Friary Meadow

Optimising user experience to increase conversions from ALL channels (without increasing budget)

Of users visited Listings page

Increase in time on site YoY

Decrease in Bounce Rate YoY

 

“The team at Zest continue to outdo themselves, finding increasingly clever and creative ways to compete with our rivals. We’re thrilled with the results, and we can’t wait to see what they do next.”

— Stephen Ladyman, Founder of Friary Meadow

Objectives

Friary Meadow is a luxury retirement community nestled on the edge of the gorgeous Hampshire countryside. Only a stone’s throw from the historic village of Titchfield, it offers residents the choice of two and three-bedroom properties, each with access to flexible assisted living services for a worry-free retirement.

Zest has been working with Friary Meadow for over 5 years (from pre-launch to present), helping them promote their retirement bungalows, houses, and apartments. 

Naturally, as a property seller, they compete with several major property developers and directories, all jostling for room on the front page of Google. These larger businesses tend to have deeper pockets when it comes to marketing spend, and during COVID, in particular, they simply increased their budgets to generate results. 

Friary Meadow didn’t have that option. Instead, they had to find a smarter way to scale.

That gave us our objective: to increase the conversion rate for paid and organic users without increasing the budget. In other words, we had to make the most of what we had to convert more visitors. 

Strategy

Central to our strategy was understanding our audience. If we were going to convince more of Friary Meadow’s prospects to enquire, we first had to know what made them tick.

This part was easy, as we’d already put Friary Meadow’s visitors under the microscope with our guided Growth Mapper sessions. We knew that the vast majority were local, with a smaller percentage searching from further afield (likely looking to move closer to family in the area). 

And we also understood that the person doing the searching wasn’t always the potential resident, but instead an adult child, family member, or friend researching on their behalf. 

Added to this, we used heat-mapping software to carry out an in-depth analysis of Friary Meadows’ website content and user experience (UX). In doing so, we identified that users had to root around for the information they required, often clicking on things that weren’t clickable in a vain attempt to dig deeper. 

Armed with this knowledge, we knew we had to improve the structure, flow, and content of the property pages to meet audience expectations and improve conversions. 

Here’s how we did it.

Action

The Friary Meadows website initially used category pages for each property type (bungalow/apartment/house). This provided top-level, general information yet failed to dive deeper into the individual property specifications and amenities. 

To address this, we optimised the website to include listings for each available property. The idea was to improve engagement and allow users to view detailed information without needing to visit Friary Meadow in person. 

It also brought the website more in-line with Friary Meadows’ competitors, offering the kind of photographs, floorplans, and descriptions found on traditional property directories — ultimately making comparisons easier. 

And, as an added bonus, we could now use these targeted pages to improve rankings for terms such as “retirement flat” or “retirement bungalow.”

Putting these pages live was a collaborative effort between Zest and the Friary Meadows’ in-house team. We built the page templates, their team populated them with images and information, we optimised them further, and they put them live. Seamless. 

Results

Our initial target was to increase the conversion rate for paid and organic users by 29.5%. At the end of the period in question, we almost doubled that, increasing paid and organic enquiries by 57%. 

We also saw some promising numbers as a result of our optimisations:

  • 19.84% of all users visited the listings page;

  • Time on site increased by 8.7% year-on-year;

  • And bounce rate decreased by 16% year-on-year.


Best of all, because the conversion rate from PPC shot up (by 29.4% year-on-year), the cost per acquisition (CPA - the total cost of acquiring a new customer via a specific channel or campaign) went down by 10.23% year-on-year!

Growth team

  • Ollie H

    Head of Client Services

  • Alex C

    Senior SEO Specialist

  • Nikola V

    SEO Specialist