The New Madison at Adams Farm is an apartment community just 15 minutes from our HQ in Greensboro, North Carolina. After our major creative overhaul of their brand (learn more about that here), our next step was to begin a concerted effort at driving more targeted traffic to their website. And, ultimately, we were looking to drive more leads for their sales team. Below we’ll break down the two key components of those efforts—SEO and PPC—and what kinds of results they’ve yielded. 

SEO

Search engine optimization is a critical part of any website redesign project we tackle. Without the right infrastructure behind it, a website’s beauty only goes skin-deep. Because of the crowded market of apartment complexes in Greensboro, we knew that SEO would play a part in The New Madison at Adams Farm’s long-term game when it comes to redirecting attention away from their local competitors.

By creating a targeted list of a dozen or so mid- to long-tail keywords the complex would like to rank for, we were able to begin the work of slowly but surely increasing the amount of organic traffic to the new website over time. Using the website’s internal CMS system, we deployed the target keywords in a tactical way throughout the site. Those keywords, coupled with a few key internal SEO tweaks (site speed, security, etc.), allowed us to set the new website up with the framework that would eventually start drawing more visitors over time.

Since the SEO project was completed in mid-September 2018, we have seen a marked increase in organic search traffic to the website. In that month, the site saw 505 visitors as a result of organic search results. Contrast that with May 2019, where the site had more than 3,700 organic search visits. That’s an increase of more than 600%. During that same period, we’ve also seen organic search visits account for 51% of all completed site conversions (phone calls & contact form responses), highlighting the importance of SEO to this project’s overall goals.

Organic Search Traffic, September 2018-May 2019

PPC

On the paid side, we knew that Google Ads would be a significant driver of traffic to the site while the organic SEO efforts began to take hold. Our Google Ads campaign implemented a three-part system to guide through the natural buyer’s journey from awareness to consideration to decision:

• Search Network campaign using keyword targeting
• Display Network campaign retargeting using website traffic
• Call-Only campaign driving mobile users to call the sales office

With these three elements, we were able to reach our target audience at multiple touch-points. And the use of the Display Network campaign allowed us to take advantage of all the great photography and videography assets created during our first campaign. This Display campaign would primarily be an awareness-driver, helping increase our total ad impressions, while the Search Network and Call-Only campaigns did the conversion-focused heavy lifting.

Without getting too far into the weeds (or revealing our “special sauce”), we can see that the Google Ads campaign has been a very successful traffic and conversion driver for this property. Here are some of the key metrics from the campaign thus far: