Home Renovation Client

Homees

SERVICES / Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Social media marketing, Content creation

The Client

Homees (previously SGHomeNeeds) is a home services platform in Singapore, offering all kinds of home services from interior designers to handyman and contractors. They started off with a huge challenge - as a two-sided marketplace, it needs both customers and merchants in order for the platform to work. However, like any platform business, it's a chicken-and-egg issue - without one party, there is simply no incentive for the other to join, and hence the business model collapses.

Due to the sheer number of home services, Homees is considered a behemoth - both in terms of the number of broad home services categories (more than 20), and also the number of smaller categories (more than 200). From doors to flooring, kitchen to bathroom, SGHomeNeeds is truly a large SEO project for any agency, as they require a full-time team to handle the huge number of pages.

The Challange

Homees started off with a huge challenge - as a two-sided marketplace, it needs both customers and merchants in order for the platform to work. However, like any platform business, it's a chicken-and-egg issue - without one party, the other side will not join.

As a startup, they have limited funds but need traffic to their sites. Not only is their team, they lack both critical masses - both business listings and consumers.

Effectively, they are creating a two-sided digital platform based on almost no resources, expertise, manpower and cooperation. Everything has to be planned and executed strategically.

As Google pay-per-click (PPC) is out of the question due to its high costs, search engine optimisation (SEO) is considered the ideal candidate for it to get traffic long-term and at a very cost effective rate.

The marketing plan is planned to be:

The Battle

The first step is to mass create the number of categories. Due to the sheer number of categories (more than 20) and smaller ones (more than 200), the time invested to fully optimise these pages is heavy.

Next, consumers are always captured first via nice visuals. We overhaul the website's images with appealing and bright ones to make the readers feel good.

Then, we create strategically important articles which are useful for the home-owners, articles which shows the best designs and cost guides to help homeowners plan their budgets.

Lastly, we created stunning visuals on social media, especially on Instagram and Facebook, to attract more users to the platform.

The Result

Since its start in December 2017, Homees has consistently improved and reaching a daily traffic of up to 1000 in February 2020.

Note that these traffic are purely organic, and is traffic from Google that the platform did not have to pay for.

It is achieved because of the important technical details but more importantly, because its pages are highly-relevant to the search intent.

Detected by AHRefs, the company is drawing up to $24,500 worth of traffic per month, that is, traffic costs the platform has to pay should it decides to buy traffic from Google through PPC.