Real Estate Websites and SEO
There are literally thousands of providers of real estate websites, almost every one of them claim to include SEO in their package. Why wouldn’t they since it’s worthless to have a great real estate website if no one ever finds it! After the new real estate agent's site is complete most agents are happy with the look and feel of their new website but don’t get any traffic...much less lead generation. In the most unfortunate of examples, the site owner may even fall prey to one of those "SEO Gurus" who claim to get you on page 1 of Google for $200 per month. After that, most people have had it with anyone claiming to provide SEO services. Although there are some affordable SEO companies, you will not get much for $200 per month.
Different Skill Sets
For the most part, web designers do not do real estate SEO. On the other hand, SEO people generally don't build websites. Good SEO companies will work with web designers, especially in real estate where you display real estate listings, on the URL structure of the site itself. The site and the listings have to be easy for Google to crawl and be logical for the Google bot to understand. Internal linking from within all of the internal pages is critical also.
As a general rule, web designers are proficient in the technical side of building a website, not the marketing side. Their expertise generally is in graphic design and a portion of what you are paying in web design is to create graphics and getting the site to look exactly like you want it. On the other hand, the SEO guru will focus on:
- • Optimizing Headers from H1 to H4
- • Optimizing the copy on your site to have the correct keyword density
- • Optimizing the meta title and meta description
- • Internal Linking
- • Siloing the site -- creating a good site structure that is easy to crawl
- • Creating high-quality backlinks
- • Adding new, original content in the form of blog posts
- • Socially syndicating those blog posts to drive traffic to the website
- • Keyword research
- • Creating and submitting XML sitemaps
- • Disavowing bad back-links
- • Creating AMP pages
There are some instances where the SEO Agency and the web designer do the same work. Website features such as placement and design of the "call to action".
SEO Is Not a Button
It's important to understand that SEO is not a button. Real Estate SEO, not something that you do one time or implement. Although the on-page SEO is generally done at the time of the website build, for it to be successful the on-page SEO should be utilizing the results of extensive keyword research. Real SEO is an ongoing process and although some real estate SEO is done during the building of the site, it is NOT an add on feature or a button that gets pressed.
Real Estate SEO Has Many Parts
To have your real estate website rank in Search Engine Placement (SERPS), there are many moving parts. All SEO campaigns should start with a look at real estate keywords to get a feel for what local terms are being searched and the level of competition for each term. As far as the website structure goes, it’s important to "silo" or "theme" the website so Search Engine Spiders can easily make sense of how your pages and internal links are related. Most SEO campaigns utilize Social Media to drive traffic to specific pages and create social signals. Backlinks are the cornerstone of SEO as search engines feel if other sites link to you -- you must be an authority.
Backlinks from websites are not just about quantity but quality. The higher the quality of a website that uses your website as a reference, the better. By that same rationale, if you have a lot of low-quality websites that link to you, it can actually hurt your search engine rankings. If your real estate brokerage has bricks and mortar office, it’s important to have Citations. Citations are simply business listings on websites such as Yelp, Hotfrog or Foursquare.
Lastly, the ongoing monitoring of the SERPS and domain metrics are critical for SEO success. With Google making an estimated 600 changes to their algorithm every year, it’s critical that your SEO Company is consistently implementing the most current best practices.
Real Estate Websites Do Not Included SEO
The hard reality is that real estate websites simply do not "come with" SEO. If you have purchased a website and are not actively paying a real estate SEO expert or implementing current SEO practices yourself, the chances of your website ranking for any major real estate keywords are slim.
There is a ton of competition for just about any real estate keyword so chances are against you to rank by accident are slim and none. If your goal when you purchased a real estate website was to rank, regardless of what your web designer told you, you will need to implement SEO best practices on an ongoing basis.
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