How Technical SEO Grew Organic Traffic 32% for Forbes Global Properties

THE CHALLENGE:

Forbes Global Properties operates a large-scale real estate site with thousands of listing, location, and market pages — and years of technical debt were quietly capping its organic visibility. Internal linking failed to transfer equity to the pages that deserved to rank, so authority pooled in a handful of templates instead of flowing to high-value listing and market pages.

Compounding the problem, improper search filtering rules meant faceted and filtered URLs were being handled in ways that diluted crawl focus and fragmented indexing. The symptoms were plain in the data: flat organic traffic, stalled rankings, and a gap between the site’s authority and its actual search performance.

THE STRATEGY:

At this scale, page-by-page fixes don’t move the needle — template-level fixes do. Moving Traffic Media’s approach was to audit once, fix everywhere: identify the handful of structural decisions (internal linking logic, filter handling, template content and structure) whose correction would cascade across thousands of URLs at once.

The engagement was deliberately sequenced in two tracks. A full technical audit surfaced quick wins the development team could ship immediately alongside more advanced opportunities requiring deeper builds. A complimentary template audit ran in parallel, identifying content and structure opportunities at scale. Rather than handing off a PDF and hoping, MTM worked directly with the Forbes Global Properties development team to triage every recommendation by impact and effort — so the highest-leverage fixes shipped first.

DETAILS:

The technical audit covered the issues most likely to constrain a large real estate marketplace: internal linking architecture that determines how equity flows from high-authority pages to listing and market pages, and search-filter rules governing which faceted URLs get crawled, indexed, or consolidated. Remediating the filter logic refocused crawl activity on canonical, rank-worthy pages instead of near-duplicate filtered variants.

The template audit treated the site the way search engines experience it — as a small number of templates rendered thousands of times. MTM identified content and structure improvements at the template level, so each fix propagated across every page built on it.

Implementation ran as a working partnership with the client’s development team: recommendations triaged together, sequenced into sprints, and verified after release. That collaboration is why fixes actually shipped — and why results began compounding within the first few months.

THE RESULTS:

Within five months of MTM’s engagement, organic traffic to Forbes Global Properties grew 32% versus the pre-engagement average, while organic traffic value grew 22% over the same period. The number of keywords ranking in Google’s top 10 improved 30%, confirming the internal linking and template fixes were passing equity to pages that could now compete.

The most telling number is the 38% growth in non-brand organic traffic. Brand searches find you regardless; non-brand growth means Forbes Global Properties is now being discovered by buyers searching for properties and markets — net-new demand the site’s technical debt had been leaving on the table. Because the gains come from structural fixes rather than a campaign, they compound: every new listing and market page now inherits a foundation built to rank.