Challenge
The client: a real estate agency in Bali that works with three audiences at once: villa owners (management), guests (rentals), and buyers (sales). The client's goal is ambitious: double organic traffic and reach the top for commercial queries in all three segments.
What made it hard
- Fierce competition. Bali real estate is popular with foreigners, and agencies, aggregators, and large portals all fight for these queries.
- Most of the site outside the index. At the start, 3.17K pages were indexed, while 9.29K remained unindexed. In other words, Google was ignoring more than two thirds of the site.
- The sitemap had not worked for more than a year and a half. Google reported "Couldn't fetch," meaning it could not even read the sitemap. New listings and pages were found slowly or not at all.
- Mostly branded traffic. The site was found by people who already knew the agency, while new clients went to competitors.
- Moderate domain authority. A DR of 28 means competitive queries have to be won on quality and technical cleanliness.
Three different audiences with different intent complicate the structure: a page for a villa buyer and one for a tourist looking for a week-long rental have to be different.
What we did
We started work in August 2026 with an audit, because without a technical foundation any content would have stayed invisible.
Technical audit
- Our first priority was the sitemap and the reasons Google could not read it.
- We went through the mass of unindexed pages: which ones are valuable and which are technical duplicates or empty pages.
- We reviewed the site structure from the perspective of the three segments so each audience has its own clear path.
SEO for commercial queries
We split the keyword set into three segments: owners, guests, buyers. For each, we identified the key commercial queries and the pages that should rank for them.
GEO
Foreigners increasingly ask AI assistants where to rent or buy a villa in Bali. So we are preparing key pages for AI systems to use in their answers: clear facts about services, areas, and the rental and purchase process.
Measurement
We track average position, clicks, and CTR in Google Search Console every month and compare them with the history for the previous year.
Results
Google Search Console data for the year (clicks per month): from 1,646 in October 2025 to 3,553 in August 2026, when we started.
The first full month of our work, September 2026, delivered:
- 3,791 clicks, the best month of the year (+7% vs August);
- an average position of 11.4 instead of 15.3 in August, the best of the year;
- in early October the average position holds at 10.8.
The top priority at the start was removing technical blockers: a sitemap Google had been unable to read for over a year and a half, and thousands of pages outside the index. The project is ongoing, and the goal of doubling organic traffic remains in progress.
What makes this project special
Bali real estate is a competitive international market with three different audiences in one business: villa owners, guests and buyers. Much of the potential was hidden in technical problems, so the very first full month already set a clicks record and the best position of the year.
We started in August 2026. In September clicks grew to 3,791 and the average position improved from 15.3 to 11.4. Source: Google Search Console, October 2025 - September 2026
Published: · Updated: