Royal Oaks Homes redesigned their website with us in 2014 for a new responsive layout. It’s a gorgeous website and perfect for mobile use – but it didn’t do exactly what we wanted for their SEO. So we dug in to see what we could improve for these Raleigh home builders, and ended up with some great results and an important lesson.
Our first thought and primary focus was content. Content is very very important. And while the website was gorgeous and easy navigated, it didn’t have a lot of text. We thought that adding unique information to a majority of their pages would help in several ways:
It helps home buyers research the cities they’re moving to.
It introduces individual communities to home buyers.
It proves to home buyers why Royal Oaks Homes is the builder of choice in those areas.
And it improves the website from an SEO-perspective.
Along with a few small tweaks to the home page, we concentrated on the Find Your Home and Available Home pages. Starting with the main landing pages of “all communities” and “all available homes”, we drilled down to the areas of Raleigh and Fayetteville and then the individual cities, including Apex, Angier, Cary, Knightdale, Clayton, Fuquay-Varina, Holly Springs, and Cameron North Carolina.
It was a lot of work! With a minimal goal of 250 words, we added around 400 to every page that discussed the area, the communities in the area, and the homes that Royal Oaks Homes build. Our copy writing team worked closely with Matt Riley researching the location and its special benefits. For example, now interested buyers know that Raleigh is “rated as America’s Best Places to Live: #1 in 2011, The Ten Best Cities for Newlyweds: #2 in 2012, and Best Cities for Raising a Family: #5 in 2012, we chose Raleigh and its surrounding cities for our new homes because of the incredible quality of life it offers” and Fayetteville is “rated as #2 “Highest Per Capita Income Growth in North Carolina”, #3 “Most Affordable Housing Market in the Nation”, and a three-time Winner of the National Civics League “All-American City” award, we chose Fayetteville and its surrounding cities for our new homes because of the powerful economy and unique culture it offers”.
Our final list included improving or creating 23 new pages.
You can see the difference on page with a before and after shot:
And with information:
We also saw the difference in results. Royal Oaks Homes shot up in page rank for all of their major search terms; previously on page 3 or 4, they moved up to page 1 0r 2 in just a few weeks.
“New homes in Angier NC” : page 1
“New homes in Holly Springs NC” : page 1
“New homes in Cameron NC” : page 1
“New homes in Apex NC” : page 2
“New homes in Clayton NC” : page 2
“New homes in Knightdale NC” : page 2
“Raleigh new homes” : page 2
“New Homes in Fayetteville NC” : page 2
And we’ve been improving since then.
Website traffic improved dramatically. Within one month total visits to the website were up 16%, new user traffic increasing 13.83%, and page views up 12.96%. From September to October right after these changes, Royal Oaks Homes’ website had over 85,000 views.
We’re all very happy with the improvement to their website and thank Matt for letting us try something new. We’ve taken this lesson to our other websites; it’s nice to crack some of Google’s code and improve a website for both our builders and buyers.