Team Jodi is a real estate brokerage firm run by Jodi Bakst. The firm is based in Chapel Hill, NC, and serves the surrounding communities. It focuses on Chapel Hill realty and Durham homes.
Challenge
Jodi has been using online marketing for years, but until recently it was not a central part of her business. When the real estate market was strong, she had a business website and was running paid campaigns on Google, but never had time to make these channels efficient, cost-effective parts of her business. When the market turned downward in late 2008, Jodi realized that she would finally have time to figure out how to do online marketing the right way.
"I decided that from the $1,500 to $2,000 I was spending a month on pay-per-click, I really needed to dig into that and see if it was worth it. I also knew that business was slowing down and people were going to sit at their computers and click away, and I didn't want to pay for it. It was time to start focusing on organic placement."
Jodi's offline marketing strategy had long included a focus on providing valuable content to her customers, including market-data reports. With this background, she gravitated towards HubSpot's inbound marketing system -- software that helps business owners use content, search engine optimization and social media to get found by customers instead of using intrusive tactics to find customers.
Solution
Jodi signed up for HubSpot in September 2008 and, with the help of
HubSpot partner PageTender, LLC, began doing the work she needed to do in order to replace her pay-per-click campaigns with organic search traffic.
Her first step was to focus on keywords. Using HubSpot's keyword analysis tool, she determined which keywords she should try to rank for -- the ones that gave her the right balance of traffic, relevance and difficulty. She also began focusing on content creation, including blogging.
Over the last five months, a series of other HubSpot tools have become a part of her daily routine. She uses Website Grader to keep track of her site's overall search engine optimization as she builds links for off-page seo and tweaks, headings keywords and meta-data for on-page SEO improvements.
HubSpot's competitor analysis tool is also very valuable to Jodi. She uses it to check which keywords her competition is ranking for, then to figure out how to rank for those keywords herself. She uses HubSpot's link analysis tool to find out who is talking about her business, and she uses HubSpot's marketing analytics package to determine which of her content and marketing campaigns are most successful.
Jodi also continues to pay close attention to HubSpot's keyword analysis tool. She keeps track of several high-traffic keywords that bring in significant qualified traffic. She says the tool's graphs of specific keyword rank over time are particularlly rewarding.
Results
Jodi's results have been remarkable since she signed up for HubSpot. She says that while the HubSpot methodology requires a significant amount of hard work -- analyzing your keywords regularly, optimizing your site and constantly creating great content -- it's work that's paying off for her.
Specifically, since she started with HubSpot:
- Monthly website traffic has increased over 246%
- Google search traffic has grown over 300%
- She has accumulated over 2,184 inbound links from over 230 domains
- She has moved to the first page of Google search results for keywords like:
- "homes chapel hill"
- "homes realtors"
- "durham realtors"
- "chapel hill realty"
- "durham real estate"
- "durham homes"
"Could I have achieved the results I've achieved without HubSpot?" she asks. "I think the answer is yes. Would I have ever done it? I doubt it. I doubt it ... I don't think I would have been able to put it together the way HubSpot has put it together."
Website Visitors (Sept. 2008 - Feb. 2009)
Organic Google Search Referrals (Sept 2008 - Feb. 2009)
