Case Study
How Conner Homes Turned Local Search Into a Growth Engine
How a 60-year Washington home builder went from brand-name traffic to capturing search demand across its communities.
Meet Bill Boucher
Meet Bill Boucher, Marketing Director at Conner Homes. Conner has been building homes across Washington for more than 60 years, one of the most established regional builders in the state. The reputation was never the question. The question was whether the people searching for new homes in each community could actually find them.
Overview
From Outdated Website to Digital Authority
Conner Homes did not have a visibility problem with its own name. People who already knew the brand found the site without trouble. The gap was everything happening one layer down: the buyers searching for new homes in Kent, in Bellevue, in Puyallup, in Renton, the people who did not yet know Conner but were actively looking for exactly what Conner builds.
That demand was real, it was measurable, and it was going almost entirely to competitors. A 60-year builder was competing on brand recognition in a market where most of the searches never mention a brand at all.
When we started, the conversation was not about a sweeping campaign. It was about one honest question: where is the search demand, and why are we not capturing it? From there the strategy built itself, an audit first, then a plan Bill and his team could see and approve before a single page went into production.
Challenge
Starting Point
Conner had the track record, the communities, and the inventory. What it did not have was a site structured to intercept the way people actually search for new homes. Buyers do not search for a builder by name. They search by place: new homes in Snohomish, new construction Edmonds, communities in Duvall. Without pages built to answer those searches, the demand flowed past Conner to whoever had done the work.
The opportunity was that the demand was already there. This was not about creating interest. It was about capturing interest that existed every day and was going uncaptured.
- Traffic concentrated on brand-name searches, not community demand
- No pages built to capture city and neighborhood search intent
- Local buyers finding competitors first across key Washington markets
- Established reputation not translating into organic discovery
- A full portfolio of communities with no dedicated search footprint
Strategy
A Structured Roadmap
We did not start with a page count. We started with an audit, because the right strategy comes from the data, not from assumptions. Once we could see exactly where the demand lived and where Conner was invisible, the plan wrote itself: build the pages that answer the searches buyers are already making, one approved community at a time.
Bill reviewed the audit and the city-page strategy before anything went into build. Nothing shipped that the team had not seen and signed off on.
Full SEO Audit
We started by mapping the real search demand across Conner's Washington markets and pinpointing where the site was failing to capture it. The audit review is what kicked the whole strategy off, and it is where the direction became clear.
Approved City-Page Strategy
From the audit we built a community-page plan targeting the places buyers actually search: Kent, Snohomish, Bellevue, Seattle, Puyallup, Black Diamond, Renton, Edmonds, Monroe, and Duvall. Ten community pages, each built to answer local search intent rather than swap a city name into a template.
New-Homes Hub
Alongside the ten community pages we planned a new-homes hub, a central page to organize the communities and give buyers and search engines a clear structure to move through. Eleven new SEO-targeted pages in total.
Ongoing Build
All eleven pages are approved and in production. As they go live, the same approach continues: measure, refine, and expand the footprint into the communities where demand justifies it.
Results
Quantitative Impact
Even before the full city-page set is live, the direction was set at the audit review, which left the client impressed enough to greenlight the strategy (Bill Boucher, Marketing Director). What the numbers show since is a site that started capturing demand it had been leaving on the table. Traffic nearly quadrupled over the quarter, and the growth is broad, not a single spike.
Organic Search Performance (GA4)
+266%
Website Sessions
Monthly sessions grew from 6,400 to 23,400
+296%
Users
Monthly users grew from 4,600 to 18,400
11
New SEO Pages
Approved and in build across Washington communities
Keyword Growth (SE Ranking)
10
Community Pages
City pages targeting Washington markets with real local search demand
1
New-Homes Hub
Central hub organizing communities for buyers and search engines
10 Cities
Markets Targeted
Kent, Snohomish, Bellevue, Seattle, Puyallup, Black Diamond, Renton, Edmonds, Monroe, and Duvall
Looking Forward
What Comes Next
The foundation is set. As the eleven pages go live, the work is to keep capturing demand and keep expanding the footprint into the communities where the search volume justifies a dedicated page. A 60-year builder with a reputation this strong should be the first name buyers find in every market it serves, not just the one they already knew to look for.
The plan is approved, the pages are in build, and the traffic is already moving in the right direction.
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