Internet Marketing Case Study - November 2013: Tonto Verde Golf Community

Summary:

• Tonto Verde has been a client of August Ash since June of 2012.  From the beginning our partnership has focused on improving the overall amount of traffic and leads for visitors seeking further information about golf course community living, in particular those interested in purchasing property within 0-3 years.
• In over a year’s time, we’ve pursued a diverse range of opportunities in search engine optimization (SEO), paid advertising, landing page optimization and overall website improvements.  Our combined efforts have resulted in an effective, long-term strategy, and have enabled us to achieve high volumes of relevant traffic at a low cost. We’ve also maintained a high degree of visibility, allowing our strategy to remain flexible and evolve when new opportunities arise.

Background:

Tonto Verde (www.tontoverde.org) is a golf community in Arizona, located northeast of Scottsdale.  Before meeting with August Ash, members of Tonto Verde’s marketing team designed a program for those interested in living in a golf course community the opportunity to experience life in Tonto Verde firsthand.  They partnered with our experienced digital marketing team to increase awareness for the new program online.

Challenge:

The biggest challenge we faced early on was identifying those who were interested and financially capable of making big purchase decisions, as opposed to those who may be simply browsing without any intent of purchasing.  Real estate, retirement, and golf tend to be highly sought after topics online, which is why having a clear understanding of the visitors’ intent was important moving forward.

Solution:

We chose to focus the majority of our efforts on improving search engine traffic, both organic and paid, because we knew with search we would have the most control and understanding in terms of what visitors were interested in.  In addition, we also introduced carefully researched display campaigns in the form of retargeting and site-targeted advertising.

Results:

Organic Search:

Tonto Verde tends to have frequent fluctuations in monthly organic traffic volumes due to seasonality; nonetheless we have achieved significant improvements in terms of overall search engine rankings.

Paid Search:

We’ve worked extensively to lower the average cost-per-click, and to maximize the amount of traffic received for the desired monthly budget.  This has been accomplished through consistent keyword and bid optimization, quality score improvement and landing page adjustments.