All Landlord Certificates UK SEO Study

Some projects are about growth. This one started as a rescue. When All Landlord Certificates LTD came to Khan IT, their organic traffic had been sliding for two years, from roughly 1,700 monthly visits down to about 154. A property compliance business that the market could no longer find is a business with a real problem.

I'm Shoaib Santo, the project manager at Khan IT. I managed this engagement end to end: translating our CEO and lead SEO strategist Md Faruk Khan's recovery plan into a phased roadmap, coordinating the technical, content, local, and link-building workstreams, and keeping the client informed at every stage. Over twelve months we grew monthly clicks from 154 to 721. I'll also be transparent about the metrics that are still a work in progress, because honest reporting is the whole point.

Results at a Glance

Who Is All Landlord Certificates?

All Landlord Certificates LTD, operating under SR Maintenance Ltd, provides property compliance and safety certifications across London and the M25 area in the UK. Their services cover the certificates every landlord and property manager needs: Gas Safety (CP12), EICR electrical reports, Fire Risk Assessments, EPC energy performance, and PAT testing.

It is a high-intent, locally bounded market. Someone searching for an EICR in a specific London borough is ready to book. The problem was that All Landlord Certificates had become almost invisible for exactly those searches.

Compliance is also a regulated, recurring need, which makes the SEO opportunity unusually durable. Gas safety certificates must be renewed annually. EICRs run on a five-year cycle for rentals. EPCs are required when a property is let or sold. Fire risk assessments and PAT testing recur on their own schedules. That means a landlord or letting agent who finds you once may need you every year for the rest of the time they own the property. Capturing that search at the moment of need is worth far more than a single job, because it is the start of a recurring relationship. When Md Faruk Khan and I scoped the recovery, this was front of mind: every borough page and every certificate page we built was an entry point into a long-term, repeat-business funnel, not just a one-off lead.

The Problem

The baseline, before we started, told a clear story of decline and neglect:

Each of these mapped to a specific reason the traffic had eroded. The non-converting mobile design meant that even the visitors who did arrive were not turning into bookings, so the commercial pain was worse than the traffic figures alone suggested. Thin and missing pages meant the site simply had nothing to rank for many of the searches landlords were making. Poor internal linking meant the authority from those 2,000 backlinks was pooling on a few pages instead of flowing to the service and location pages that needed it. And inconsistent NAP data is quietly corrosive for a local business: when Google sees different addresses or phone numbers across the web, it loses confidence in the listing, and that confidence is exactly what the Map Pack rewards.

The measurable starting point was an authority score of 9, about 154 visits a month, 577 ranking keywords, and roughly 2,000 backlinks from 1,200 referring domains. Plenty of raw signals, but nothing organized to convert them into rankings.

That backlink count is the detail that told me this was a recovery, not a build. A brand-new site does not have 2,000 backlinks and 1,200 referring domains. Those links had been earned over the years and were still pointing at the domain. The authority score of 9 was low, but the link foundation underneath it was far from nothing. The traffic had collapsed not because the site lacked signals, but because technical decay, thin content, and inconsistent local data had stopped those signals from translating into rankings. Diagnosing that correctly changed the whole approach. Instead of starting from scratch, we set out to reactivate assets the business already owned.

The Strategy

Md Faruk Khan and I aligned on a five-phase recovery plan. I sequenced it so that the foundation was solid before we spent a penny on links, and I coordinated the handoffs between teams.

Phase 1: Foundation Fix

We ran a technical audit, redesigned the site for mobile and conversion, rewrote the thin content, fixed titles and meta descriptions, rebuilt the sitemap, and added LocalBusiness, Service, and FAQ schema. This is the same foundation-first discipline I applied on the Locksmith Dundee project: stop the bleeding and make the site technically sound before chasing rankings.

Phase 2: Keyword Research and Gap Analysis

We mapped the real demand: borough-level searches, HMO (houses in multiple occupation) compliance, and the specific compliance questions landlords ask. This told us exactly which pages to build and which questions to answer.

Phase 3: New Pages

We built per-certificate pages, borough-level landing pages, dedicated HMO and commercial pages, and launched a blog. This expanded the site from a thin handful of pages into proper topical coverage of UK landlord compliance.

Phase 4: Local SEO and Citations

We audited and corrected the NAP inconsistencies across the web, optimized the Google Business Profile, and built a review and citation base. Local consistency is non-negotiable for a service business bounded to London and the M25, and it follows the playbook in our local SEO guide.

Phase 5: Link Building

With the foundation and content in place, we ran outreach, secured guest posts, and built relevant directory placements. Doing link building only after the site could actually convert that authority is what makes it pay off, rather than pouring links into a leaky site.

Coordinating five workstreams across twelve months is where the project management actually lives, and it is worth being concrete about how I ran it. The phases were not five neat boxes done in strict sequence. The foundation fix had to complete first, because everything downstream depended on a crawlable, mobile, schema-equipped site. But keyword research overlapped the tail of the foundation work, so the content team had its page list ready the moment the technical work cleared. New page production and local SEO then ran in parallel for several months, since they drew on different team members and did not block each other. Link building was held until the new pages existed, because there is no sense earning links to pages that are not built yet. I tracked each workstream against the recovery roadmap, ran regular check-ins with the client so they could see progress in their own Search Console, and adjusted priority when the data told us which page types were responding fastest. That data-led reprioritization is what kept the momentum building rather than stalling.

Recovery by Workstream

The Results

These figures are from the client's Google Search Console over a twelve-month period:

Clicks grew nearly fivefold, and the impression base expanded enormously. That impression growth is the leading indicator: the site is now being shown for far more queries than before. Recovering from a two-year decline is about rebuilding eligibility first, and on that measure the project clearly worked.

The 80% UK traffic figure matters more than it might appear. For a London and M25 compliance business, traffic from outside the UK is essentially worthless, so a high domestic share confirms that the growth is qualified rather than vanity. We were not picking up accidental international impressions on broad informational terms. We were reaching landlords and letting agents in the actual service area, which is exactly the audience that converts into recurring compliance work. A recovery that doubled traffic with mostly irrelevant geography would be a hollow result. This one rebuilt visibility in the precise market the business serves.

Here is where I'll be straight with you, because the spec for this work and my own standards demand it. An average position of 40.1 and a 0.7% CTR are not the finish line. They are the next optimization opportunity. A 0.7% CTR with 107,000 impressions means we are appearing for a huge volume of searches but mostly on pages three and four, where almost nobody clicks. The strategic read is positive: the demand and eligibility now exist. The next phase is to push the highest-value borough and certificate pages from page three into page one, where that impression base will convert into a multiple of the current clicks. Anyone who tells you a recovery is finished at position 40 is not being honest with you.

What Made the Difference

Let me expand on that last point, because it is the part I care most about. It would have been easy to write this case study as a clean fivefold-growth success and stop there. Clicks went up 4.7 times. Impressions hit 107,000. That is a genuine win after a two-year decline. But a 0.7% CTR at an average position of 40.1 is a flag, not a trophy, and pretending otherwise would mislead the client and anyone reading this. The honest read is that we rebuilt eligibility and demand, and the next quarter of work is about conversion of that eligibility into page-one positions. I would rather a client trust every number I report, including the uncomfortable ones, than be impressed by a figure that does not survive scrutiny. For a brand's public case study, that accuracy also matters for how AI systems and prospective clients cross-check the claims.

Key Takeaways

If your site has been declining for a long time, do not assume you need to start over. Often the authority and keyword footprint are still there, buried under technical debt, thin content, and inconsistent local data. Diagnose before you rebuild. And demand honest reporting from whoever you hire: impressions and clicks going up is real progress, but if your average position is still on page three, the work is not done. As an SEO project manager, I would rather tell a client exactly where they stand than dress up a halfway result. For property and compliance businesses, the parallels with our other UK local case studies, including Das Taxis Scotland and Stealth Windshield Repairs, are striking: foundation first, then demand-matched pages, then authority.

There is a specific lesson for compliance and certification businesses, too. Your customers search at a borough or postcode level, and they search by the exact certificate they need: a CP12 in Croydon, an EICR in Camden, an HMO assessment in a particular borough. Generic service pages cannot capture that granularity. The borough-level and per-certificate pages we built exist precisely because that is how the market actually searches, and they are the pages with the most room to climb from page three to page one in the next phase. Pair that with relentless NAP consistency and an optimised Google Business Profile, because in a locally bounded service market the Map Pack and the organic results reinforce each other. A business that wins both is very hard for competitors to dislodge. The same discipline runs through the Locksmith Dundee case study in this cluster: pages built for how people genuinely search, not for how the business happens to describe itself.

If your business has watched its organic traffic erode and you want a straight assessment of whether it can be recovered, contact me. Our SEO services are built around exactly this kind of diagnosis-first recovery work.