RedDoor Homes - a site that features rich and dynamic content
Being an agile agency we always keep in mind that every website is unique and has to be closely tailored to the client’s needs.
Here at 3B, we know how to adapt our strategy and recommendations to meet the expectations of every client. However, this may be a bit challenging when it comes to working with estate agents, mainly because they often depend on a third-party tool for the property listing.
Quite often, estate agents employ a property listings widget embedded on their site. The problem with these widgets is that they are often not SEO friendly. Some of them display within an iframe - meaning that the properties do not have unique URLs and therefore can not be shared.
RedDoor Homes came to us with a beautiful but a very slow website. They explained to us their USP - creating engaging video content to help prospective & existing clients. Their portfolio includes virtual viewings, tips for landlords, tenants, homeowners; reviews of local cafes, restaurants & events.
To make the best recommendation possible we conducted the full SEO & Site performance audit. The audit revealed a handful of potential improvements. Starting from some pages not being responsive on mobile to missing metadata and having 6 Google Analytics codes connected to the site. All that aside our biggest concern with the RedDoor homes website remained the site being incredibly slow, on both, desktop and mobile.
This often happens with large websites; many people think having a website is enough and they tend to focus more on content management and forget about general maintenance and the optimisation of user journeys and conversions.
When talking through all areas of improvements with the client we hit a roadblock - all property listings were done through a tried party tool called ‘Expert agent’ - a tool that the client was determined to maintain despite the fact that ‘Expert agent’ embedded property listings simply weren't working for this site.
A thorough research process revealed the perfect solution - two websites unified into one online presence; a website for content management on Squarespace & a website for the property listings by ExtertAgent.
To manage brochure content we recommended Squarespace - the perfect solution for those who want to regularly update their site. The interface is very intuitive and the client does not need to have any dev knowledge at all!
When the new websites went live, we were then able to better focus on on-site SEO and especially on one of the most important elements of SEO - copywriting; producing a user-friendly & search engine optimised content.
SEO is a long process. It starts with thorough keyword research, understanding what people search for and industry trends. An optimised page should be at least 750 words long. Having said that there is no point of writing those long, well-optimised pages if people are simply not reading them. To write useful content you need to understand your website visitors and that’s where the tracking comes into play.
Google tag manager plays a very important role in understanding your website traffic, although what needs to be tracked differs from site to site. Here is what we added to the RedDoor Homes website:
Scroll depth tracking - this is key for SEO content and long term strategy. Implementing scroll depth tracking allowed us to see how much of the page people read (25%, 50%, 75%, 100%). Analyzing this data helps to understand what pages people don’t find particularly interesting or easy to read - then more work can be done to make those pages perform better.
Video tracking - the site has many videos and tracking them allows us to see the videos that have been watched, which ones were the most popular if the people watch the whole video or give up halfway through.
Outbound link tracking & link clicks to services provided by RedDoor - almost every website has links to other platforms, it is important to see where people click off to from your site. In this case, we also wanted to know how many people use ‘off-site services’ such as online property valuation, repairs and maintenance platform etc.
Tracking of form submissions - allows us to see how many times people contacted RedDoor using contact forms on the website. It allows easy analysis of what pages have higher conversion rates.
Reading all this, you probably think it’s a lot to digest and not everyone is confident navigating their way through the maze of Google Analytics. Luckily, we know the most common client concerns and we don’t expect our clients to find all the information they might need all by themselves.
To that end we used Data Studio to present everything a client needs to know about their website performance in one beautiful and comprehensive report. The report includes information about the most important platforms for RedDoor - their main website, properties website and YouTube. It also includes the number of sessions, users, bounce rate, page views, number of form enquiries, new / returning visitors ratio, devices people use to browse the site, how people find the site and many more.
We are always open to suggestions, and if a client thinks that they would benefit from something extra added to the report we are keen to help.
“Choosing an agency to carry out an effective SEO strategy is tricky; optimisation seems a dark art to most of us and trust is vital - trust that the agency knows what they’re doing, and trust that they’ll actually do it!
We’ve been associates of 3B for many years now but only very recently invited them to take on our SEO and Digital marketing account. Step one was a brutal but much appreciated audit of our existing website and a recommendation that we migrate our sizable but chaotic body of content to a platform where we could collate and organise it far better in order that we more effectively convert traffic to our site and into our sales funnel.
Just a few short weeks later we had our new site - a more striking but fundamentally simpler site that’s easier to manage and, importantly, easier to market. We’re delighted.
3B are just exactly what they purport to be: a boisterous but effective agency that have our best interest at heart, leveraging their considerable experience whilst keenly adopting new technologies and methods along the way - and we trust them totally!”
Andy Wicking, Director
