How We Took a National CRE News Publisher to Page-One Rankings

Company Overview

Our client is a national commercial real estate news website with over 70 thousand pages focusing on a variety of industries and sub industries. They have been in business since 2015. Due to NDAs we are not permitted to disclose further details. Note: This project took a considerable amount of time and effort to achieve** 

Goals

The company was looking to rank for commercial real estate news keywords across their various industries and sub industries.

Challenges

Technical SEO

Technical SEO refers to the foundational principles of a website. Without a strong foundation it will be difficult to create impactful results. Technical SEO is equivalent to the foundation of a house. If your “house” is built with a shaky foundation it will fall. Most websites suffer from the same issues. These being unminified javascript, CSS, H-tags, alt text, orphaned pages, sitemap issues to name a few.     

No Keyword Strategy

Without a solid keyword strategy it is difficult to be found for the searches that matter to a business. Keyword strategy issues also make it a challenge for Google to know what a website is about. In this case the search engine was having a hard time identifying that our client was a news website serving multiple industries and sub industries as well as locations.

Poor Internal Linking

internal links are critical step in quality SEO outcomes to pass “page rank” to other webpages: helping to enhance association between other webpages. Without them search engines struggle to find every one of the pages a website has. Poor internal linking can also lead to “orphaned pages” which are pages with no parent page further decreating their ability to rank.

What We Did

Like all of our projects we had to confirm our suspicions about their technical SEO health. We ran their website through Cindtoro’s custom built SEO audit process. We discovered broken links, images with no alternative text, poorly written title tags and as well as the unminified JavaScript and CSS files. 

Keyword Selection

Before we could move onto addressing their issues we had to ensure that the website had a set of focus keywords. Keyword selection provides the underlaying direction for everything going forward. These terms had never been established previously. Our team extensively researched ideal target keywords and selected them based on the most ideal outcome: which was to rank for CRE news related terms.

We opted for some of the following keywords:

Improved Technical SEO

Our next step after our audit was to address their technical SEO problems. The reason why we start off with technical problems first is because establishing a solid foundation is the most important part of SEO rankings. Technical SEO is also the type of SEO that many practitioners fail to work on due to complexity and lack of understanding. The Cindtoro team took a systemic approach to addressing our clients issues starting with broken links, then moving onto heading tags, followed by alt text. After that we worked on anything else they would have been holding them back from success.

Optimized Title Tags

A website’s title tag is like a bookcover if it is misaligned or not optimized your website fails to help Google understand what your “book” is about. Our client had misaligned title tags which made it harder for them to be found for their desired keywords.

Added Relevant Alt Text

Alt text is another important thing to ensure SEO happens in an effective way. A search engine cannot read images like humans can. Alternative text helps describe images on-page to visually impaired users as well as to search engines. The our client had tens of thousands of unoptimized images.

While it is important to ensure that every image contains relevant alt text we focused on the ones that actually moved the needle. Specifically, these were the ones on the pages we were looking to rank. We optimized each of the images with keyword rich information using some of the keywords we selected above in addition to other ones.

Improved internal linking

We helped to improve their internal link structure via an onsite sitemap and lead the editorial team to link out to other companies they often covered in their CRE news stories.

Results

Given the high level of competition of CRE news websites the website reached the 1st page Google rankings for nearly all of their chosen keywords in about a year and a half. Our client has had very little keyword fluctuation and continues to rank for the terms we established.

They continue to rank for some of the following keywords:

(There were a total of 35 core keywords all of which perform significantly well) the terms selected for this case study were selected randomly.

If you would like our help for your SEO efforts please reach out to a member of our team to schedule an appointment.

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