How this business grew their organic traffic by 57% and increased conversion rates by 339%
The company at the heart of this case study is a US real estate business that operates over 1,100 sites across 38 states.
It is the fourth-largest self-storage property manager in the US and became part of another business that brought its combined store count to 3,500 locations across 43 states.
Clearly, the company has had ambitious goals since its origins in 1982. And as it’s grown, it’s relied more and more on its website to support those ambitions. Yet, while its website receives 1.1 million monthly sessions, only 18% of those were from organic search. With such high traffic volumes and an annual revenue of $1bn, even incremental changes to organic traffic could significantly impact its revenue. So, the company needed to develop a strategy that would improve its conversion rates without negatively affecting its almost 200,000 monthly organic visitors.
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customer success story
The challenge
Before working with SearchPilot, the web development and design teams focused on user experience (UX), user interface (UI), and conversion rates (CRO).
All had the potential to boost website revenue, and the SEO team could see how valuable this activity was. But they also knew that maintaining high monthly organic traffic was vital to underpinning any success.
While the UX, UI, and CRO changes may have improved the site or conversion rates, they may also have narrowed the pool of website visitors (the people they need to convert). But without any data, the SEO team was limited in its ability to challenge any potentially damaging changes.
The company needed to align its teams and create shared, cohesive goals for its website, backed by accurate data, enhanced visibility, and powerful testing capabilities. That’s where SearchPilot’s full-funnel testing came in.
The solution
The company implemented our full-funnel testing solution. This works by splitting pages into control and variant groups. We start by gathering SEO test data. Once we have enough, we then transition to a CRO test. While this CRO test is running, SearchPilot layers the conversion rate impact on top of the already-measured SEO impact. Using this functionality, the company could ensure the site saw a net positive change in both conversions and organic traffic.
Thanks to SearchPilot’s meta-CMS functionality, this real estate business was able to capitalize on winning changes quickly. From 2019-2022, the SEO team conducted 36 experiments, with six resulting in net positive outcomes. This meant they avoided deploying several negative changes that would have impacted website performance.
By implementing SearchPilot’s full-funnel testing approach, SEO and CRO teams are better aligned, improving efficiency for the engineering team’s deployment schedule. The company saw an 80% reduction in development and deployment time for its engineering team because they only had to focus on proven, winning changes for both SEO and CRO.
The results
When all teams began operating at full speed in the same direction, the company started achieving more impactful results faster.
This real estate business needed more than a high-performing website to support its ambitious goals. It needed to align its website experts around a shared goal: revenue. With a shared tool and unified view of all website data, the team could work together to prioritize impactful website changes. They no longer needed to choose between reach and conversions — instead, they could elevate the company’s website to reach its full revenue-generating potential.
With better-aligned goals, the company’s design, UX and SEO teams could work together to prioritize revenue. Full-funnel testing provided the teams with enhanced visibility, enabling them to grow their organic traffic without putting conversions on the back burner.
