Case Studies

The focus of this case study is how a minimal investment can yield a maximum return, it’s a story about Return On Investment and it illustrates many points clearly that we think it’s important that you as a realtor understand in regards to how your website can be failing you despite your best efforts.

“The conclusion is simple, hit’s are hits, pretty is pretty but effective will help you make money!”

Madeira Island Portugal, local real estate agent Tony de Nobrega has built his Point2 website into something of a SEO monster; his content is quite excellent for SEO and the visitors to his site. During Peak traffic seasons Tony is seeing sustained 400 unique visitors per day with it spiking as high as 900 on multiple occasions. Tony spends large sums of times utilizing tools such as Scrub The Web to analyze his content and keywords, tweaking and making adjustments till in frustration he contacted us.

From a search optimization and marketing standpoint we initially weren’t sure what we could offer Tony, his site already dominated the search engines for the common and niche market search terms both general terms and “long tail” terms. He had very successful Pay per Click campaigns underway bringing in large sums of traffic based on relative ad terms that were pre-qualifying these visitors, truly we found ourselves in a position where there was little left to do other than manage Tony’s existing work and possibly tweak and re-direct it slightly.

We decided we needed to have a conversation with Tony; we needed to ask him what the end result he was looking for from the “More Hit’s” he had come to us asking how to achieve. The answer was simple, like any agent Tony was looking for more business, a higher conversion of visitors into prospects that he could pursue in attempt to convert further into clients and the problem was simply that even with 900 unique visitors in one day he wasn’t receiving the qualified leads he was looking for.

So we went looking deeper into Tony’s website to identify the problem, we added our preferred analytics tracking code to his site to gather some more usable data than we could easily extract from Point2’s Ultra Stats package. We walked away for a week to gather a large enough sampling of traffic data to be able to spot any patterns that might assist in identifying where Tony’s site was failing. The answer jumped out immediately, visitors left as quickly as they came.

In a particularly busy week we saw roughly 5000 unique visitors come to the site, a mere 133 didn’t leave immediately – that’s a whole lot of traffic to throw away.

 We had to explain to Tony that even if we could double his traffic on his site (if possible) which would require a fairly hefty budget to finance our services and the additional paid advertising that would be required for a minimal return based on his web site performance. We suggested that a complete redesign of his sites layout and navigational elements be performed to reduce the visitor bounce rate.

The goal now became make this site effective, the focus was not to make it pretty although to some extent the esthetics were improved, and not get more hits although SEO from the perspective of don’t hurt existing performance was critical the goal was to simply make it work effectively.

Rather than spend big dollars to possibly capture the attention or 1-200 new visitors by driving another 5000 visitors to the site it became nominal investment to capture the attention of the 4800 he was already throwing away each week.

The results have been excellent – and investment of $1500 to implement some minor visual changes to clean up the clutter and implement a custom navigation system to allow for quick logical access to desired content along with some custom elements to direct visitors to the key information they desire immediately without thought or effort on their part.

The conclusion is simple, hit’s are hits, pretty is pretty but effective will help you make money! This case study illustrates that it’s not necessarily the big dollars that yield the return on investment.

Now that Tony’s site is effective there may be value in pursuing additional online marketing options. For the purposes of brand recognition, or simply keeping things fresh he may consider to invest in a complete visual redesign of his site at some point – again at this point it could very well be money well spent provided that existing usability and SEO element are preserved.  The key now is that his site is effective as a tool, it generates a higher number of leads – and the leads themselves are better qualified.