How we helped the SDL Property Auctions increase blog conversions by 306%

The Challenge

During the pandemic, in-room auctions came to a halt. While this created an exciting opportunity to grow the digital branch of the business, a huge pivot in marketing strategy and website development was required to better facilitate online auctions, as well as drive customers towards them. Every other property auctioneer in the UK at the time was also facing the same challenges, however, so competition was fiercer than ever before. 

Making such an expensive and potentially life-changing purchase online requires a huge amount of trust, which we had to build without any face-to-face contact, and maintain post-pandemic to ensure the business remained profitable long after auction houses reopened.

Goals

We’ve worked with SDL Property Auctions for seven years now, continuously adapting our strategy in line with the evolution of the business, working as an extension of their in-house team to provide ongoing consultancy and support across SEO, content and web development.

• Increase quality organic traffic while boosting engagement and conversions
• Optimise content strategy to create high-value location, property type and advice pages
• Identify and reclaim lost keyword positions while targeting new opportunities
• Address broken links, schema issues and indexability concerns to strengthen technical SEO and overall site health 

Strategy

SEO & Content  

Our content approach can be broken down into the following four key areas:

Location pages: Google’s recent core updates prioritise the most helpful and therefore relevant results. One side effect of this is increased reliance on localised landing pages. We therefore adapted our content strategy for SDL Property Auctions to place a stronger focus on local SEO, working through the optimisation of existing location pages and creating more where sufficient search volume and relevance was identified. This approach led to significant increases in sessions and conversions for location-specific keywords.

Property type pages: similar to collection pages on a traditional ecommerce store, we worked on optimising and increasing the range of property-type pages on the site. This allowed us to target a wider range of niche keywords while improving user journey by introducing users to a landing page which suits their needs from the first click. This resulted in an increase in targeted traffic for terms relating to renovation, repossession, etc. 

Advice hub: heavily influenced by Google’s Helpful Content update, we worked through optimising and expanding the advice pages on the website. Designed to provide valuable, uncomplicated information that may be of use to users of all backgrounds (whether they’re potential buyers, sellers or hopeful partners), this content achieved a significant increase in sessions and user interactions. 

Blog content: we worked within Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines to create blog articles that are both unique and useful. Some examples of the types of content we crafted for the SDL Property Auctions blog include question-based content which answers FAQs, advice and nurture pieces which help new and existing users by sharing information, thought-leadership blogs which develop the site’s expertise, and market research pieces which assist users with their own research. We also regularly refreshed older, high-performing content to maintain existing organic rankings.

Web Design & Development 

In 2020, we redesigned the SDL Property Auctions website to be more suitable for the online-first approach as the popularity of online property auctions was accelerated by the pandemic. At the time, the SDL website held thousands of pages, many of which just weren’t needed, so we were keen to strip the customer journey right back to basics.  

We began by undertaking thorough customer-journey research to uncover what a new customer journey should look like on the new site. This approach helped to future-proof the website, making it more suitable for online auctions and more recognisable among customers, meaning the brand no longer had to rely on traditional in-room auctions. Extensive customer research was carried out, which could be broken down into the following parts:

Competitor review: a thorough review of UK competitors or global equivalent companies leading within their markets

SEO research: in-depth exploration of UK-based keywords to discover which pages were necessary for SEO and also glean insights into how consumers were ‘shopping’ for and selling properties at the time. This included any changes pre and post-pandemic. 

Persona review: SDL’s established buyer personas were reviewed to ensure all are appropriately catered for.

Existing website audit: a full review of all content on the previous website was carried out to evaluate current performance and identify areas for improvement

Taxonomy and full page structure: our SEO team created a new taxonomy for the SDL Property Auctions site, establishing the structure of the menu and all pages within the website were established. 

Email Marketing 

The Eddisons rebrand meant that all channels and creative assets needed to be rebranded. Our creative team helped to facilitate this with a thorough audit and the design of a series of email marketing templates for several campaign types, including a welcome automation.