Note: the name of the client has been redacted as they are still operating in stealth mode.

‍

The Challenge

When I was approached about building a condo-focused real estate site from scratch, I was intrigued. The client had deep experience in the industry, a wealth of condos data and a vision for the platform, but at the time there was no website. In fact, there wasn't even a brand name yet. We were going to build everything from scratch.

The vision was to build a condo search platform that filled a gap in the very competitive real estate market. Most real estate sites like Zillow and Redfin have incredible SEO engines that target search queries like "houses for sales in {city}". While this drives a ton of volume, it is relatively top-of-funnel. Where the gap exists is in the long tail. Most prospective condo buyers have very specific wants and needs. Not only are they looking for a condo in a specific city or neighborhood, but they also want something that is pet friendly, with a lake view, with EV parking, with a fitness center, etc. They also want a specific number of bedrooms, square footage, or under a certain price point.

A long-tail query like "Pet friendly condos for sale in West Loop Chicago under $500,000" will at best give you a search result with the filters applied on a typical real estate site. This is an okay user experience, but our goal was to create something more elevated – a unique, data rich, and insightful experience that provided the user with all of the data and information they needed to make the right condo buying decision for them. Not just a list of search results.

The Solution

The first step was to create a brand, buy the domain, and get a site live. We knew that trying to grow a brand new site into the hundreds of thousands of pages would be a challenging task. We had no authority or reputation wit Google and we were very cautious as to not burn our crawl budget as we attempted to get pages indexed. We needed to start slow, create some value, and build some authority.

Ultimately, we decided that the best path to executing on this strategy was building a Programmatic SEO site.

‍

What is Programmatic SEO

Programmatic SEO refers to the use of automation, data, and scalable systems to create and optimize large volumes of SEO-driven content. It involves leveraging algorithms and structured data to target specific keywords and generate content at scale, often for highly specific or long-tail search queries.

Hypergrowth offers a great article on Programmatic SEO, highlights some winning case studies, outlines the principles for effective programmatic SEO programs, and provides some tactical advice on building a programmatic SEO program from scratch.

Programmatic SEO has become somewhat controversial in many SEO spaces of late. As with many growth strategies, there have been countless examples of companies using programmatic strategies to create and publish spam or thin content at scale. While this might provide short term results, these sites inevitably come crashing down.

We knew the risks of programmatic, but moved forward with it knowing that we had all the right pieces in place to make programmatic work:

1. Depth of Content: provide high quality, unique and valuable content to users
2. Content accuracy: avoid hallucinations and ensure that content and data is accurate and reliable
3. High quality UX: we engaged a top end designer, ensured optimal page performance and built pages to solve real user needs
4. Evergreen content: Do the pages have a long shelf life or will they become obsolete?
5. Scalable query pattern: programmatic works best for queries that users are actually searching for and that match a scalable pattern (i.e. best X in Y).

‍

Building The Programmatic Condo Site

In short, the scalable query pattern that we were building for was Condos for Sale in {X} – where "X" is every city, neighborhood, county an Zip code in the United States. Moreover, we knew we had the opportunity to build specific landing pages for cities, neighborhoods, condo buildings, listings, and communities, which became our topical hubs. Lastly, we focused on scaling out to the long-tail for queries like "Pet friendly condos for sale in West Loop Chicago under $500,000" to provide unique content experience beyond simply a list of search results.

The process was long and involved, but here's how we approached it in a nutshell:

1. Validated our opportunities through robust keyword research
2. Performed in depth competitor research to identify opportunities and gaps
3. Created programmatic SEO page templates
4. Leveraged multiple data sets to create unique and insightful content
5. Developed an intricate and scalable internal linking framework
6. Implemented structured data at scale
7. Ensured strong technical SEO foundations and performance scores
8. Published content slowly and intentionally
9. Monitored crawl rates and indexing
10. Scaled pages at a pace we knew Google could keep up with
11. Ran A/B tests and shipped winning results site wide

‍

The Results

In under 18 months, we were able to achieve the following:

• Launched in 12 key markets (and counting)
• Scaled the site 323,000 indexed pages
• 1M+ search impressions
• 20,000 ranked keywords

‍

As with most Programmatic sites, growth didn't come immediately and it certainly wasn't linear. But once things started to take off we got real momentum and poured gasoline on the fire. While my initial 18 month contract with this client has come to an end, it's exciting to continue to watch their growth from the sidelines.