Development
The process began with an overhaul of the website. This included a complete rethink of what users needed out of the site, resulting in a streamlined organizational structure. We also upgraded the old site’s approach of a mini microsite for each individual retirement community into a single flowing page of all the highlights for each community.
This approach led to higher engagement metrics, including:
- Average time a user spent on site – over 3 minutes
- Rate of users leaving the site without taking any action – below 45%
- Conversation rate – 13.26%
SEO
We built the entire site with a foundation of search engine optimization (SEO), ensuring everything down to the navigation hierarchy and URLs were determined with SEO and user experience in mind. We concocted new pages to speak directly to what our research indicated had high search interest. Every page launched with meta tags and on-page content in place that directly targeted specific keywords for those pages. We then engaged in link building efforts, provided editorial calendars for new content topics, trained the communications team on how to write content with SEO in mind, and more.
This effort resulted in a 451% increase in organic search conversions (sales leads) for the first year of the new version of the site over the first year of the previous version of the site.
Content distribution
While proceeding with additional SEO efforts, we also instituted a campaign of having influential writers in the industry publish our content or develop their own on their platforms, thus expanding our possible reach, establishing vital brand building, and gathering an audience for retargeting.
These tactics added valuable content to the internet that continues earning new visits, sales leads, and brand building long after their initial publishing date.
Paid advertising
Leveraging what we knew was successful from SEO efforts, and filling search holes that the site could never rank for organically, we optimized keyword bids, wrote and designed paid search and display ads, and continually monitored and tweaked the performance of our campaigns. We ran paid search across Google and Bing, prospecting via display ads, and retargeting.
With the new site structure and paid advertising efforts working in tandem with SEO and content distribution, we secured more visitors and sales leads for less cost:
- Traffic to the site from paid ads increased 673.7%.
- Sales leads increased 2,978.1%.
- And compared to the previous year, cost-per-lead decreased 64.1%.
Sales
The bottom line, the results that made us the proudest, is that following all this work, the organization exceeded its move-in goals. Over a two-year span, move-ins increased by 71%.
Leads continue to increase as well. The site earned 313 organic conversions when we started in 2012, compared to 3,493 organic conversions and 4,118 conversions across all digital marketing efforts in August 2018. Then 2019 outperformed even 2018’s high bar by 64.42%.