Cost per conversion
£30 on paid search
Project case study
Hilda Estates / 2026
Built the technical SEO framework across a nine-site property portfolio to improve discoverability, local relevance, and search-readiness.
Hilda Estates needed more than websites that simply existed online. The commercial priority was better visibility, stronger lead generation, and a search-ready structure across multiple property sites serving different markets, stay types, and local intent.
9 live sites
Websites
9 portfolio sites
Approach
Scalable SEO framework
Problem
Visibility mattered more than simply being live
The client’s problem was not just getting property websites online. The bigger priority was improving discoverability and lead generation, especially around lettings demand, short-stay demand, local SEO performance, Google Maps visibility, and the broader search foundations needed to support growth.
Across the portfolio, the commercial offers were already strong, but those strengths only become commercially useful when search engines can crawl, index, understand, and rank the right pages effectively.
- Urgent need for stronger organic visibility
- Local SEO and Google visibility were business priorities
- Search foundations needed to support lead generation, not just presentation
Portfolio context
Different properties needed different search intent
This was not a one-size-fits-all SEO job. The portfolio included different products in different markets, such as short-stay apartments in Maida Vale, central Newcastle apartments, and premium Newcastle studio living aimed at students, professionals, and corporate residents.
That meant each website needed its own search-intent alignment around geography, property type, and stay purpose, while still fitting into a repeatable technical framework across the wider estate.
- One Greville: Maida Vale, London short-stay apartment intent
- Tyne Bridge Studios: Newcastle studio and city-centre living intent
- Newcastle Central Living: multi-address city-centre apartment intent
SEO infrastructure
Building the search foundation across the portfolio
My role was to build the SEO infrastructure layer across the portfolio: improving crawlability, clarifying sitemap coverage, reviewing indexation signals, and making the sites easier for search engines to interpret at page and site level.
The work sat around technical SEO, site structure, metadata strategy, internal linking, canonical hygiene, and search-readiness rather than simply adding copy or performing isolated content tasks.
- Diagnosed where organic visibility was being lost
- Improved sitemap and crawl/indexation structure
- Aligned page targeting to high-intent property and location searches
Technical work
Improving crawl efficiency and indexability
The technical focus was on the areas that most directly affect discoverability and crawl efficiency across a growing estate of property websites. That included sitemap discipline, robots alignment, canonical consistency, metadata structure, and stronger internal linking into commercially important pages.
On a portfolio like this, those details matter because property websites can easily drift into duplicate templates, weak landing pages, or orphaned URLs if no technical structure is enforced.
- Robots and sitemap alignment
- Canonical setup to reduce duplicate-location and duplicate-template risk
- Metadata and heading structure tied to property type and geography
- Internal linking that strengthened key landing pages
- Readiness for schema and local relevance signals where appropriate
Outcome
Turning brochure sites into a scalable search model
The outcome was a more repeatable search framework that supported both immediate commercial priorities and future portfolio expansion. Instead of relying only on brand traffic or paid acquisition, the sites were better positioned to compete around accommodation type, neighbourhood, city, and stay-duration intent.
Just as importantly, the work helped bridge the gap between property marketing goals and technical implementation by turning commercial priorities into crawlable, indexable, and more scalable web structure.
The benefit showed up on the paid side as well. The campaigns themselves were run by a separate team, but the technical work changed the quality of what those ads landed on: faster pages, clearer structure, and landing pages aligned to the intent behind the query rather than pointing spend at a generic template. Landing page experience is one of the inputs Google uses to set Quality Score, which affects what an advertiser actually pays per click, and better intent alignment lifts the conversion rate on the traffic that does arrive.
Cost per conversion across the paid activity settled at around £30. For context, real estate search advertising averaged $102.51 per lead in LocaliQ’s 2026 benchmark study of US campaigns running from April 2025 to March 2026, so £30 sits at the efficient end of the category even allowing for differences in market and currency.
- Built a repeatable SEO framework for a nine-site portfolio
- Prioritised high-urgency commercial assets first
- Reduced technical barriers to organic growth
- Created a model that could scale across 10+ sites without reinventing the setup
- Improved landing page experience, which supports Quality Score and lowers paid cost per click
- Paid campaigns were run by a separate team; the SEO work improved what they landed on
Need similar work on your product or site?
I work across technical consulting, UX structure, SEO-conscious delivery, and frontend implementation for products that need to feel credible from the first interaction.