Pemberton Holmes is a family-owned real estate company founded in 1887, with over 250 agents across Vancouver Island and an estimated $1 billion in property sold each year. A site replatform caused a sharp drop in organic visibility, including the local and community searches that drive real estate discovery. I took over SEO strategy after the decline and built the relaunch myself, with the goal of recovering the lost traffic and growing past the old baseline.

I started with the custom React property search, which generates nearly 9,000 URLs from MLS data. I compared server HTML with fully rendered pages to see what search engines could actually access, and audited the full sitemap, which turned up duplicate and thin pages, soft 404s, crawl waste and broken structured data.

From there, I reworked the site architecture and URL strategy without unnecessary changes to thousands of existing URLs, and rebuilt the location pages around real search behaviour and the way the MLS data organizes communities. Rendering, metadata, structured data and indexation fixes were prioritized by impact, and I developed the new site myself.

Since the 2025 relaunch, new organic users are 49% above the pre-decline baseline and up 153% from the post-replatform low, while average search position has improved from 18.2 to 7.4. The recovery has turned into an ongoing organic growth program, with continued technical SEO and location work across the markets Pemberton Holmes serves.