Real Estate Website SEO: The Ultimate Beginners Guide for Agents
A few weeks ago, I mentioned Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. It’s an important and complicated part of having a successful website. This week, we will go into some more detail.
For those who don’t know, SEO refers to optimizing your website so that it ranks higher in a search engine. Each engine uses a different algorithm, but the general principles are going to be the same from each. Besides just having a well-coded site, here are 5 tips to help get your site higher up on any given search.
Use common words and phrases people search for.
If you want to show up when someone searches for “San Francisco Apartments,” one tip is to use those keywords words in your page. Search engines crawl text and use the body of that text to weigh results. If you don’t mention something you want to be searchable for, you aren’t going to get that added boost to your ranking.
Title your pages with Search Engines in Mind.
All websites have titles, even if most people don’t read them. A lot of time, it’s not even presented on the page. Use this as an extra bump for search engines and give pages titles that are useful. Let’s use “San Francisco Apartments” as a page Title whenever we have a page dedicated to that. Your target audience for your website title is the search engine, not the reader.
Links to your site increase your rank.
The more sites that link or link back to your page, the higher your rank will be. The more notable the page hosting the link, the higher the link will be weighted. Get links to your site anywhere you can, whether it’s social media or local publications. The more people reference you, the higher you’ll rise in search results.
Title your links appropriately.
Just like website titles, link titles, or the text that you can click on, also factors into search results. Title your links not with your name, but with what you want to be searchable for whenever possible. For example, Randolf Everrette is an expert in San Francisco Apartments.
Persistence and Reputation.
It’s what anyone who gets youtube famous says: if you want to get famous for doing something, keep doing it. The more content you generate and the more links you get pointing to your site, the higher you’ll rank in search engines. It’s hard work generating content, but keep at it. The more you focus on one topic, the better off you’ll be. The better it is, the more links you’ll get.
What Tools are available to help in this?
Google Analytics is another great tool. Both Google Search Trends and Google Adwords will help again here as well.
Hiring an SEO Expert.
Hiring an expert is always an option. There are many experts you can hire online and can give you recommendations on what you should be doing to improve your search ranking.
Use caution when hiring an SEO expert. No true SEO professional will guarantee the top spot in search engines – these are impossible to guarantee but commonly used to lure unsuspecting clients. Be wary when interviewing and selecting your first contractor and pay attention to their promises and deliverables.
Search Engine Optimization and Chime.
If you’ve wondered about driving organic leads to your real estate website, Chime handles all marketing campaigns – from paid search to SEO – for your custom built IDX website. Learn how Chime improved Wilson Leung’s business since switching to Chime, or give our single-suite solutions a test drive by scheduling a free demo today.
That’s it this week and SEO. It’s a broad subject with a wealth of knowledge on it and advancing all the time. Focusing on the basics will help give you an idea of how to navigate the waters of the web.