Attestis: Case Study

A French tech startup that is reinventing securing building permission in France and bringing it into the 21st century

O à 10,000

Organic visitors in 10 months

80%

SEO traffic

50+

keywords in Top5

+1,300%

growth in leads

100%

non brand organic traffic

Bringing Construction into the 21st Century

attestis-web

If you’re lucky enough to own a property in France, felicitations! Invite us round for rosé sometime.

But, buyer beware, if you’re planning to do any kind of improvement to your home, from a facelift to a swimming pool, according to French Law you need to obtain a permis de construire - a building permit akin to a planning permission in other countries.

The permit itself is a cumbersome, large and unsightly metal plaque which is placed outside your property. Its purpose is to display the name of building company and architect, the type of work, the expected duration and of course official authorisation from the town hall, to anyone interested.


Under French law, it is mandatory that this plaque is placed, in full public view, as soon as the authorization is granted by the TownHall and every single day thereafter until the end of the construction.

This is a quaint and old-fashioned system that can seriously inconvenience the owner. Technically, an owner needs to ensure that a Government official, an huissier de justice (a kind of notary), visit the building site a number of times to attest that the permit is in place. There is also the risk of degradation, accidents and the plaque being removed in bad faith. Proving that the plaque is there at all times is a must. Anecdotally this means that in France homeowners may take photos of themselves next to the plaque, holding the front page of today’s daily newspaper, hostage-style, as an attempt to provide evidence.

If for whatever reason you neighbours decide that your construction project is an inconvenience to their lives, they are entitled to file to try and block your project. Failure to prove that the building permit has been in place, every single day for 2 months prior to and during the works, exposes the property owner to the entire development project being compromised and legally halted.

That is terrifying news if you have just booked an entire construction company to renovate your home.

Attestis: A True Innovator In a Traditional Space

Founded by the French Entrepreneur Guilhem Ensuque, Attestis is a platform that uses digital technology to solve the headaches caused by French building permits. Instead of a normal PVC plaque, special Attestis signage containing IoT technology (a connected object) - is installed on-site.

This signage is geo-localised and the data is transmitted and stored using blockchain technology and constitutes irrefutable and legally acceptable proof that the permis de construire is present and correct. The technology also allows for the detection of tampering… yes, it happens all the time, unfortunately.

Homeowners can check that all is well from their smartphone using the Attestis app, and sleep well looking forward to their new swimming pool. Sweet dreams.

The Inbound Marketing Strategy

The biggest challenge Attestis had when they came to us was that it was a new brand, site and domain, so their website had zero authority in SEO terms. The implication is that content would be difficult to rank and tough to drive any meaningful organic traffic.

Google has consistently iterated its algorithms over the years to reward high-quality, valuable information that not only usefully provides answers to user queries, but offers a great user experience. This means content quality is important but it also means design, layout, load speed, experience on mobile and other factors are just as important.

There is an enormous amount of search volume on the subject of building permits in France and surrounding topics, and whilst many powerful sites - including governmental, local authority and legal websites - provided information, most things available online were hard to understand and digest for most people frankly.

Mi4 created a content strategy based around a content clustering methodology around three main pillar pages: Permis de Construire, Declaration Prealable de Travaux and Recours Contentieux.

We hired a specialist subject matter expert and created long form 1500 + word long pages that were clearer, more informative and provided a better user experience across both desktop and mobile. We also created a clear path to external references and provided additional cross-linked internal blogs.

The Results? Amazing

Attestis Analytics

ATTESTIS GOOGLE ANALYTICS

From launch in October 2018 Mi4 have taken a new attestis.com from zero traffic to close to 5 K unique visitors per month, with organic traffic showing exponential growth and representing 80% of total site visitors. 90% of this traffic is non-brand traffic as Attestis is relatively unknown.

This traffic is extremely valuable representing due to the high relevance of the keywords and specificity of the problem solved which is a real pain point for many homeowners in France, and of course the true innovation of the Attestis solution.

Attestis is ranking top 5 for many long tail terms including some larger volume search firms and excitingly for them, their visibility is increasing enormously and will be within months be ranking also for some competitive high CPC keywords. This is SEO at its best, and we love it!

SIgnups to the service are now at a level that traction is considered sufficient for Attestis to have secured its first round of capital 

The Future

Attestis on the advice of Mi4 have recently migrated their existing marketing automation system taking advantage of the HubSpot for Startups program.

The Pivot of Attestis B2B market is a hugely exciting move and one that lends itself perfectly to the Inbound Marketing approach.

We’re looking forward to being part of the continued growth and success of Attestis

Services fournis par Mi4

Marketing automation
Content Production
Lead generation
Web development
Digital marketing