How We Increased NAHB’s YoY Top Keywords by 103%

The National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) represents the nation’s largest network of home builders who build communities, create jobs, and strengthen our economy. The NAHB Federation is recognized as a highly trusted source of information, the vanguard in advocating for pro-housing policy, and an essential resource for the residential home-building industry and its members.

NAHB’s flagship website, nahb.org, has experienced significant growth in organic traffic since it was redesigned in 2020. The organization’s new strategic goals of raising its visibility and strengthening its brand, as well as Google’s changes to its search algorithm in 2024, led NAHB to focus on search engine optimization (SEO), to achieve these goals and reach new audiences. NAHB engaged Velir to assist them with these efforts.

Understanding NAHB and Its Needs

Our NAHB search engine optimization (SEO) engagement began with our standard goals meeting to understand the client’s business, its organizational goals, and the unique resources that it has.

NAHB mentioned that it needed help aligning with Google’s latest best practices, as Google’s search algorithm is constantly tweaked. Some of its website pages were missing the required metadata or contained minimal content to be useful for search results. Given its extremely talented internal communications team, we identified opportunities to improve search rankings while enabling its team with standard operating procedures (SOPs) that would allow them to understand and adopt new SEO best practices.

To best support the team and meet its goals, we crafted a strategy to provide the right balance of education and action to help strengthen its SEO capabilities.

Crafting an Effective Custom SEO Strategy

To maximize NAHB’s budget, we prioritized work into three phases: discovery and research, training, and ongoing support. This allowed us to review results and prove our strategy worked before we embarked on any next steps with NAHB.

Discovery and Research

We analyzed NAHB’s website to understand its strengths and shortcomings. This research informed our SOPs and best practices training to help NAHB in the specific areas where it needed support. Rather than providing several readout documents — which may seem helpful but aren’t sustainable or actionable — we verbally shared our analysis so that we didn’t overwhelm NAHB’s team with irrelevant information. After our initial SEO goals meeting, we executed the following activities:

• SEO Technical Assessment: We reviewed NAHB’s website from a search engine’s perspective and outlined areas to improve organic performance and visibility in search. This allowed us to highlight the technical best practices while prioritizing remediations to drive a bigger impact.
• Keyword Research: Our goal for keyword research was to understand NAHB’s topics from a user’s perspective. What are users searching for, and what is NAHB currently known for in search engines? Understanding these pieces allowed us to target better keywords and drive more quality traffic to the site.
• Competitive Analysis: A competitive analysis helped us understand what’s working in this industry’s space and find similar organizations already succeeding with search visibility. This allowed us to identify new trends, content types, and pages that NAHB should create to gain additional organic traffic.
• SEO Strategy: We combined our research into a customized SEO strategy with recommendations for NAHB to improve organic performance. Our final strategy had two parts: optimizing existing content and integrating our keyword research into new content so NAHB could better reach its audiences.

SEO Training and SOPs

Our research revealed that NAHB’s team produced a lot of content, but that content was often too short, didn’t incorporate keywords, and wasn’t structured properly for SEO. The team was doing a great job keeping content fresh but needed help understanding SEO best practices for web content. To best serve the NAHB team, we created a training curriculum to help its team write more SEO-focused content.

We completed three training sessions, each on a topic that had come up during our discovery phase:

1. How to Use Keyword Research: Although our keyword research is actionable, the team wanted to better understand the best practices for SEO. This training session focused on topics such as how to use frequently asked questions (FAQs) to build more insightful pages tailored to answering audience questions.
2. SEO Content Best Practices: How people create content to appear in search results has changed drastically over the last several years with updates to search algorithms. Although Google used to reward extensive long-form content, it’s now actively searching for “helpful content.” During this training, we provided best practices for creating well-structured and keyword-rich content so readers can quickly find answers to their questions.
3. Understanding Metadata Best Practices: During our technical assessment, we found that NAHB’s metadata didn’t always follow best practices, so we dedicated one of our training sessions to reviewing the exact formula we use to write compelling keyword-rich metadata.

Ongoing SEO Retainer

Although NAHB utilized all our SOPs and applied our training toward any new content creation, it still needed support in optimizing older content. Through an ongoing SEO retainer, we helped NAHB align existing high-priority content with SEO best practices so they could focus on creating new SEO-friendly content to rank in search results.

Each month, we provided a straightforward SEO report and an optimization document where we drafted the new metadata and headers that they would then update to align with their relevant keywords.

Improving Year-over-Year (YoY) Organic Search Results

Working with NAHB’s internal communications team who prioritized aligning content with best practices, we’ve made the website more technically sound while updating and optimizing the site’s older content.

Since partnering with Velir, NAHB has seen amazing traffic results for its website, including:

• 103% YoY increase in keywords ranking in position 1–3
• 49% YoY increase in new users from search engines
• 27.4% YoY increase in total users from search engines
• 17.4% YoY increase in organic keywords

Looking to significantly improve your brand’s visibility by boosting your organic search rankings? Reach out. Our experts are excited to discuss how we can craft a successful SEO strategy for your organization.