Website
In three months, nearly 6 visitors in 10 were arriving through Google (and fewer through ads)
An estate agency owner shows me her figures, a little resigned: almost all of her site's visitors came from advertising and paid listings. Every enquiry had a price, and the day she cut the budget, the tap shut off completely. Her question was simple: "Can people ever reach me without my paying every single time?" The answer is yes, but it takes patience, and that's exactly where most people give up.
Paying to be visible isn't a flaw in itself. The problem is depending on it a hundred per cent. A site that lives on ads alone is a rental: stop paying, and you're out on the street. Natural search is the opposite, it's ownership: slow to build, but once it's there, it keeps bringing you visitors even when you're not around. Here's how we tipped the balance in three months, and exactly where we had to hold our nerve.
The problem wasn't the site, it was what it said
Her site was attractive, but it only talked about her: her agency, her team, her services. Yet nobody types "brilliant estate agency" into Google. People type their real questions: what's a property worth in this neighbourhood, how does an exchange of contracts work, what documents are needed to sell. A site that answers none of these questions is invisible to whoever's asking them, however good looking it is. So we rebuilt the site around her clients' real questions, not around her org chart.
The other lever, more technical, was connecting up her listings so they displayed cleanly and updated themselves, with every property becoming a page Google can read and rank. A well presented catalogue of listings is dozens of extra doors into the site, with no daily effort on her part.
After three months, nearly six visitors in ten arrived through a Google search, for free, where almost everything went through ads at the start. The advertising budget became a choice, no longer a drip feed.
The failure: the first three weeks, nothing moved
I'm going to be honest about the hard moment. For nearly three weeks after going live, the figures didn't budge an inch. The agency owner panicked, and I understand why: she saw a project launched and no result. I nearly doubted it myself, alongside her. Natural search doesn't work like advertising. With ads, you pay, visitors arrive the same day, and they leave the day you stop. Search is the opposite: nothing happens, nothing happens, and then it climbs, and it stays. Those three weeks of silence are the entry price, and it's exactly there that most people cut everything, just before it takes off.
Writing for the questions, not for yourself
The heart of the project lay in one simple reversal. Instead of talking about the agency, we started answering the questions her clients were really asking, the ones they typed into Google at midnight before taking the plunge. What a given type of property is worth in a given area. What documents to gather to sell. How a viewing, an exchange of contracts, financing actually work in practice. Each of these questions became a page that answers clearly, with no jargon, the way the agent would have explained it over the phone. And each page is one more door into her site.
This work has a valuable side effect. When someone lands on your site because you've answered their question well, for free, they arrive already well disposed towards you. You're not an advert that interrupted them, you're the one who helped them before they even knew you. It's a completely different starting point for a relationship, and it shows the moment you pick up the phone.
What you can check on your own this week
Open your traffic statistics, and look at one line only: where do your visitors come from? If the share arriving through a Google search is small, and the rest comes from ads or listing portals, you're renting your own visibility. Then ask yourself this simple question: does my site answer the questions my clients actually type, or does it mostly talk about me? The answer, most of the time, is obvious, and it points to the first job to do.
Building visibility that belongs to you is the heart of my work on search. If your project involves a redesign, read how to redo your site without vanishing from Google first; and to see how it all unfolds once we start working together, there's my method, step by step.