Case Study:
CheckHome
Background
CheckHome was founded in 2010 when Nic Patterson spotted a gap in the building inspection market. Having witnessed the impact of the leaky home era, Nic wanted to create a service that would give buyers peace of mind by ensuring their biggest investment was a sound one.
Fast forward more than 13 years later, CheckHome’s expert team of inspectors offers top-tier building inspection services across New Zealand. With over 70 years of combined experience and more than 9,000 inspections completed, CheckHome is a trusted name in the industry across New Zealand.
CheckHome came to us because they were keen to scale the growth of their site further by capturing new, high-quality traffic from Kiwis who were not already familiar with their brand.
Strategy
Before they came to us, CheckHome had a great site established already. However, they were failing to rank highly due to a number of technical factors as well as a lack of content optimisation that made it hard to rank for specific high-volume terms.
We also noted that with CheckHome offering their services across the country, some of their locations naturally performed better in organic search results than others. This made it a key focus in our strategy to not only improve the site’s performance as a whole but to enhance the visibility of specific regions.
Keyword Placement:
CheckHome already had a lot of potential in highly ranked blogs, some of which were even sitting in Featured Snippets. However, this was only capturing the top-of-funnel users. We wanted to enhance their middle and bottom-of-funnel traffic to help improve their site conversion rate. In order to do this, we mapped out what the top searched-for terms were in relation to each of their services, and then prioritised these within their respective pages.
Local SEO
CheckHome offers its services across the country in a range of different regions through a franchise model. We wanted to take advantage of enhancing the local SEO for these regions by utilising already established franchise location pages. We tackled this in three stages:
- Local Keyword Optimisation on site
Key location term placement was one of our primary focuses – presenting those throughout the page, within headers, metadata and body content. - Google Business Profile Optimisation
Optimising each franchise’s Google Business Profile to have as much information as possible about their services further improved visibility of these listings on Google. - Location Citations
Local citations are mentions of your business name and contact details listed in local directories. We created these across a number of directories to boost CheckHome’s local visibility. We ensured that all of the information we provided was the same across all directories so there is no confusion for search engines.
Technical Tidy-up
There were a number of technical issues holding back CheckHome’s site ranking potential. Some of our main recommendations to improve their site efficiency included:
- Site Speed: has significant impacts on site performance, as a one second delay in page load time can cause an 11% decline in page views, 16% decline in customer satisfaction and a7% decline in conversions. This is often a high priority in our technical tidy ups.
- Header Hierarchy: There was a lot off unnecessary content marked up, which can work to ‘confuse’ a search engine’s the key information on a page is. This can negatively affect rankings as the page may not rank for the terms that are most relevant.
- Missing Canonicals: A canonical URL is the one that Google chooses to serve in the results page when there are duplicate content pages on a website. This was a significant issue for CheckHome, especially as this site has franchise pages and the potential for duplicate content issues. We ensured that there was a global rule of adding self-referencing canonical URLs to avoid this issue so that SERP rankings were not
Results:
Thanks to our strategic SEO tidy-ups, CheckHome saw significant improvements in organic traffic and user engagement metrics. Sitewide, they saw a 15% increase in average monthly impressions and a 40% increase in average monthly clicks. This increased visiblity and traffic helped lead to an 11.5% increase in Inspection Bookings due to a more relevant, higher intent audience landing on the site.
From The Client
We’ve been working with Digitella for our digital marketing needs, and their service has been exceptional.
From managing our Google Ads and Meta Ads campaigns to providing insightful recommendations on improving our SEO, the team has consistently delivered great results.
The whole team have been fantastic—always responsive, proactive, and ready to help with any questions or adjustments we need.
