When Royal Oaks Homes came to us earlier this year with concerns about their SEO ranking, we jumped at the opportunity to talk about mobile-first design. In 2015, mobile friendliness became a major SEO play. Google announced that it would be crawling the mobile version of your website to evaluate user experience. If your website wasn't fast and easy to use on a mobile device, Google may have dropped you in the rankings. We asked Matt Riley, Royal Oaks' Director of Sales and Marketing, to help us design the perfect mobile experience for a homebuilder website. We considered conversion points, content treatment, copy length, button placement and size, and lots of other nuances related to home browsing on a smartphone before we came up with the ideal mobile design for the new Royal Oaks site.

Knowing that many sites without an SEO transition plan lose 60-70% of their search traffic after a redesign, we made sure that SEO was a major consideration of the project from start to finish.

Next, we brought in SEO to assess the technical limitations of their current site and create a transition plan to correct those issues on the new site. Knowing that many sites without an SEO transition plan lose 60-70% of their search traffic after a redesign, we made sure that SEO was a major consideration of the project from start to finish. Our transition plan included:

• Overseeing website design to prevent SEO issues
• Keyword research
• Optimizing title tags, meta descriptions, and H1 headers
• 301 redirects
• Internal linking strategy
• Defined content hierarchy
• Page structure optimization
• Local SEO
  • Keyword landing pages
  • Schema markup on home page, communities, and plans
• XML sitemap submission to major search engines post-launch

  The new website went live on a Thursday afternoon around 4:00. The next morning, we saw this:   On the left is where the site ranked for the term "home builders in Raleigh NC" before we launched the redesign. The right image shows the site moving up THREE positions less than 24 hours after the launch. This is a testament to how much Google likes when you eliminate technical issues and make your website more mobile-friendly. Our SEO team also installed Schema markup on the new Royal Oaks site. Schema is a type of structured data that websites can use to tell Google more information about what the website is for. Specifically, for local businesses Google uses this information to provide more details about a business in its search results. A recent local SEO update from Google confirmed that Google wants to see schema markup when it crawls your website. For home builders, Google is using this information to display a tap-to-call feature beneath your website link in search. Sure enough, Google picked up on our schema markup and has added this feature (along with a mobile-friendly tag!) to the Royal Oaks listing on mobile:   We're very excited for Royal Oaks and their immediate success post-launch. We can't wait to see how the site improves as Google continues to index our changes.   UPDATE: 9/8/2016 We're now two-weeks post-launch and are thrilled to report Royal Oaks has achieved a page 1 ranking for their top keyword, "home builders Raleigh NC" as well as a handful of other keywords!