by Getting to the top of the search engines with your real estate website is known as the practice of real estate SEO (Search Engine Optimization). You might be thinking, is SEO different for real estate websites than other sites? From a strategic angle; no, the same methods of success are used. From a tactical implementation aspect, real estate websites have a set of content that allows different forms of optimization that might not be as available as say an Ecommerce website.
Dominating the organic results feels great, especially when you can see your website in those coveted top locations for the most competitive keywords. Sometimes the focus on getting to the top leads to a focus that is more on rankings than getting clicks. Getting to the top is only a part of the battle as you want to make sure that users are compelled to click on your website.
When you want users to click on your result in the search engines this is considered search engine marketing. Search engine marketing means taking into consideration, not just rankings, but what a user sees when your rankings appear in the results. It takes just a bit of attention to details that most miss and it can improve your clicks by more than 50% so it’s worth your attention.
Here are key areas to focus on to improve the clicks you receive no matter what your rankings are.
- Page Title – Your page title is something that should be unique on each and every page. Being unique is only part of the battle. Your page title should have the keyword your page focuses on and be a call to action. For example consider the following page title “Find San Diego Homes with Free MLS Search”. This page title is short, includes a big keyword, and encourages the user to click to search the MLS.
- Schema Markup – Structured data or schema markup is a markup language that describes the content on your site without the search engine having to interpret it. With the volumes of text possible on any given page it can mean many different things to different folks and markup language helps it to be understood properly by search engines which can help with achieving greater success in the SERPs. The most common schema markup is for real estate listings. Outside of your MLS listings if you are putting listings on your site, properly marking them up can give you a big benefit.
- Your snippet text – The snippet text is the summary text that displays below your page title. You can’t always control this text but you can give yourself the best odds to have the copy you want show up by filling out your description meta tag and having your strongest copy closest to the top of your page.
- Variety of Content – The more roads that lead to your website the better. Think about the search engine results page, besides text, what other options are displayed? Along the top section of Google you will also see that you can view results by “Images” or “Videos”. This means that if you create unique engaging real estate content via images and videos you have the opportunity to show up in more places within the search engine results pages. You can pack your best pages with unique images (that have captions) and even build up videos where you could have your own YouTube channel that provides visitors with additional information about your market.
- Domain name – Your domain name, just as in your pay per click ads, can improve your click rates by 10% or more. Instead of having a domain that is your name, consider a domain name that is related to the city or neighborhoods that you operate in and it will give users the confidence to click your result. Now keep in mind a good domain name doesn’t really help impact your actual rankings, rather a domain that is oriented around your target market can help increase the click rate, thereby getting you more interested people to do business with.
- Page names – Just like your domain name it helps to name your web pages names that are related to what the page is all about. For example instead of a page named “neighborhood_page1.html” consider the page name of “spring_valley_homes.html” as it is more descriptive to both the search engine and the user who will be making the click!
Just concentrating on these six items will help you to see more clicks from your search engine results quickly. These same four methods will even help increase your rankings at the same time. When you focus on both the experience of your next customer and the search engine you will have traffic coming to your website every day.
