Real Estate SEO Case Study: How We Dominiated Google in 6 Months

This is an SEO case study of how I managed to dominate Google Search Results for a niche real estate website (providing pool villas for rent) in Thailand after 6 months of work.

Like any other of my case studies, I won’t reveal the website and keywords for security and privacy reasons. But in this article, you will find some of my overview process of how I went about achieving the results along with various screenshots proof.

Project Background

The client operates in a niche real estate market where he rents out pool villas to people who want to visit Pattaya, Thailand, a destination where millions of tourists visit every year for holidays.

The client approached me after he recently completed building his website and wanted to do the right SEO from the start, with the goal of dominating the market on Google within 6 months.

Challenges

Just like any other real estate market, this is quite a competitive niche with lots of profits and money. Therefore there were many big players who have been dominating the search results for many years, some of which are independent websites, while some are big real estate directories.

Another challenge is that the site was relatively new with quite a number of things to be fixed as well.

The Campaign

Here are the overviews of how I approached the campaign:

Technical Optimized Website

The first step into the campaign was to fix all the technical aspects of the site that were improperly set up by the client’s web developer. Even though the site is built using WordPress, there were a lot of bad structures set up, along with other problems such as poor page speed, code bloat, and more. These were addressed and quickly fixed before moving to the next step.

On-Page Optimization

Next up is to focus on the on-page obsessively. What I mean by “obsessively” here is to optimize each and every detail to the tee.

This includes things like:

• Heading (h1,h2 & h3) optimization
• Keyword research and page creation:
  
  Since the majority of traffic will go to listing page, the next step was to do proper keyword research to build out as many relevant listing-style/category pages that target various keywords. For example: targeting number of people, villa type, etc.
• Sentence-level optimization using semantically relevant keywords:
  
  By making sure that each sentence is properly optimized using semantically relevant keywords based on reverse engineering the competitors and using a proprietary tool that I created. You can use on-page tools like Surfer-SEO to help with the process. This step is applied to listing-page/category and each listing content to optimized them for maximum on-page relevance.
• Keyword count and variation optimization:
  
  Making sure that I have used the right frequency of each keyword on the page. For example, the word “Villa”, I made sure to check the competitors’ average and see how many times I should use this word. You can again, use tools like Surfer SEO, but there’s really no hard rule for this. I’d like to keep it a little lower than the average to avoid over-optimization.
• Design refinement and connection
  
  One thing I’ve also done after the web design process was to refine the design elements on the page to make sure they are consistent in the flow and all the sections and areas are connected without breaking the semantic connection from one area to another.
• Internal linking
  
  Lastly, after all the page creation and optimization steps were carried out, I also made sure to do proper internal linking – connecting from one page to another using relevant anchor texts and keeping in mind the quantity.

Off-Page Optimization

Once the on-page of the site is ready, the next thing is to start looking into off-page factors.

Here are some of the things I did:

• Advise the client to start with branding
  
  Branding and traffic is a huge deal in SEO. I’ve been talking about how I use it in as many SEO campaigns to help support the strategy. The client followed my advice and started running Google Ads, which not only help build some awareness, but the engagement we received also helped the site quickly get out of sandbox and position itself strongly for ranking.
• Backlink building
  
  When the site was ready for link building, the next step was to build just a few guest posts per month coupled with high-quality PBNs to help support the branding campaign. This took the site to the next level and the traffic quickly went up thereafter.

Results

Here are some of the screenshots from Google Search Console and Ahrefs, showing that the site has achieved its results after 6 months:

Want To Get Results Like This?

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