do all the small things right such as maintaining the organization’s business information, positioning services, and developing value propositions. Not only is it best practice, but imagine a Google bot scouring through the internet to find inaccurate information about the business. How would it know which one is correct? We would need to begin with basic NAP information and build Advent’s digital presence from the bottom up. Additionally, being a local company, there are certain markets that fit the company’s strategy and range in margin. Therefore these city markets would be positioned and embedded in the page’s infrastructure and navigation to further strengthen its SEO rankings.
Advent’s content strategy would be straight forward. As a property management company, homeowners typically search for the city or area in which they are looking for services. Understanding how search bots, we would design the new site’s structure to make cities and areas easy to find. Additionally, content would be tailored to answer homeowners’ biggest questions, which were fielded from research and in-person events.
Implementation of Strategy:
Step one: Let’s get down to the basics
We decided that we would begin with NAP information then register with Google My Business. Additionally, once Google verified the business, we would then proceed with other listing sites, which would further validate Advent’s digital footprint.
Step two: Positioning and Value propositions
Homeowners will typically search for the city they are looking for property management services in. We leveraged this by creating landing pages dedicated to major market cities. For example, we created landing pages in San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley to not only demonstrate services in these cities, but to strengthen our positioning as well.
These pages would be titled “San Francisco Property Management”, respective to major service cities, and would include key terms that were related to property management and real estate
Step three: Web Design
Once we had our strategy in place, and the tactics to improve SEO, we then began the design phase. At its core, the Advent brand embodied exceptional customer service, trust, and teamwork. Based on previous research, the brand colors were blue, yellow and orange, which represented trust, sociability, enthusiasm, and success.
After reviewing, we took these colors to our web development consultant and created the ideal theme in WordPress.
Additionally, the old website had one contact form on the page. We improved lead generation by creating multiple form pages, dedicated to real estate, property management, and general questions.
Step four: Content creation
After identifying Advent’s major service cities, we created content surrounding those cities for respective landing pages for page rank. Additionally, we had a small budget to create additional content to answer potential questions homeowners carried. Some of this content surround topics such as:
Why hire a property manager to look after your property
Why you should treat your home as a small business
20 Questions to ask your property Manager
We created over 20 pieces of content that would be published bi-weekly and shared with our owner newsletters.
Results:
Since it takes some time for Google to register the legitimacy and details about a business, the effects of SEO strategy were apparent after a few months. Advent Properties was on the twelfth page for “bay area property management”. By the time the website was completed, Advent Properties landed on the first page, positioned as one of the leaders in real estate management.
Contact form submissions grew by 70% over the course of three months after the website was completed, resulting in more leads and business.