BCK: A Report-Recommend-Revise Case Study

For 30 years, BCK Real Estate has been serving Central Vermont and beyond from offices in Barre, Montpelier, Northfield, Rochester, and Waterbury with exceptional real estate and customer service. The insight into small town values and traditional Vermont communities is what you’d expect from a locally owned business.

When BCK Real Estate first came to Union Street Media in 2007, they knew what they wanted: more visitors of quality, not just quantity, to visit their site. They wanted these visitors to turn into leads through the various conversion tools throughout their site. They also emphasized the importance of improving their search engine placement to reach people who did not already know the BCK brand. The new site performed well, right from relaunch. The graph below shows the steady improvement the site has made in its 2 years with Union Street Media. Keep reading to learn more about how we helped achieve large increases in the last year – including responding to an unexpected sudden drop in rankings a couple of months ago.

By spring of 2009, the firm was ready to kick things into high gear, so they engaged in our Report- Recommend-Revise process (RRR). We began with a baseline assessment and performed extensive keyword research to inform a site design update. We then implemented an extensive volume of new content to appeal to site visitors and search engines alike. In particular, our own One Click Search technology helped us segment the MLS data and fully optimize it with high value keywords and unique introductory content written by BCK professionals.

Over the next few months, we repeated the process of reporting on the data, making recommendations, and making revisions. The site immediately improved its rankings and the traffic and engagement numbers were solid. Then suddenly in June, the site’s visitor volume dropped and we noticed their rankings went from being above the fold on page 1 in Google to page 3 or 4. We searched and searched for a cause, but were unable to identify the source of the “slap-down” from Google. We fought back with a carefully built XML site map that we submitted via the Google Webmaster Tools. Within a few days, all was well again, as you can see in the data. This is the kind of SEO event that most Realtors would not notice until the phones stopped ringing – nor would they know what to do about it. Being engaged in our RRR process gave BCK the peace of mind and quick results to this crisis.

If you compare BCK’s data from May to October of 2009 to that same time frame the previous year, you will see we clearly met our goals – even in the face of a random Google glitch and the worst recession in decades:

To read more about the Reach and Engagement concept check out our blog. Contributing to these statistics is the 39% increase in traffic driven from search engines. BCK made significant improvements with the following terms: