Case Study Property Niche

This is one of my favourite case studies because it is not just all about the success on how easy it was, as many YouTubers and the like would like you think. It is an honest SEO case study showing the challenges of doing things right, with things not quite working at first until further exploration and time passes.

0 To 77,000 Visitors

The case study is by “Ryan Arani” for an app or company website within the property industry that went from 0 visitors to 77,000 a year. I will not name that company on this article, but you can read the full information on Ryan’s site here.

He is keen to show, there was a limited budget to the process and the starting point was low, no previous SEO work had been on the website with no activity.

The Starting Point Was Technical SEO

Like many sites I come across the starting point was getting the technical SEO sorted first. There was very little crawling going on from Google, Ryan narrowed it down to JavaScript rendering and https issues. There were other issues also to address, but basically the time for Google to crawl and load each page was so high, it pretty much gave up the process.

It took a week of developer time, to get the pages within the site to load to a satisfactory speed.

From now on, all website changes and updates would be found by Google.

Next Process Was Content

Ryan started off with many easy to rank search terms, to at least get some traffic to the website. You can see the full list of opportunities on the original case study property niche article.

His property niche related search terms were researched from common platforms such as Quora, Reddit, Facebook and YouTube. At this point Ryan is very honest with his monthly spend on content, again check out original article, but the spend ranged from £5000 to £2000 a month. He noted that some content did not get published (does not state why).

As this may seem a lot of money, the online property niche is very competitive and so not a large budget in respect to the niche.

Ryan’s Property Link Building

No buying links or dodgy blogs here, Ryan stuck to good old-fashioned SEO outreach and achieved around 100 links, a big plus point is making sure relevancy played a big part.

Surprisingly though only 2 to 5 hours per week were spent on building links. (Way better conversion than mine). The quality of the backlinks in his opinion were very good and to replicate from buying links would be very expensive.

But this is where things hit a wall, where there should have a great increase in visitors, there was very little. And Ryan admits his confidence was hit, until he reminded himself that the site being so unloved by Google for so long, was probably going to take some time to recover.

DE-Optimizing The Website

When things did not work as planned was when Ryan started to de-optimise the website. Then, when these pages were re-submitted to Google within the search Console, and this is where the graph starts to grow with traffic. Almost zero to 77,000 visits a year for a small business.

Clearly standing back and having another look, was why Ryan took the decision to de-optimize.

There is a reminder to keep uploading the content and moving the site forward, quitting after 3 months could have been the end of the website.

This small business gets between 7,000 and 8,000 visits a month from almost nothing.

Property Niche SEO Strategy Final Words

I love this example, because this case property niche project shows the real challenges, so much we see on YouTube suggests, if you do this and that you will be a millionaire in a month. Here shows that consistent hard work with a great SEO strategy can pay off, but not necessarily in gradual steps, there can be a moment where it all comes together.

After reading the original article I started following Ryan on Linkedin, I am very interested in other things he has to say.