Where they started
A coastal agency with real inventory and a genuinely strong DR for its size, but a site that competed against itself in every market it served. “Homes for sale in [area]” demand was spread across a dozen overlapping pages per town: an old landing page, a blog post, a filtered listing view, a “communities” entry, each half-answering the same query and none of them winning. The clearest tell was one flagship beach town where six internal URLs all ranked between positions 18 and 40 for the exact same term, trading places week to week and never breaking the first page. Underneath that, the highest-value searches (waterfront, gated, acreage) had no home at all; they were scattered into whichever generic page happened to mention the word.
What we did
- Collapsed each area into a single hub and 301’d the rest into it. For every market we picked one canonical “homes for sale in [area]” page, moved the useful content into it, and redirected the also-rans, so the town’s link equity and relevance pooled on one URL instead of splitting six ways.
- Cleaned up the cannibalization market by market. We mapped which pages competed for which query, then de-optimized or merged the losers so Google had one obvious answer per intent. Rankings that had bounced around page 2 for a year consolidated onto the hub within weeks.
- Built dedicated luxury-intent pages for the modifiers that carry the money. Waterfront, gated, and acreage each got their own page per relevant town. Low search volume, but the exact language a seven-figure buyer types.
- Added 22 links to the hubs and the strongest luxury pages. A regional lifestyle magazine and a coastal-living blog pointed at the flagship markets, nudging DR from 37 to 40 and pulling the whole area cluster up with it.
Traffic was choppy for the first two months (merging and redirecting pages temporarily drops rankings before it lifts them), then climbed cleanly once each hub settled as the single answer for its area. The head terms drove the visible growth; the quiet waterfront pages drove the revenue.