Century 21
A 8.900% increase in organic traffic for Belgium's largest real estate franchise network.
Client
Century 21 Belgium
Industry
Real Estate
Services
Technical SEO, Programmatic SEO
The opportunity
Thousands of keywords, one untapped market
Century 21 Belgium, a major real estate franchise network, commissioned a complete website rebuild. Rather than treating SEO as an afterthought, we were engaged from the very beginning, first conducting an extensive audit of the legacy site, then working directly with the web agency through wireframes and development to ensure SEO requirements were built into the foundation.
The real estate sector is characterised by high search volumes across thousands of keyword combinations. Users search for specific patterns: property type + for sale/for rent + municipality. With dozens of property types and hundreds of municipalities across Belgium, the potential keyword universe was enormous, but the legacy site was capturing only a fraction of this demand.
Audit findings
Critical gaps hiding in plain sight
A comprehensive technical SEO audit covering technical aspects, on-page optimisation factors, and domain & page authority analysis revealed critical gaps between the site’s structure and the keyword opportunity.
- Navigation only linked to major municipalities. Hundreds of smaller locations had no crawlable entry points
- No search engine friendly URL structure for property type + transaction + location combinations
- Link equity was not flowing efficiently to high-value SEO pages
- Some filter combinations (bedrooms, surface area) created crawl budget waste
Our approach
SEO designed in from the start
Every shortcoming from the audit became a requirement for the new build, giving the web agency clear specifications based on data.
Programmatic SEO Architecture
We designed a single page template that automatically generated indexable pages for every combination of property type (apartment, house, commercial, etc.), transaction type (for sale, for rent), province, and municipality. The template dynamically generated optimised URLs, title tags, meta descriptions, and H1 headings for each combination. Internal linking was built directly into the template, automatically connecting related pages into topical clusters that reinforced semantic relevance across the entire site.
Technical SEO
Crawl budget was protected by noindexing low-value filter pages that would have created thousands of thin, near-duplicate URLs. We ensured all valuable combinations were reachable within three clicks of the homepage through structured navigation from homepage to provinces, provinces to municipalities, and municipalities to listings. A page-level redirect map preserved rankings from the legacy site, and both Dutch and French language versions were implemented for the Belgian market.
- Organic traffic increase
- +0.000%
- Monthly organic visitors
- 1K
- Top 10 positions
- 0.000