Customer Story
The Canadian Apartment Properties Real Estate Investment Trust (also known as CAPREIT) is Canada’s largest publicly-traded provider of quality rental housing. They own or have interests in over 67,000 residential apartment suites, townhomes and land lease community sites in Canada and the Netherlands.
As Canada’s biggest rental housing provider, CAPREIT’s primary business objective is to fill its apartment vacancies.
To achieve this, their marketing team is focused on driving quality leads to apartment listings – especially in cities with high vacancy rates.
CAPREIT is always looking for new and better ways to drive quality leads to their rental housing listing sites. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) was one of their key strategies – focused mainly on fundamental SEO tactics centred around improving rankings.
When it came to Schema Markup, they were “aware of the potential of Schema Markup driving rich results and employed Schema Markup but never really got deep into the semantics of it”, said David Goodman, Senior Digital Marketing Manager at CAPREIT. They were, however, open to experimenting with new tactics that could help them achieve their objective but needed the technical expertise and resources to employ a robust Schema Markup strategy.
Through a mutual referral, the CAPREIT team learnt about Schema App and wanted to explore the potential impact Schema App could have on their business outcomes, initially targeting their residential apartment suites and townhomes.
CAPREIT decided to leverage Schema App’s expertise and solution to execute its Schema Markup strategy. They were assigned a dedicated Customer Success Manager from Schema App, who managed CAPREIT’s Schema Markup from strategy to results.
The goal of this partnership was to improve CAPREIT’s visibility and click-through rate on CAPREIT’s rental housing listing pages to help increase more qualified traffic and reduce vacancies across their properties.
First, Schema App targeted Apartment and Product markup on all of CAPREIT’s apartment listing pages using the Schema App Highlighter. That way, the vacant apartment listings would show up as a Product Rich Result on the search engine results page (SERP).
However, CAPREIT’s site was offered in two languages – English and French. The English site presented no issues. But the French site had a different price format (example: 3423 $) that went against Schema.org and Google’s Structured Data guidelines.
To overcome this challenge, the Schema App team included conditional rules in the Highlighter to render the price in the proper format depending on the language of the page. If a page were in French, the Highlighter would apply specific filters to render the price correctly to follow Schema.org’s and Google’s Structured Data guidelines.
The rental market moves fast, and the vacancies in buildings are constantly changing. If a building no longer has any vacancies, the page should reflect the most current information on the SERP. However, CAPREIT has thousands of apartment listings and updating the Schema Markup manually on all the listings is almost impossible.
Thankfully, the dynamic element of the Schema App Highlighter has made it easy for the CAPREIT team to maintain current information regarding their listings.
If a building no longer had any vacancies, all the CAPREIT team had to do was remove the pricing from the listing page. The lowPrice and highPrice properties in the Schema Markup would automatically update and not have any numbers.
The listing URL will no longer show up as a Product rich result on search, and the CAPREIT team will not have to worry about misleading rich results.
After seeing the success with Product structured data, CAPREIT was keen on targeting other types of rich results like FAQ, How-To, and Videos to diversify their Schema Markup strategy.
As part of their ongoing engagement with Schema App, CAPREIT consults with their Customer Success Manager on ways they can improve their content to achieve these rich results. For instance, CAPREIT had another apartment rental site that was achieving better Video Rich Results than their main page. Schema App then recommended CAPREIT content changes for their main site to make them eligible for similar results.
The Customer Success Manager also shares content best practices to empower CAPREIT’s content team to create new content that enables easy-targeting of rich result opportunities at scale through the Schema App Highlighter.
Every quarter, the Schema App Customer Success Manager also performs a Quarterly Business Review to report on the performance of CAPREIT’s Schema Markup strategy in detail and in alignment with CAPREIT’s goals.
“I’m always excited to share what we’re planning to do at CAPREIT and explore what Schema App can do to service those needs, projects and ideas,” says Mr. Goodman.
English Apartment Listing with Product Rich Result
French Apartment Listing with Product Rich Result
Product Rich Result
Today, CAPREIT can see the impact of Schema Markup on their website and their business objectives. “The search results we get are rich results, and these rich results convert much better. We saw a 34% lift in click-through rates with our Product rich results in comparison to ‘vanilla’ search results,” Mr. Goodman added.
In the first year of working with Schema App, CAPREIT’s Apartment Listing pages with Product Rich Results saw a:
In Q3 2022, CAPREIT’s Apartment listing pages with Product Rich Results had a 5.4% click-through rate, while Apartment listing pages without Product Rich Results had a 3.4% click-through rate.
CAPREIT now sees Schema App as a valued partner and an indispensable component in its SEO strategy.
For me, it’s about how this technology can help us to achieve an end result. And Schema App is a valued partner that helped us understand the potential of Schema Markup. The platform also provided us with the ability to report on it, understand it and continuously improve it.
David Goodman
Sr. Manager, Digital Marketing
CAPREIT