Challenge
Apartment People is an apartment-finding service in Chicago, which competes with big, national apartment finding services such as Craigslist and Zillow. In coming to Highly Relevant, Apartment People wanted to leverage its local expertise and connections throughout the city in order to drive organic traffic.
Solution
Highly Relevant customized an SEO plan for Apartment People that included: SEO optimizations focusing on targeted demographic keywords Chicago-based linkbuilding campaign Local Search optimizations Website UX consultation and recommendations Website Content & Optimization Highly Relevant optimized the entire site with keyword rich content to attract organic rankings from broad match keywords relating to specific Chicago neighborhoods. For Apartment People, capturing long-tail traffic for local keywords was a priority; the more specific the search term, the higher their rate of conversion. During the campaign, Apartment People doubled the amount of keywords they ranked for from just over 600 to over 1300. Linkbuilding Campaign Apartment People already had a robust link profile upon working with Highly Relevant. However, its competitors operated on a national level, and had obtained links from some of the most powerful domains in the world. With limited reach beyond Chicago proper, Apartment People needed to think differently to compete with its competitors on the front page for Chicago search terms. We hypothesized that consistently local, Chicago-based links would push Apartment People over the edge. Apartment People would not be able to compete the sheer quantity of links that Zillow obtained in such a short period of time, but it would be able to leverage its local relationships and reputation to obtain secure placements in authoritative, local niche blogs and publications.
Results
After pursuing and securing a select number of local link opportunities on a careful, consistent basis, Highly Relevant helped Apartment People increase its organic traffic 115 percent through the course of its campaign. Keywords: 115 percent increase Non-branded SEO Traffic: 117 percent increase Total Traffic: 210,000 additional visitors.
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