MakeMyHouse.com: How AEO and SEO Drove 380% Growth in Organic Leads

What We Did

MakeMyHouse.com had strong brand recognition in Delhi NCR — they'd been in the market long enough that architects and interior designers knew the name. The problem was organic traffic. For 18 months, sessions had been flat between 24,000 and 31,000 per month. Rankings for their core terms hadn't moved. And competitors were starting to appear in Google's featured snippets and answer boxes for the home design questions MakeMyHouse should have owned. The specific queries they were losing were high commercial-intent questions: "how much does it cost to build a 2BHK in India," "what is the average architect fee in Delhi," "3BHK house design under 30 lakhs." Every answer box that went to a competitor was a potential lead walking out the door. When Deepak audited the site, three root causes stood out. First, the content was written for ranking rather than for answering — keyword-dense paragraphs that Google couldn't extract a clean answer from. Second, there was no FAQ or structured schema anywhere on the 120+ article library. Third, the site had accumulated canonical tag issues and thin content pages from a series of CMS migrations. The strategy had two parallel tracks: fix the technical and structural issues suppressing existing rankings, and rebuild the content architecture so Google could extract answers directly from MakeMyHouse articles. AEO was woven into every content decision from day one. Phase 1 — Technical cleanup: Identified 340 pages with thin content, 18 canonical conflicts from past CMS migrations, and 60+ redirect chains. Fixed canonicals, collapsed redirect chains, and set up proper indexation rules. Phase 2 — Content restructure: Rewrote or restructured 120 articles. Answer statements moved to the top of each section. Each article got a dedicated Q&A section targeting the specific questions people search around that topic — written for how Google extracts snippets. Phase 3 — AEO schema: Implemented FAQPage JSON-LD schema across all 120 articles, mapping each FAQ to actual search questions MakeMyHouse was targeting. Added Article schema with author credentials to build E-E-A-T signals. First 3 snippets appeared in month 3. Phase 4 — City expansion: MakeMyHouse had strong recognition in Delhi NCR but minimal organic presence elsewhere. Built city-specific landing pages for Mumbai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune and Chennai with local data. By month 6, these pages contributed 22% of total organic traffic. Phase 5 — Authority building: Built 45 editorial links through original data studies (India construction cost surveys, architect fee benchmarks), guest posts on real estate publications, and press coverage. Domain authority moved from 28 to 41. By month 6, organic traffic had grown from 28,000 to 67,000 sessions per month. By month 12, it reached 134,000 — driven by the compounding effect of content restructure, schema deployment, and link building.