3 min read
Background
SevernWoods Fine Homes is a custom home builder and whole-home renovator out of Toronto, Ontario. They specialize in high-end custom homes and renovations in the Old Toronto region. In business since 2004, SevernWoods' organic traffic, leads, and online presence were below average when they came to us to improve these areas.
The Challenge
SevernWoods' monthly organic traffic was very low when we started working together. This led to a very slow stream of leads coming in the door. The good news was they did not have a blog nor much website authority, which allowed us to use our proven methods to see dramatic increases quickly! Our proven methods help create authority with Google, giving Google a better understanding of SevernWoods’ website, what they do, and what we want them to be ranking for when people use those specific search terms.
The majority of SevernWoods leads came from referrals, and unfortunately, referrals aren’t coming in the door on a daily or weekly basis. So we were challenged with generating authority online, getting users to come to their website, and converting those users into leads. However, we did not want just any leads, but more qualified leads! They would typically receive leads outside their service area and under their typical budget range, but we’ll explore that later.
The Strategy
Going into our strategy, SevernWoods did not have much authority in the Toronto region for home building and renovations. We also had minimal ranking keywords and no blogs. This allowed us to start fresh, using a holistic inbound marketing strategy for generating leads and gaining authority within the industry.
We started with our top-performing blog topics, but it takes time for search engines to index and rank content. So we used social media and emails to help drive traffic. As illustrated in the graphic below, we saw traffic increase month over month, and we really made some major progress by 6 months! We continue to feed blogs to Google, improve internal pages, and now SevernWoods is recognized as a reputable source of information for renovations in the Toronto region by the search engines.
Remember, 96% of viewers are just browsing and aren’t ready to buy yet. They may be a year or two or more out from a renovation. That leaves 4% of people ready to buy now. Most remodelers only focus on the 4%. But at Builder Funnel, we target both those ready now and those that will be in the future.
Many website visitors aren't ready to commit today, but we want a way to capture their email anyway. This is where our high-performance lead conversion offers come into play. We offer exclusive access to our knowledge and expertise, but in exchange, they give us their name and email. This allows us to remain in contact and provide helpful resources so when they're ready, we'll be the obvious choice.
Note the graph below - as traffic increases so does lead conversion. SevernWoods has increased month-to-month lead generation 4-7x (depending on the month) since working with Builder Funnel.
We continue to send them helpful blogs and articles, recent projects completed, and newsletters as the months go by. We started with a small list of approximately 20 people comprised of past clients and business partners, but with the addition of high-value blogs, improving their internal pages, and offering valuable information in exchange for an email address, we have been able to grow that list to over 500 contacts as illustrated below.
Their email list grew from 20 to 500 contacts.
The Results
We are still chasing after our main goal to target the 1% in Toronto, and in the process, we built an extremely solid foundation that has generated qualified leads in the future for SevernWoods.
Over the year and a half time, SevernWoods Fine Homes has been working with Builder Funnel, they have...
- Increased lead generation 6x (under 10 to over 60 leads per month on average (See chart in Strategy)
- Expanded their email list from 20 to over 500 contacts (See chart in Strategy)
- Increased website traffic from under 250 visitors a month to almost 1k per month (See chart in Strategy)
In addition, we have...
- Doubled their backlinks (a very important SEO metric)
- Tripled their referring domains
- And increased organic keywords they rank for from 39 to over 1.1k (yes, that's over a 2800% increase!)
SevernWoods Starting Website Metrics
SevernWoods Current Website Metrics
We're only halfway through the current year, and as you can see by the chart below, our inbound marketing strategy is drastically increasing website traffic and leads!
In addition, here's a fun fact! Cost is one of the most important factors to any potential remodeling or building customer. That's why we wrote a very valuable blog post on the subject, and we're ranking in Google's featured snippet (also dubbed position zero).
Key Takeaways
You can't just write a few blogs, optimize images and keywords, and expect to rank #1 in Google and be showered with multi-million dollar projects overnight. A good marketing strategy takes time especially if you're targeting the top 1% of earners in a market. If you're a high-end design-build firm or custom home builder, Builder Funnel can help you generate qualified traffic, leads, and sales using a holistic marketing strategy that will only become more and more effective with time!
If you're interested in getting results like this for your remodeling or custom home building business, contact us to start the conversation!