Arthur Online Integration and SEO Optimisation for Student Lettings

Chester Student Lets’ previous website was built on an old content management system. It did have some integrations with Arthur Online, but the integrations were not fully working because the old content management system could not be updated. As well as this, the website was at risk of having security issues.

We were recommended to Chester Student Lets by Arthur Online and because of our history of working with property management lettings and estate agent companies, we opened up discussion. They wanted us to not only rebuild the website on a more stable content management system, but they also wanted us to add some enhancements to the website and also fix some of the issues with the Arthur Online integration as they had never worked on the existing website.

What we did: First of all, we had to analyse the existing website and decide from a strategic point of view what was required, what we could get rid of, and exactly work out how the student lets should be shown on the website. 

One of the most important parts of the student lettings website is to allow students to rent properties in the current academic year but also look forward and book viewings and rent properties in the next academic year, so we have to work over two academic years. At any one time, we would have a letting in the current year and a letting in the next year as well, which is quite unusual for lettings.

We designed it as such, students can now see what was available currently and what was available in the future. 

We made sure that the Arthur Online integration was working properly and how Chester Students Lets wanted also, implementing the integration so that any viewing inquiries were fed straight back into their Arthur Online platform. Any property data such as changing of images, descriptions, anything, any status change on the property could be updated in Arthur Online. It would be fed to online’s API directly to the website. This means Chester Student Lets could save plenty of time as they embraced a new automated way of working. This saves money and also means less human error in their processes.

SEO: One of the other areas that we looked at when building the website was a big focus on SEO, so we made sure that all the images were optimised for the website, which hadn’t been done before. We made sure the things like page titles and descriptions and URLs were compliant with the best SEO practice of the day.

We, quite importantly, were able to decrease the load time of the actual pages. Before they had taken a huge amount of time to download, so we were able to increase the speed of every page of the website. This also helps for SEO and the general user experience of the website. 

So overall, we delivered a working website, but also a website that was a lot more capable of being indexed by Google and being found for the relevant search terms.

Providing training for the future: As an added benefit, changing of the CMS, we’re also able to give additional training to Chester Student Lets for them to be able to create landing pages for their pay-per-click campaigns and other pages within the websites, which they didn’t really have access to be able to do before. They were quite restricted with the templates that they had before. But we were able to give them a platform where they would be able to create whatever they wanted.

Overall, they were extremely happy with what we had done for them and continue to be happy. Chester Student Lets are now part of our ongoing support program, so we keep them up to date with everything, making sure all plug-ins are updated, security patches, and so on.

If you are thinking about upgrading your website to be fully integrated with Arthur Online then you have come to the right place. Learn more about Arthur Online and how integrated websites can be beneficial to your business here. Or, give us a call on 01252 756528 or schedule a call by clicking the button on the right.