How to Structure URLs for Your Real Estate Website: A Guide
Welcome to the world of real estate website URLs — it's a bit like a digital maze where every slash and dot has a role to play. But don't worry, we're here to be your friendly guides through this online journey. Imagine us as your digital map, helping you navigate the twists and turns of web addresses. Together, we'll make understanding real estate website URLs as easy as a walk in the park. So, let's embark on this adventure with a simple and smile-inducing guide to tackle those sometimes-tricky website addresses! Why is a Well-Structured URL Important for Real Estate Websites? Having a well-structured URL is crucial for both search engine optimization (SEO) and user experience. A URL, or Uniform Resource Locator, serves as the address of a webpage on the internet. It not only helps search engines understand the content of a page, but also impacts how users perceive and interact with your website. A well-structured URL provides clear and concise information about the content of a webpage. It should be descriptive, relevant, and easy to read. By optimizing your URL structure, you can improve your website;s SEO and make it more user-friendly for potential homebuyers or sellers. Let's dive deeper into the components of a URL and explore best practices for real estate websites. Components of a URL Let's break down the different components of a URL. A typical URL consists of several parts, each serving a specific purpose: Protocol: The protocol determines how data is transmitted between a web browser and a web server. The most common protocol is http:// or its secure counterpart https://. Domain: The domain is the main part of a URL and represents the specific website you're visiting. In the case of a real estate website, the domain could be something like www.realestatecompany.com. Subdomain: A subdomain is a part of the main domain and precedes it with a dot. It can be used to organize different sections of a website or target specific markets. For example, blog.realestatecompany.com could be the subdomain for a blog section. Path: The path refers to the specific location of a webpage within a website. It's often represented by a series of slashes ("/") and can include directories, categories, or individual pages. For instance, /listings/properties could lead to a page showcasing available properties. Parameters: Parameters are additional information included in a URL that provides instructions or data to the webpage. They are usually represented by question marks ("?") and ampersands ("&"). For example, /listings/properties?city=NewYork could filter the properties based on the city of New York. Now that we have a clear understanding of the components of a URL, let's move on to the next steps — how we can optimize it for real estate websites. Ways to Optimize URL Structure To optimize your real estate website's URL structure, consider the following best practices: Incorporating keywords in your URL Including relevant keywords in your URL can significantly improve the visibility of your real estate website in search engine results. When search engines crawl and index your website, they analyze the URL to determine its relevance to a user's search query. By incorporating keywords related to your real estate niche or specific property listings, you increase the chances of ranking higher in search results. For example, instead of using a generic URL like /properties/12345, consider utilizing a keyword-rich URL such as /luxury-villas-for-sale-in-malibu. This not only helps search engines understand the content of the page, but also provides potential visitors with a clear indication of what they can expect. If you want more information about keyword strategy of your website, check out this article: Real Estate Keywords. Make it easy to read and understand It's crucial to create user-friendly URLs that are easy to read and understand. A user-friendly URL should provide a clear indication of the content on the page and help visitors navigate your real estate website more efficiently. Avoid using long, complex URLs with unnecessary characters or numbers. Instead, opt for shorter, descriptive URLs that accurately represent the content of the page. For instance, a URL like /listings/condos/central-park-view is much more user-friendly than /listings/12345?property_id=6789. URL structure listings and property pages Real estate websites often feature a vast number of listings and property pages. To optimize the URL structure for these pages, it's crucial to follow a logical hierarchy and incorporate relevant keywords. For instance, consider structuring your URL as follows: /listings/city/category/property-name. This structure provides clear navigation paths and helps search engines understand the context of each listing. Additionally, incorporating relevant keywords, such as the city name and property type, can boost your website's visibility in local search results. More Tips to Maximize Your URLs' Effect on SEO Keep it simple and concise: Long and complicated URLs can be difficult for users to remember and share. Aim for shorter URLs that accurately describe the content of the page. For example, www.yourrealestatewebsite.com/condos-for-sale is much simpler and more user-friendly than www.yourrealestatewebsite.com/listings/condos/buy/marketplace/sale. Use hyphens to separate words: Hyphens are preferred over underscores or spaces in URLs because they are more readable to both users and search engines. For instance, www.yourrealestatewebsite.com/3-bedroom-homes is more readable than www.yourrealestatewebsite.com/3bedroomhomes or www.yourrealestatewebsite.com/3_bedroom_homes. Avoid using unnecessary characters: Special characters, such as exclamation marks or ampersands, can make URLs appear cluttered and confusing. Stick to alphanumeric characters and hyphens to ensure compatibility across different platforms and devices. Be consistent in URL structure: Consistency in URL structure not only helps users navigate your website more easily, but also assists search engines in understanding the hierarchy of your site. For example, if your main categories are "buy" and "rent," use a consistent structure like www.yourrealestatewebsite.com/buy/property-type and www.yourrealestatewebsite.com/rent/property-type. That's it! Utilize these simple tips and tricks to help improve your website visibility in search results. If you enjoyed this article, you might like these two, too: Optimizing Crawl Budget for Real Estate Websites SEO Titles and Meta Descriptions for Real Estate SEO Thank you — let's keep SEO-ing! To view the original article, visit the Realtyna blog.

5 Common Google Search Console Errors for Real Estate Websites
Is your real estate website not ranking as well as you'd like on Google? It could be due to some common errors in your Google Search Console (GSC). As you know, SEO is an on going process, so if you want to keep your pages up in search results, you must constantly update your website and monitor it to fix issues. One of the greatest tools for monitoring your performance and also fixing your issue is Google Search Console. This tool is owned by Google, so it's really crucial to use. If you want to improve your real estate website SEO, this article will help you understand GSC errors. Common Errors in Google Search Console Crawl errors Mobile usability issues Structured data errors Page speed problems (CWV) Security issues Let's talk about all of them more exclusively: Error 1: Crawl errors Crawl errors can prevent Google from properly indexing your pages, leading to lower rankings for your real estate website. These errors occur when Google's bots encounter issues while crawling your site. There are several crawl errors on GSC. The most common crawl issues in real estate websites are: Not Found (404) Crawled – currently not indexed Discovered – currently not indexed Page with redirect Server error (5xx) Fixing each one of these requires knowledge about SEO, and also a little about SEO plugins if you are using WordPress as your CMS. Error 2: Mobile usability issues In today's mobile-driven world, having a mobile-friendly website is crucial for real estate businesses. Mobile usability issues can negatively impact your website's performance and rankings on Google. If your site is not optimized for mobile devices, you may be missing out on potential leads and traffic. To identify mobile usability issues, go to the "Mobile Usability" report in your Google Search Console. This report will highlight any issues affecting the mobile user experience on your website, such as text that is too small to read, clickable elements that are too close together, or viewport configuration errors. Here are some solutions to common mobile usability issues: Use responsive design: Ensure your website is built using responsive design principles. This means that the website's layout and content will automatically adjust to fit the screen size of the device being used. Optimize font sizes: Make sure text on your website is easily readable on mobile devices. Use a font size that is large enough to be legible without zooming in. Space out clickable elements: Ensure that clickable elements, such as buttons and links, are spaced out enough so that users can easily tap on them without accidentally tapping on adjacent elements. Note that the Mobile-usability report will retire at the end of the 2023. Google announced that, in modern times, virtually all websites are mobile friendly and there is no need to have either this or the mobile usability test anymore. Error 3: Structured data errors Structured data helps search engines understand the content and context of your real estate website. It provides additional information about your properties, such as price, location, and availability. However, if there are errors in your structured data implementation, it can cause Google to misinterpret your website's content and potentially impact your rankings. To identify structured data errors, navigate to the "Enhancements" report in your Google Search Console. This report will show you any issues with your structured data markup, such as missing fields, incorrect values, or invalid markup. To resolve structured data errors: Use structured data testing tools: Google provides a structured data testing tool that allows you to validate your structured data markup. Use this tool to identify any errors and make the necessary corrections. Follow Google's guidelines: Ensure that your structured data markup follows Google's guidelines for real estate websites. This includes using the appropriate schema types and properties to accurately represent your properties. Test and monitor: After making corrections to your structured data markup, use the testing tool again to verify that the errors have been resolved. Regularly monitor your Google Search Console for any new structured data errors that may arise. Error 4: Page speed problems (CWV) Page speed is a crucial factor that directly influences user experience and search engine rankings. In the realm of real estate websites, where competition is fierce and user expectations are high, addressing page speed problems is paramount. One significant aspect of page speed that Google emphasizes is the Core Web Vitals (CWV). Understanding Core Web Vitals (CWV): Core Web Vitals are a set of specific factors that Google considers when evaluating the overall user experience of a webpage. The three main components of CWV are: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Measures the loading performance of a webpage by assessing the time it takes for the largest content element to become visible. Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Assesses the visual stability of a webpage by measuring unexpected layout shifts during the loading process. First Input Delay (FID): Evaluates the interactivity of a page by measuring the time it takes for a user to interact with the page after the initial click. Note that Google has just announced that FID is going to be replaced by Interaction to Next Paint (INP) very soon. Error 5: Security issues Website security is crucial for protecting your real estate website and the sensitive information of your visitors. Google takes website security seriously and may penalize websites that have security vulnerabilities. To identify security issues, use the "Security Issues" report in your Google Search Console. This report will alert you to any security-related problems detected on your website, such as malware infections or hacked content. To secure your website: Install an SSL certificate: An SSL certificate encrypts the data transmitted between your website and users' browsers. This ensures that sensitive information, such as login credentials and contact forms, is secure. Update your software: Keep your website's CMS, plugins, and themes up to date. Software updates often include security patches that protect against known vulnerabilities. Use strong passwords: Ensure that all user accounts on your website have strong, unique passwords. Encourage your users to do the same. Regularly backup your website: Perform regular backups of your website's files and database. This allows you to restore your website to a previous state in case of a security breach. That's it, These are the most common Google Search Console issues that might happen to your real estate website, No matter the type of real estate website you are using, you can increase the likelihood of ranking by solving these issues. To view the original article, visit the Realtyna blog.

What Is an SEO Site Audit Report?
An SEO website audit report provides a comprehensive analysis of the website's performance, identifying areas for improvement and optimization. It examines various aspects such as site structure, content quality, user experience, SEO, and technical issues. No matter which types of real estate website you currently have, this report helps you identify and address any issues that may be hindering the sites' online visibility and user engagement, ultimately improving overall performance and success in the competitive real estate market. Importance of Site Audit Reports for Real Estate Websites Real estate websites are often complex, with a vast amount of content, property listings, and interactive features. A site audit report is crucial for real estate SEO, and these reports offer a holistic evaluation of the website's performance, identifying areas that require attention. It serves as a roadmap for real estate businesses to enhance their website's functionality, user experience, and search engine optimization. By addressing the issues highlighted in the report, real estate websites can attract more qualified leads, improve conversion rates, and ultimately gain a competitive edge in the market. Site audit reports also play a pivotal role in ensuring compliance with industry standards and best practices. With the ever-evolving landscape of digital marketing and web development, staying updated with the latest trends and algorithms is essential for real estate websites to maintain their relevance and authority in the online sphere. A thorough site audit report provides actionable recommendations to align the website with current best practices, ensuring that it remains competitive and effective in capturing the attention of potential homebuyers and sellers. In addition, site audit reports can uncover technical issues that may be hindering the website's performance. From page load times and mobile responsiveness to broken links and metadata errors, identifying and rectifying these technical glitches can significantly enhance the overall user experience and search engine visibility of real estate websites. Ultimately, a well-executed site audit report empowers real estate businesses to optimize their online presence, drive organic traffic, and establish themselves as trustworthy and reliable sources in the competitive real estate market. Key Components of a Site Audit Report A comprehensive site audit report encompasses various key components, each playing a crucial role in evaluating the website's performance and identifying areas for improvement. These components include: Site Structure: This component evaluates the organization and navigation of the website, ensuring that it is intuitive and user-friendly. It assesses the hierarchical structure of the website, the accessibility of important pages, and the overall user journey through the site. Content Quality: The quality and relevance of content are pivotal for real estate websites. A site audit report analyzes the uniqueness, depth, and optimization of the content, including property descriptions, SEO titles and meta descriptions, blog posts, and informational pages, to ensure that it resonates with the target audience and aligns with SEO best practices. User Experience (UX): Evaluating the website's UX involves assessing factors such as page load times, mobile responsiveness, interactive elements, and overall design aesthetics. A seamless and engaging user experience is essential for keeping visitors engaged and encouraging them to explore property listings and relevant information. SEO Analysis: This component delves into the website's search engine optimization strategies, including keyword usage, meta tags, backlink profiles, and overall on-page and off-page optimization. It aims to identify opportunities for improving the website's visibility and ranking on search engine results pages Technical Issues: Technical aspects such as website speed, security, mobile-friendliness, and crawlability by search engines are critical for the website's overall performance. A site audit report identifies and prioritizes technical issues that may be affecting the website's functionality and visibility. Each of these components contributes to a comprehensive understanding of the website's current state and provides actionable insights for enhancing its performance and relevance in the highly competitive digital landscape. Common Issues Found in Site Audit Reports Site audit reports often reveal common issues that can impact the performance and effectiveness of real estate websites. These issues may include: Duplicate Content: Real estate websites frequently encounter duplicate content issues, especially when property listings are syndicated across multiple platforms. Addressing duplicate content through canonical tags and unique, descriptive content is essential for avoiding penalties from search engines and improving organic visibility. Page Load Times: Slow-loading pages can significantly impact the user experience and lead to higher bounce rates. Site audit reports highlight pages with extended load times and provide recommendations for optimizing images, scripts, and server response times to enhance overall page speed. Broken Links: Broken links within a website can frustrate visitors and harm the site's credibility. Site audit reports identify broken links and guide on updating or removing them to maintain a seamless user experience. Mobile Responsiveness: With a growing number of users accessing real estate websites via mobile devices, ensuring mobile responsiveness is crucial. Site audit reports evaluate the website's performance on various devices and provide suggestions for improving responsiveness and usability across different screen sizes. Metadata and Structured Data Issues: Optimizing metadata and structured data is essential for improving the website's visibility in search results. Site audit reports identify missing or poorly optimized metadata and structured data, offering recommendations to enhance the website's search engine presence. Site audit reports might not cover all the important issues your website might have. Issues related to Robots.txt and Sitemap.xml should be reviewed manually. Don't know how? Follow the links we mentioned. Tools for Generating Site Audit Reports In the digital marketing landscape, numerous tools are available to streamline the process of generating comprehensive website audit reports. These tools offer robust features for analyzing various aspects of website performance and delivering actionable insights for optimization. Some notable tools for generating site audit reports include: Moz Pro: Moz Pro provides a suite of SEO tools, including site audit capabilities that assess technical, content, and link issues affecting real estate websites. It offers actionable recommendations and prioritizes issues to enhance website performance. Semrush: Semrush offers comprehensive site audit features that analyze on-page SEO, technical SEO, and content issues. Real estate professionals can leverage Semrush to identify and address critical areas for improvement. Ahrefs: Ahrefs' site audit tool provides in-depth insights into a real estate website's technical health and SEO performance. It offers detailed reports on issues such as broken links, crawlability, and mobile-friendliness. Screaming Frog: The Screaming Frog SEO Spider tool enables real estate professionals to conduct thorough site audits by analyzing URLs, metadata, page titles, and other critical SEO elements. It provides detailed reports for technical and on-page optimizations. As a real estate SEO expert and also the writer of this content, I recommend Ahrefs, Learn more about this amazing tools at this link: ahrefs.com/site-audit. Case studies of successful site audit implementations in real estate Several real estate businesses have successfully leveraged site audit reports to enhance their website's performance and achieve tangible results in the competitive online landscape. These sample case studies demonstrate the impact of site audits on real estate websites and highlight the outcomes of strategic optimization efforts: Case Study 1: Real Estate Agency XYZ Real Estate Agency XYZ, a leading player in the local property market, commissioned a comprehensive site audit to identify opportunities for improving their website's performance. The audit revealed several key areas for enhancement, including slow page load times, inconsistent metadata, and content duplication across property listings. Armed with the insights from the site audit report, Real Estate Agency XYZ implemented targeted improvements, including optimizing images to improve page speed, standardizing metadata across listings, and implementing canonical tags to address duplicate content issues. As a result, the website experienced a notable increase in organic traffic, higher search engine rankings for key property keywords, and improved user engagement metrics. Case Study 2: Property Management Company ABC Property Management Company ABC sought to strengthen its online presence and generate more qualified leads through strategic website optimization. A site audit report uncovered significant mobile responsiveness issues, outdated content, and suboptimal internal linking structures within the website. Using the recommendations from the site audit report, Property Management Company ABC revamped its website to prioritize mobile responsiveness, refreshed outdated content with valuable insights and market trends, and restructured internal linking to improve user navigation. These efforts led to a substantial increase in website conversions, improved search engine visibility, and enhanced user satisfaction with the website's mobile experience. To view the original article, visit the Realtyna blog.

Who is a Real Estate SEO Expert? And What Do They Do?
A real estate SEO expert is a professional who specializes in optimizing websites for search engines to improve organic rankings. They have a deep understanding of search engine algorithms and use their expertise to increase visibility and drive targeted traffic to real estate websites. These experts utilize a range of strategies, including conducting thorough keyword research, implementing on-page optimization techniques, creating compelling content, building high-quality links, and optimizing technical aspects of websites. By implementing these tactics, they assist real estate professionals in dominating search engine results and surpassing their competitors. In today's fiercely competitive online environment, the inclusion of a real estate SEO expert on your team can have a profound impact. Their knowledge and skills can assist you in attracting qualified leads, generating a higher number of conversions, and ultimately expanding your business. The importance of SEO for real estate businesses Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process of optimizing a website to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). For real estate businesses, it is an essential component of their digital marketing strategy. The higher a real estate website ranks on search engines like Google, the more visibility and exposure it gets, leading to increased traffic, qualified leads, and conversions. SEO is particularly crucial in the real estate industry because competition is fierce. With so many real estate businesses vying for the attention of potential customers, it's essential to stand out from the crowd. A real estate SEO expert can help your business achieve this by using their skills and expertise to improve your website's visibility and search engine rankings. What does a real estate SEO expert do? What does a real estate SEO expert do?A real estate SEO expert is a professional who specializes in optimizing real estate websites for search engines. They deeply understand search engine algorithms and use their expertise to improve organic rankings, drive targeted traffic, and increase conversions. Here are some of the things that a real estate SEO expert does: Keyword Research Keyword research is the process of identifying the words and phrases that potential customers use when searching for real estate properties, agents, or services. A real estate SEO expert will use various tools and techniques to conduct thorough keyword research and identify the most relevant and high-traffic keywords for your business. They will then use these keywords to optimize your website's content, meta tags, and other on-page elements to improve your search engine rankings. On-Page Optimization On-page optimization is the process of optimizing the content and structure of a website to improve its relevance and visibility to search engines. A real estate SEO expert will use various on-page optimization techniques, such as optimizing meta tags, headers, images, and internal linking, to improve your website's relevance and visibility to search engines. They will also ensure that your website is mobile-friendly, has a fast loading speed, and is user-friendly to improve user experience and engagement. Off-Page Optimization Off-page optimization is the process of improving a website's visibility and authority through external links and mentions. A real estate SEO expert will use various off-page optimization techniques, such as link building, social media marketing, and content marketing, to improve your website's visibility, authority, and reputation. They will also ensure that your business is listed in relevant directories and citations to improve your visibility in local search results. Technical Optimization Real estate SEO experts should have a strong understanding of technical SEO, which is the process of optimizing a website's technical aspects to improve its visibility and ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs). Some of the key technical SEO tasks that a real estate SEO expert should be able to perform include: Local SEO for Real Estate Businesses Local SEO is the process of optimizing a website for local search results. A real estate SEO expert will use various local SEO techniques, such as optimizing your Google My Business profile, building local citations, and getting positive reviews, to improve your visibility and relevance in local search results. This is particularly crucial for real estate businesses that serve a specific geographic area. Tracking and Measuring Success in Real Estate SEO A real estate SEO expert will also track and measure the success of your SEO efforts using various tools and metrics, such as Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and keyword rankings. They will use this data to refine their strategies, identify opportunities for improvement, and demonstrate the ROI of their SEO efforts. Now, we are going deep through each one of the real estate SEO expert responsibilities: Keyword research for your website Keyword research is the process of identifying the keywords and phrases that potential customers are using to search for products or services like yours online. It is an important part of SEO (search engine optimization), as it helps real estate SEOs to create content and optimize your website so that it ranks higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). Here are some of the important things in the keyword research process: Brainstorm a list of relevant keywords RESX (Real Estate SEO Experts) start by brainstorming a list of keywords and phrases that are relevant to your business and the products or services you offer. They consider the different types of properties you sell or rent, the locations you serve, and the types of buyers and sellers you work with. Use keyword research tools There are a number of keyword research tools available that can help you identify relevant keywords and phrases, as well as their search volume and competition level. Some popular keyword research tools include Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, Ubersuggest, and SEMrush. Identify long-tail keywords Long-tail keywords are more specific and less competitive than short-tail keywords. They are also more likely to be used by potential customers who are closer to making a purchase decision. For example, real estate SEO experts, instead of targeting the keyword "real estate agent," might target the long-tail keyword "best real estate agent in [city]." Use keywords throughout your website Once they have identified a list of relevant keywords, they will be sure to use them throughout your website, including in your title tags, meta descriptions, header tags, and body content. This will help Google to understand what your website is about and rank it accordingly. If you are interested in the keyword research process for your business, check out the best real estate SEO keywords for 2023. On-page optimization for your website On-page optimization is the process of optimizing the individual pages of a website to improve their ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs). It involves optimizing a variety of factors, including the website's content, structure, and metadata. For real estate websites, on-page optimization is especially important, as it can help to ensure that potential buyers can easily find your website and learn about the properties you have for sale. Here are a few key things that real estate SEO experts will do: Use relevant keywords throughout your website, including in your title tags, meta descriptions, header tags, and body content. Create high-quality, informative content that provides value to potential buyers. Optimize your images by sizing and compressing them properly and using descriptive alt text. Improve your website's structure by using clear and descriptive URLs, creating a logical hierarchy of pages, and using internal links to connect your pages together. Make sure your website is mobile-friendly. Off-page optimization for your website Off-page optimization is a crucial aspect of real estate SEO. It involves strategies that are implemented outside of the website itself to improve its search engine rankings. One of the most important off-page optimization techniques is link building. Real estate SEO experts understand the significance of building high-quality backlinks to a website. Backlinks act as votes of confidence from other websites, indicating to search engines that the website being linked to is trustworthy and valuable. Real estate SEO experts use various tactics to acquire backlinks, such as guest posting on relevant industry websites, reaching out to influencers for collaborations, and leveraging social media platforms to promote content and acquire links. In addition to link building, real estate SEO experts also focus on other off-page optimization techniques, such as social media marketing and online reputation management. By utilizing social media platforms effectively, they can broaden the reach of real estate websites, engage with the target audience, and drive more traffic. Online reputation management involves monitoring and managing the online presence of real estate businesses, ensuring that their reputation remains positive and trustworthy. Technical optimization for your website Here are some technical things that your SEO expert should have to do for your website: Optimizing website speed Improving website structure Fixing broken links Creating a mobile-friendly website Using relevant keywords throughout the website Optimizing images (Want to know more about it? Learn a few tips in SEO Tips for Images: Real Estate Edition) Submitting the website to search engines Monitoring website performance and making adjustments as needed Note that not all of the above items should done alone by SEO experts; for some of them, SEOs need help from a developer or website admin. Local SEO for real estate businesses Local SEO is a vital component of real estate SEO, as it focuses on optimizing websites for local search results. Real estate professionals operate within specific geographic areas, and it is crucial for their websites to appear in local search results when potential clients search for real estate services in their vicinity. Real estate SEO experts employ various strategies to optimize websites for local search, such as optimizing Google My Business profiles, creating location-specific landing pages, and obtaining local citations. By implementing these techniques, they help real estate businesses increase their visibility in local search results, attract more qualified leads, and ultimately drive more conversions. Local SEO for real estate businesses also involves optimizing websites for mobile devices, as a significant portion of local searches are performed on smartphones and tablets. Real estate SEO experts ensure that websites are mobile-friendly and provide a seamless user experience across different devices. This optimization helps real estate businesses capture mobile users and enhances their chances of converting them into clients. Tools and resources used by real estate SEO experts Real estate SEO experts use a range of tools and resources to conduct keyword research, analyze website data, and optimize websites for search engines. Here are some of the most popular tools and resources used by real estate SEO experts: Google Analytics Google Analytics is a free web analytics service provided by Google that tracks and reports website traffic. Real estate SEO experts use Google Analytics to track website traffic, user behavior, and other key metrics to improve their SEO strategies. Google Search Console Google Search Console is a free tool provided by Google that helps website owners monitor and maintain their website's presence in Google search results. Real estate SEO experts use Google Search Console to track website performance, identify technical issues, and submit sitemaps. Ahrefs Ahrefs is a popular SEO tool that provides data and insights on backlinks, keywords, and website traffic. Real estate SEO experts use Ahrefs to conduct keyword research, analyze competitor backlinks, and monitor website performance. SEMrush SEMrush is an all-in-one marketing toolkit that provides tools for SEO, PPC, content marketing, and social media marketing. Real estate SEO experts use SEMrush to conduct keyword research, analyze website data, and optimize websites for search engines. Tracking and measuring success in real estate SEO Measuring and tracking the success of your SEO efforts is crucial to improving your website's search engine rankings and achieving your business goals. Here are some metrics that a real estate SEO should track to measure the success of their SEO efforts: Organic Traffic Organic traffic refers to the number of visitors who come to your website through search engine results pages. Tracking organic traffic can help you understand how well your website is ranking on search engines and how effective your SEO efforts are. Keyword Rankings Keyword rankings refer to the positions your website ranks for specific keywords on search engine results pages. Tracking keyword rankings can help you understand how well your website is optimized for specific keywords and how competitive your industry is. Conversions Conversions refer to the number of visitors who take a specific action on your website, such as filling out a contact form or making a purchase. Tracking conversions can help you understand how effective your website is at converting visitors into customers and how well your SEO efforts are driving qualified leads. Backlinks Backlinks refer to the number and quality of external links pointing to your website. Tracking backlinks can help you understand how well your website is building authority and reputation in your industry and how competitive your industry is. Learn a bit more about Backlinks for real estate. How to evaluate a real estate SEO expert for your business If you're looking for a real estate SEO expert for your business, there are several things to consider. Here are some tips for finding the right real estate SEO expert for your business: Look for Experience and Expertise When choosing a real estate SEO expert, it's essential to look for someone with experience and expertise in the real estate industry. They should be familiar with the unique challenges and opportunities of the industry and have a deep understanding of search engine algorithms and best practices. Check References and Reviews Before hiring a real estate SEO expert, it's essential to check their references and reviews. Look for reviews and testimonials from previous clients, and ask for references that you can contact directly to hear about their experience working with the expert. Ask About Their Strategies and Tactics When interviewing potential real estate SEO experts, ask them about their strategies and tactics for improving your website's search engine rankings. They should be able to explain their approach in clear and understandable terms and provide examples of their success in the past. Evaluate Their Communication and Collaboration Skills Effective communication and collaboration are crucial when working with a real estate SEO expert. Look for someone who is responsive, transparent, and easy to work with, and who can collaborate effectively with your team to achieve your SEO goals. At Realtyna, we have some best Real Estate SEO Experts who are professional in Real Estate marketing. if you care about your website's performance in search results, you can hire us to do Search Engine Optimization for your website, if you are interested or want to know more about our SEO plans for your business, check out the Realtyna SEO packages. Conclusion In conclusion, a real estate SEO expert is a crucial component of any real estate business's digital marketing strategy. They use their skills and expertise to improve website visibility, drive targeted traffic, and increase conversions. By conducting thorough keyword research, implementing on-page and off-page optimization techniques, and tracking and measuring success, they can help your business dominate search engine results and surpass your competitors. To view the original article, visit the Realtyna blog.

How to master local SEO for your real estate website
In today's digital world, over 90% of homebuyers initiate their search online. Thus, mastering local SEO for real estate is not just beneficial — it's essential. This article delves deeper into the significance of local SEO in the real estate industry, highlighting strategies to enhance local search rankings and spotlight properties effectively. This article is also a summary of the original article written on Real Estate Webmasters' blog. Understanding Local SEO Local SEO is pivotal for real estate businesses for several reasons: Hyper-Local Visibility: It ensures your content and listings target the right audience in specific geographic areas. Increased Traffic and Leads: A higher rank in local search results can lead to more organic traffic and quality local leads. Online Credibility: A top spot in local search results can establish your business as a trusted local expert. Tip: Local SEO is a marathon, not a sprint. Results may take time, but the payoff is worth the patience. Optimizing Your Website for Local Search To be relevant for local queries, consider: Local Keywords: Integrate phrases that local clients might use when searching for real estate services into your website content, meta titles, and descriptions. NAP Consistency: Ensure your name, address, and phone number are consistent across all online platforms. Local Business Listings: Claim and optimize your listings on platforms like Google My Business and Yelp. Schema Markup: Use this code type to give search engines detailed information about your business. Tip: Regularly monitor your website's performance using tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console to refine your strategy. Leveraging Local Reviews and Testimonials for SEO Reviews and testimonials can significantly influence your local SEO rankings and online reputation: Encourage Reviews: Prompt satisfied clients to leave reviews on platforms like Google and Yelp. Respond to Reviews: Engage with all feedback to show you value your clients. Feature Testimonials: Display client testimonials on your website to provide social proof. Schema Markup: Use "Review Schema" to showcase your star ratings in search results. Tip: Proactively request reviews from clients to enhance your online presence. Enhancing Hyperlocal Content Hyperlocal content focuses on specific communities or neighborhoods: Detailed Neighborhood Profiles: Offer comprehensive profiles on the neighborhoods you serve. Local Events: Share content about local events to engage your audience. Local Market Updates: Regularly update your audience on the local real estate market. Local Keywords: Embed local keywords into your content for better discoverability. Tip: Consider creating videos on local market updates to bolster your content strategy. Citations and Links: Enhancing Online Visibility Citations and backlinks are essential for local SEO: Building Citations: Ensure mentions of your business's name, address, and phone number are consistent online. Acquiring Quality Backlinks: These are incoming links from other websites that boost your site's authority. Internal Linking: Link from one page of your website to another to enhance user experience. Tip: Prioritize quality over quantity for backlinks. Avoid dubious SEO tactics that can lead to penalties. In Conclusion Local SEO is indispensable for real estate professionals aiming to enhance visibility and engagement. It's an ongoing process of optimization, monitoring, and adaptation. By implementing the strategies discussed in this article, real estate professionals can effectively connect with potential buyers and stand out in a competitive market.

Real Estate Website SEO: Guide for Success in 2023
SEO (search engine optimization) can be hard to wrap your brain around because it's something you never really see but that has a huge impact on your success online. Your website needs to be fully optimized for your brokerage to reach its full digital potential, both in 2023 and beyond. In fact, SEO is just as important as good design and images. It's the brains that powers your website and lets consumers find you simply by searching for "homes for sale" in your area. When it comes to SEO, there's no one thing you can do for your website to rank higher. Real success is the result of many compounding, ongoing, and ever-evolving tasks. If you don't have full-time support, these can feel overwhelming and impossible to manage. But with the right partner, you can entrust difficult SEO work to an expert and spend your time focusing on what you do best—selling real estate. To give you a better idea about SEO and what makes an award-winning website stand out from the competition, I'm going to answer some of your most commonly asked SEO questions below and share my tips on how to rank higher in 2023 and for every year after! What is search engine optimization? Search engine optimization, or SEO, is everything you can do to help your site perform better on search engines, like Google and Bing. Search engines use complex (and top-secret) algorithms to gauge whether a site is useful to searchers. In a nutshell, SEO comprises all the steps you can take to help these search engines find your website, determine its content is useful, and as a result, display your site as high up as possible in search results (if you work hard and do things right, somewhere on the first page—or even the very first spot!). Why is SEO important for real estate websites? SEO is the not-so-secret sauce that drives consumers to your website, turning it into an organic lead generator and keeping your funnel full. Search engines use crawlers to identify websites and updated website content on the internet. Once crawlers find a website, they add it to an index, i.e., a huge database of all the URLs they deem worthy of showing to searchers in search results. Therefore, the logical first step in SEO is getting crawlers to find your site, and the second is convincing them your site is both trustworthy and useful, so they keep sending searchers back again and again. To complicate things a little bit, SEO best practices are constantly evolving because search engines are constantly changing (and improving) how they determine what qualifies as consumer-worthy content. It's next to impossible to keep up to date with all these changes without full-time help. Does your team have time to add SEO to its list? Most brokers we talk to say, "No way, my team is busy already!" That's why working with an SEO partner can be so valuable. How can you make your website SEO-optimized? Truth be told, SEO isn't sexy. It involves tracking hundreds of tiny details that over time can add up to big rewards. If you are thinking of your website like a house, SEO starts right in the foundation and the structural level that eventually becomes a beautiful home. SEO is the fuel that powers your website, turning it into a lead-generating machine and providing measurable ROI. That means it involves a lot of work behind the walls, under the floorboards, and on content and pages your visitors might never see so crawlers index and rank your site first. What are the basic building blocks of SEO? At a minimum, your site needs to cover certain basic elements to be optimized for search engines. As simple as they are, they're crucial to get absolutely right. Let's look at three of them: 1. Website design and code The first element for optimizing a website is its literal foundation: the design (its basic information architecture, structure, and page hierarchy) and the actual code used to make it appear in a browser. Websites have to be designed and coded with SEO in mind and every piece specifically crafted to ensure optimal search engine performance. These include the HTML and CSS markups, canonical text, everything that affects page weight and load time, crawl paths, linking structures, and more. Does this sound like a lot? Because it is! 2. Customization The second SEO building block is customization. The best homebuilders (web developers) in the world can build your house (website) on the finest foundation (code), but it won't start to feel like it's really yours until you've added your own finishing touches. That's where customization comes in. Search engine algorithms use many different metrics to figure out whether your website is useful (and therefore, worthy of a high ranking). One metric of website quality is uniqueness, the degree to which your site's content resembles that on other websites. This is considered a reliable way to determine whether your site provides relevant information visitors can't find anywhere else. This is why customization is important: For example, if you're trying to sell houses in Houston, but your website doesn't mention the city's diverse neighborhoods or its amenities, or copies blocks of text information word-for-word from the Chamber of Commerce website (or, gasp! Wikipedia), then Houston, we have a problem. 3. Content The third SEO building block is content. Quality content is another way to demonstrate your site is useful, leading to higher search rankings. The more recent and relevant (unique) content you have, the better. If you change and update your content frequently, it shows you're maintaining your site, so search engines believe it's more up to date (and therefore more useful). The more useful your site seems to search engines, the higher your ranking. These are just three of the most basic SEO considerations you need to think about. How often are these on your to-do list? What can I do so my real estate website ranks higher? As you can see from this article, there's no one thing you can do so your brokerage's site ranks higher on search engines. A high ranking is the result of a concerted strategy involving many ongoing tasks and tiny details that really add up. Every website and market is different. That said, there are some steps you can start taking right now to put your website on the right path. Here are three quick tips for getting a better SEO ranking: 1. Update and improve your website content If your website foundation is already strong and your content is tagged properly (headings, meta descriptions, etc.), you can start improving your ranking a lot by updating your pages and adding the kind of content crawlers are looking for. These include popular real estate keywords, demographic information, neighborhood data, and "community marketing" (what you'd want to know if you were looking for a home in your area…). If your content isn't properly tagged, start there first. 2. Update and improve your links The worst thing a visitor could find on your website is a dead end—a page where there's nowhere to go, so they leave. Search engines do not like these dead-end pages, also called orphan pages, because of the bad user experience they create. Check your website for dead-end pages (you can use a tool like the User Flow reports on Google Analytics). If you find any, add outbound links, social media widgets, or link back to other high-value pages on your website so you are no longer penalized for these pages. 3. Get a free SEO consultation Not sure what the best next step is for a better ranking? We can help! Steve Thomson is Vice President of Software Development at Constellation1. He was recognized as a 2021 Newsmaker by RISMedia. To view the original article, visit the Constellation1 blog.

Is the Organic Lead Machine at Your Brokerage Broken? Fix It with These 4 Simple Tips
In a high interest-rate environment like ours, listings are harder and harder to come by. Brokers and agents can't afford to let leads slip through the cracks. And yet, the organic lead machines at many brokerages are broken, or at the very least, not working as well as they could be. Is your lead generation machine broken? Take this short quiz to find out. Ask yourself the following: Is the number of visits to your website trending down? Are you converting less than 1% of your visitors to leads? Are leads left unactioned once you convert them? Do actioned leads go cold quickly? Did you answer "yes" to any one of these questions? Guess what, it's time to repair your lead machine. A few simple improvements can help you rev back up and keep your funnel full, no matter what the market is doing. Read on to learn how to solve each of these problems. SEO: The Solution to Declining Website Visitors When you check the number of unique site visitors (known as users in the free Google Analytics tool), how does the number trend over time? There will be natural fluctuations in your web traffic, and boosts when you publish new content or go on a marketing blitz. But if your traffic is generally stagnant—or worse, declining—it could be a sign that your site needs some search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is a complex topic, but when it comes to real estate SEO, we've got you covered. You can learn more about the ins and outs of real state website SEO on our dedicated page, read our Ultimate Guide to Real Estate SEO for 2022, or learn three actionable tips to start ranking higher right now. Many brokers don't have the time or expertise to track key metrics like unique visitors, bounce rate, site traffic trends, and more. In fact, most brokerages are guilty of what Craig Rowe, Real Estate Technology Columnist, calls SEO negligence, ignoring SEO and its importance for generating leads. If you fall into this category, working with the right partner can take SEO off your plate and give you time to focus on where you shine—selling real estate. Low Conversion Rate? Tweak Your Website Design If your traffic is good, but your conversion rate is stubbornly low, there may be an issue with your website design. A widely cited statistic attributed to NAR® states that the true conversion rate for online real estate leads is between 0.4% and 1.2%. That means for every 1,000 people who sign up for your newsletter, create an account and save a property search, download your buyer's guide, or subscribe to your blog, only 4 to 12 of them will result in a closing. Remember, buyers and sellers are landing on your page for one reason: they're interested in real estate in your area. If you're letting your expertise shine and providing the right path to conversion, the leads will come. If the path is broken or isn't there, leads will lose their way. Here are three website design elements you can work on to boost conversion by providing trigger points consumers can engage with: Jazz up your homepage and provide a freebie Your homepage is what makes the biggest impression on visitors—it's the first thing they see! Make sure it wows them with a beautiful image, consistent branding, and a clear "path" to the action you want them to take: clicking a listing, searching for property, visiting your blog, etc. You can offer a free home valuation, CMA, or newsletter as a conversion incentive. Most consumers will be willing to part with their information in exchange for such valuable resources. Learn about the five most common problems with real estate websites and how to fix them. Improve your contact page and make sure it works Craig Rowe tells a story where he was trying to contact a large number of agents in a short period. More than half the time, their Contact Me pages were either difficult to find, didn't work, or didn't seem to capture his information. There was no phone number listed or other ways to contact the agent. If a journalist can't get in touch with an agent, how would a consumer be expected to? Your site needs multiple ways for visitors to contact you, whether it's a form visitors fill in, a chatbot, a call button, or various other options. Brighten up your blog and add calls to action Blogs are a huge asset to your website. They help with SEO and are a huge conversion opportunity through calls-to-action (or CTAs). By including CTAs, you encourage visitors to provide their information by offering a newsletter, a market report or CMA, or even an eBook about real estate in your area in exchange. Get creative! Unactioned Leads: Improve and Automate Your Lead Routing You're getting leads through your website. Phew! The inbound arm of your lead machine is working. What about the next piece of the puzzle? Do you know how many of those leads never get a follow-up? Can you identify where the breakdown is in the chain of communication? You can obviously route leads by hand—lots of teams do. But when you are already busy, and time is of the essence (responding within 5 minutes dramatically boosts conversion), smart automation and customized routing with a powerful real estate CRM could be the ticket to helping you track your leads, action them faster, and keep any from slipping through the cracks. Keep Leads Warm with Targeted Nurture Campaigns Not all leads are ready to make a move right away. By some estimates, online real estate leads may need to incubate for anywhere from 6 to 24 months. Two years is a long time to be sitting on a lead, but those are seeds you'd do well to plant now. What are you doing in the meantime? Keeping your leads warm requires regular contact points. These can come in many forms, like a newsletter, recommended properties emails, social media posts, drip campaigns, and more. The idea is to keep you top of mind while providing information that's relevant to wherever your lead is in your sales funnel. Do they need preapproval? Do they need to adjust their property or neighborhood expectations? Do they need to make repairs or curb appeal improvements before they list? If you're the first person they think of when they are ready to act, you'll have another successful conversion under your belt! With the right tools, these lead nurture steps can be automated, too. Watch the Leads Pour in After Making These Simple, But Powerful Fixes If you don't know what's wrong with your lead machine, you won't be able to fix it. Find out where your problems lie (e.g., traffic, conversion, follow-up), identify your gaps, then find the right solution to fill them. Constellation1 helps brokerages look at all these elements together, aggregate our findings, identify gaps, and tailor solutions to brokerages' needs. To view the original article, visit the Constellation1 blog.

3 SEO Real Estate Website Strategies
If you're a real estate agent, broker, or technology company, you know that having a website is essential for your business. It gives you a place to showcase your listings and services and allows potential clients to learn more about you and get in touch with you quickly. However, simply having a website isn't enough – you need to ensure that your site is optimized for search engines to attract more visitors. Yes, search engine optimization is still alive and continues to grow as it evolves in providing answers to people's questions. In this blog post, we will discuss three SEO strategies to help improve your website's positioning in search engines and generate more readers and leads! The first is that the search engine's artificial intelligence will play a prominent role in SEO rankings, especially Google's. Most SEO experts focus on Google because of their search and Chrome web browser market shares. In the United States, Google maintains a 92% market share in search and averages around 63% market share of people using Chrome as a web browser. The other major search engines are Bing and Yahoo, which hold a combined market share of around 10%. A search engine's AI focuses on capturing consumer behavior metrics for ranking factors. This means that click-through rate, time people spend on a page, and other overall website metrics influence how the AI prioritizes content. Therefore, when reevaluating SEO strategy, crafting well-organized and quality, engaging content is critical to success. What is essential to the readers of your content is also crucial to the search engine's AI for ranking. This is where custom content on the property search result pages for neighborhoods and listing detail pages can improve SEO. Guidelines for content creation are included in the E-A-T principle. Google defines E-A-T for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. An approach that is excellent to use in evaluating the quality of content. A few guidelines to use when developing content with E-A-T in mind are: Does the content contain authentic information, reporting, research, or analysis? Is the content written by an expert demonstrating their knowledge about the subject? Is the content written very well, or is it sloppy? Are the facts in the content easily verifiable? Content writers who follow these simple guidelines achieve the desired results to improve search engine rankings. Additionally, as AI continues to drive rankings, it impacts search results. As a result, it is possible that when submitting a search, a page may be #2, and when performing a subsequent search, the same page may be #5. Therefore, AI will adjust its page ranking based on the events at the time of a search. The second SEO strategy is to focus on optimizing your website with structured data. Most people are familiar with the concept of structured data, even if they don't realize it. Structured data is simply information that is organized in a predefined way. This can include things like open houses, homes for sale, and site structure. By adding structured data to your site, you are essentially providing a map for search engines to follow. This makes it easier for them to index your content and display it in search results. In addition, structured data can also help you improve your click-through rate by making your listings more relevant and user-friendly. However, there is a catch. Don't overuse structured data or resort to black-hat methods. Google just takes advantage of specific structured data, which must be implemented correctly for the content's trustworthiness to be confirmed. As you can see, structured data is an integral part of SEO. If you want your site to be successful, make sure you take advantage of this powerful tool. Lastly, one of the benefits of SEO is that it can help improve the accessibility of a site. Optimizing the website for Google search can also help make it more accessible for people with disabilities who use screen readers and other assistive technologies. According to WCAG 2.1, one of the success criteria for accessibility is that "webpages can be parsed unambiguously by software." This means that screen readers and other assistive technologies should be able to interpret the content on a webpage without any ambiguity. However, many websites are not well-optimized for SEO, so it can be difficult or impossible for these technologies to parse. Therefore, improving the SEO of a website can also help to enhance its accessibility. If you implement these three SEO strategies, you will be well on your way to improving your website's ranking in search engines and generating more leads! The last thing you want to do is to ignore or think SEO is not a practical part of a marketing strategy. What other SEO strategies have you used to improve your website's ranking? Please share your tips with us in the comments below! And if you're looking for more help, contact the WAV Group. WAV Group explicitly focuses its SEO strategies on the real estate industry. To view the original article, visit the WAV Group blog.

The Ultimate Guide for Real Estate SEO: Tips for 2022
Search engine optimization (SEO) can feel like a bit of a mystery, and something that's hard to get a handle on. But your website needs to be fully search engine optimized to ensure your brokerage's success, both in 2022 and beyond. SEO is just as important as beautiful design and visuals. It's the brains powering your website allowing consumers to find you. There isn't just one thing you can do to rank higher online when it comes to SEO. Success rests on an accumulation of many ongoing and ever-evolving tasks. These can feel impossible to manage. However, with the right partner, you can leave the heavy SEO lifting to an expert and get back to focusing on what you do best—real estate. To teach you more about SEO and what makes our award-winning websites stand out from the competition, I'm going to answer some of your most commonly asked SEO questions below. What is SEO? Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process of optimizing your site for search engines, like Google and Bing. Search engines use complex (and closely guarded) algorithms to determine whether a site is useful to consumers. SEO includes all the steps you can take to help search engines identify your website and show it as high up in the search results as possible (ideally, somewhere on the first page). Why is SEO important for a real estate website? SEO is what drives consumers to your website, turning it into a lead generator and keeping your funnel full. Search engines use crawlers to identify websites on the internet and updated website content. Once crawlers find it, they add it to their index, a huge database of all the URLs they deem worthy of providing in search results. The first key to SEO is getting crawlers to find your site, and the second key is to convince them that your site is trustworthy and useful, so they keep sending searchers there. SEO best practices are constantly evolving, and it's next to impossible to keep up with all of them without full-time help. Is SEO another time-consuming task your team can add to its list? Most brokers say no, in our experience. This is why working with the right partner is so important. What goes into creating an optimized website? Let's be honest: there's really nothing sexy about SEO. It involves a unique skill set that requires tracking hundreds of tiny details that can add up to big rewards. Think of your website like a house: the structure and system that help with SEO are the foundation, the strong bones behind a beautiful website. SEO brings your website vision to life and turns it into a lead-generation machine for real ROI. SEO is also about trust: the search engine needs to trust your website provides searchers looking for information about real estate where you work. What's more, consumer search habits are changing. They're asking questions, not typing keywords. We do a lot of work behind the scenes, even on pages your visitors might rarely see, to build trust with crawlers so that they show your site first. At a bare minimum, your site needs to cover certain basics. These might seem simple, but they're crucial to get absolutely right. Let's look at a few of those now: Basic 1: Design and Code The first step to creating an optimized website starts at the most basic level: the design (your site's information architecture, structure, and page hierarchy) and the actual computer code used to make it. Websites must be designed and coded with SEO in mind and every component tailored to ensure optimal search engine performance. These include HTML and CSS markups, canonical text, factors affecting page weight and load time, crawl paths, linking structures, and more. Basic 2: Customization The second step to creating an optimized website is customization. The best homebuilders in the world can make a house for you on the finest foundation, but your house won't start to feel like a home until you add your own finishings and flavor. That's where customization comes in, and it applies to your website, too. Search engine algorithms use a lot of metrics to determine whether your website is valuable and useful. One metric for measuring the quality of your website is uniqueness, or the degree to which the content on your site resembles that on other websites and provides relevant information visitors can't find elsewhere. This is where customization comes in. If you're trying to sell houses in Houston, but your website makes zero mentions of the city and its amenities, or copies information word-for-word from the Chamber of Commerce website, then Houston, we have a problem. Basic 3: Content The third step to creating an optimized website is content. Quality content is essential to higher search rankings because it demonstrates that your site is useful. In theory, the more recent and relevant (unique) content you have, the better. Content that changes frequently shows that you're making regular updates, so the search engine believes your website is more up to date and therefore more useful. This can boost your ranking. These are just the three most basic SEO considerations you need to take care of. Do you even have time to tackle those? How can you achieve a better SEO ranking? There isn't just one thing your brokerage can do to rank better on search engines. As you can see from this article, a high ranking is an accumulation of ongoing tasks and tiny details that can really add up. While every website and market is different, we've compiled three quick tips for how you can achieve a better SEO ranking. Update and improve your existing content If your website structure is already solid and your content is properly tagged (headings, meta descriptions, etc.), you can still majorly improve your ranking by updating your pages and adding content crawlers are looking for. Think popular real estate keywords, demographic information, neighborhood information, and "community marketing" (what you'd want to know if you were looking for a home in your area). Update and improve your linking structure The worst thing you can have on your website is a dead end—a page a visitor gets to where there's nowhere to go but leave. Search engines hate these dead-end pages, also called orphan pages, because they create a bad user experience and increase the chances your visitor will just go somewhere else. Search engines are in the business of meeting their customers' demands for information. If your website doesn't do that, or makes information more difficult for crawlers to find, search engines won't trust your site or send users there. Check your website for dead-end pages (you can use a tool like User Flow reports from Google Analytics). If you find any, add outbound links, social media widgets, or link back to other high-value pages on your website. Ask us for a consultation Not sure what the best next step is for a higher website ranking? We can help with that! One of our customers, Vylla Home, increased its organic website traffic by more than 2,000% after switching to a Constellation1 website. This was thanks to a concerted effort by both sides: we provided the tools, and Vylla ran with them. We always make sure to go a step further, and it shows in our customers' results. Steve Thomson is Vice President of Software Development at Constellation1. He was recently recognized as a 2021 Newsmaker by RISMedia. To view the original article, visit the Constellation1 blog.

Think Like a Newspaper Publisher
A leading real estate brokerage in Southwest Florida generates nearly 200 visitors a month from a single blog post that provides reasons to move to the area. Another blog post filled with fun local facts from last April continues to drive nearly 100 visits to another Sunbelt-based brokerage. So, what's their secret sauce? They are all benefiting from the value of coupling content with SEO. Content is a crucial component of any SEO program for real estate. By providing content that attracts traffic to their website and engages visitors, brokerages can leapfrog local competitors in traffic and lead generation. Without a complete SEO and content strategy, you miss out on driving more prospective local home sellers and buyers to your brokerage website. That's why real estate brokerages benefit when they think like news veterans to drive more targeted and quality traffic to their websites. News publishers understand that nothing connects better to their audience than local news and information that provides value. Avoid Being Yesterday's News While you don't have a team of seasoned journalists who create content like big-time newspapers do, you can learn from how they do what they do. About a third of all traffic to one of the country's largest-circulation newspaper websites comes from search traffic, according to Alexa. In addition, the paper's reader engagement is off the charts at more than double their competitor's average. So, it is clear that newspapers care deeply about SEO and the insights it provides. For example, Search Engine Land notes that, often, data tools help shape editorial decisions. Newspapers closely monitor online reader behavior, which allows them to improve their content strategy, and, in turn, builds more trust with their readers. Newspapers don't think about SEO as a one-hit-wonder for their sites. They know building trust with their readers takes time, and rather than try to sell to their customers, they focus on informing them. Today's newspaper world offers content that connects, and readers keep coming back for more. Benefits of Content in Your Overall SEO Strategy Google likes websites that offer new and engaging content. The more frequently your content is updated, the more Google crawls and indexes your website. As Google begins to see your website as being authoritative, your ranking in Google searches improves. It's essential to provide fresh and frequent content that is distinct. Google does not like duplicate content. If you are repurposing the same content that Google is finding elsewhere, Google is less likely to come back and index your website. Google also will come back less frequently to a website when the content is stale. So you need to give search engines like Google something new to find. Delta Media Group regularly provides local content for brokerage websites that is distinct, with topics that spark curiosity to attract and then engage readers, and that helps ensure they spend more time on the broker's site. Examples of hyperlocal blog content include, "Top 5 Picnic Spots in Dayton," "Pet Parks of Portland," "Best Bookstores in Boise," "7 Fun Facts About the French Quarter," and "9 Reasons to Move to Naples." These are the type of evergreen posts that can drive more traffic to a website for years. In some larger markets, it is difficult for a brokerage to rank high in a Google search for a general home search, such as "Homes for sale in Miami." But by specifically building out hyperlocal blog content for these markets and optimizing these blogs for search, brokerages can increase their chances of ranking for the more competitive search phrases over time. Delta also provides industry-leading SEO software that automates the process of optimizing a brokerage's website. As a result, it helps brokerage websites grow immensely, creating tens of thousands of pages from MLS listing data – content a brokerage otherwise would not have. Plus, Delta's software provides Google with clean, more descriptive URLs for each page it creates, making it easier to index. This includes market landing pages, pages for local neighborhoods and subdivisions, school districts, brokerages, IDX listings results pages, and more — all optimized and updated for search engines automatically. Without this software, a brokerage would need a team of folks to manage this process. Combined with the regular blog posts Delta provides, there's always plenty of new content for Google to come back and index. Right Time, Right Content Real estate brokerages can leverage automation tools and deliver the right content to the right people at the right time. While you may not field a team of content creators like a major newspaper, the good news is that Delta Media already has one in place for you. Creating content of interest that is relevant and valued is what Delta does best, generating thousands of visitors to our brokerage clients' websites each month. For example, manually creating and maintaining social media channels, email marketing campaigns, and a blog can be challenging. Many brokerages don't dedicate the resources needed for an effective content marketing strategy because it can be overwhelming and often not deliver a return on one's investment of time and money. Delta Media Group helps brokerages overcome this hurdle by providing a robust content marketing strategy that leverages automated drip marketing email campaigns and social posting tools as well as hyperlocal blog content. Everything you do as a brokerage in leveraging content should be easy and help you better connect with the communities you serve. By delivering content that matters to your community, you can turn online prospects into closed transactions. For example, in New Hampshire, a monthly email that targets 22,000 individuals showcasing new listings, price changes, and a real estate article generates 53% of their website traffic and 33% of their leads. To drive more website traffic, major regional brokerages in North Carolina and Long Island, New York deploy automated marketing tools, including Market Watch reports, new listing alerts, push notifications, and the My Customer for Life drip marketing email campaign. As much as 10% of their total traffic comes from these automated tools. In fact, a brokerage can derive more than half of its website volume and a third of its leads from a well-crafted email campaign when the content is hyperlocal and seen as valuable. While the brokerage provides the content, the email goes out on behalf of agents to each agent's client and prospect database. Agents benefit from this strategy, as they don't have to lift a finger to touch both past and potential clients. They appreciate their broker giving them this type of marketing support that helps them grow their business. Over the years, one broker's email campaign has built an almost cult-like following, with recipients looking forward to their weekly email blast. Building Traffic and Leads Real estate SEO is a lot different than how SEO works for most other industries. Regular SEO typically is trying to build and drive traffic to products or services that remain the same. In real estate SEO, the product — a property listing — is turning over all the time, and every new home listing is a new product. A lot of brokerages struggle with SEO for this reason. But SEO done right can help brokerages dramatically increase traffic and generate more "ready to transact" leads. When compared with most other real estate marketing activities, SEO triumphs by delivering a stellar ROI, as it is one of the most profitable ways to market your brokerage website. And SEO isn't just for national brokerages or ones with million-dollar marketing budgets. SEO is achievable for brokerages of all sizes. Best of all, the audiences you reach on your website with the right SEO program are buyers and sellers who are more likely to transact sooner rather than later. Because Delta Media Group delivers the "under the hood" work that SEO requires, brokerages don't have to do the heavy lifting. As a leading real estate website and lead management developer, Delta has the programmers, system administrators, content creators, and web designers to help with the necessary website adjustments, maximizing the SEO of a brokerage site. Delta works within your real estate website, including the back-end code, to make the necessary programming adjustments, helping brokerages avoid using the services of a third-party SEO company. In addition, copywriting is done by a team of professionals so that SEO-based content creation is by writers who include graduates from top journalism programs and many former professional journalists. For SEO to remain effective, it also needs to be monitored and adjusted. Having a professional team that has your back gives brokerages peace of mind. Delta makes sure that your SEO investment continues to deliver traffic and leads through tracking and monitoring online behavior. As a result, brokerages get ongoing insight into their website traffic and lead generation because SEO transparency is paramount for its long-term success. The Big Takeaway It's a myth that SEO is only for the biggest brokerage firms, and SEO is anything but dead in real estate. The fact is SEO can provide one of the most significant returns on investment of any marketing expenditure by a brokerage. The right SEO and content marketing strategy can be a brokerage's secret sauce for driving more traffic and building more leads. When a brokerage thinks like a publisher by delivering hyperlocal, relevant and timely content, they will drive more traffic to their website, generate more actionable leads, and delight their agents. RE Technology readers can try DeltaNET 6 free for 30 days. To view the original article, visit the Delta Media Group blog.

5 Real Estate Searches You Should Be Aware of
Lead generation in the real estate industry is directly connected to a real estate agent's awareness of the real estate clients' needs. In the modern world when practically everything happens virtually, one of the best sources to understand clients' needs and determine what's missing in your real estate marketing strategy is to Google it. That's exactly what your clients and all of us do. We Google our questions and when some questions start to repeat themselves, they create a pattern that then appears as the most asked questions on Google. Keeping an eye on the repeated requests and questions will help you to understand how to proceed with your lead generation strategy. "What Should I Be Aware of When Buying Land or a Property?" This is a question that most first-time buyers ask before contacting a real estate agent. It is good if you have a ready answer for them that is ranked properly and will pop up as soon as they type it. It's especially important if you're working with a first time buyer exclusively. "What to Check in a House Before Buying?" This question is also what most people purchasing a property are interested in. As a seasoned real estate pro, with a lot of experience you can provide valuable information at the same time promote your service by showcasing your expertise. "How Do I Know if My Realtor Is Bad?" Let's be honest, real estate agents have an ambiguous reputation. Hollywood representation of the real estate industry coupled with the general belief that real estate agents work only for commission creates an illusion that real estate agents do nothing. The only thing that can be done in this case is just continue working and showcasing your expertise, helping people make the stressful homebuying/homeselling process easier. "Why Do You Need a Real Estate Agent?" This question is something that is asked very often typically by people who just start the homebuying/selling process and have no idea how complicated this process might be. Explain and showcase the responsibilities of the real estate agent and how an agent can simplify the process of homebuying/selling. "Documents to Check Before Buying Property?" Even though real estate agents can't give legal advice, they can help clients to understand what documents they need to pay attention to before buying the property. Paperwork can be complicated, time consuming and oftentimes just confusing, and real estate clients can avoid all this stress by hiring an experienced real estate agent. To view the original article, visit the Realtyna blog.

Real Estate SEO: How Do I Get Shown in Google's Featured Snippets?
Google is constantly changing and evolving, trying to make visitors' experience more user-friendly and allow them get the answers they need sooner. That's why Google snippets rolled out a featured snippet option. So, what does it mean exactly for real estate agents? Let's find out. What Is a Featured Snippet on Google? A featured snippet is a selected search result that appears at the top of the search results in a different format box. Featured snippets, also known as a position zero, aim to give visitors a short answer straight away. Types of featured snippets include: Tables Steps Definitions Lists Example: How Does a Featured Snippet Work? Featured snippets are automatically chosen by Google while crawling a web search listing. Different parts of the text are extracted from your article in order to be placed as a small 40-60 word text above the first position on Google, hence the name "position zero." What Are the Types of Featured Snippets? Tables – In the case of tables, Google is pulling data from the search listing and highlighting it in the form of table. If your data is too big according to the featured snippets standards, Google will hide a part of data under the "More" button. Steps – As the name suggests, this featured snippet type contains a list of steps. Usually, it answers the question "How to...?" It is presented in an ordered format. Definitions – This feature snippet contains a concise definition of the search query. The definition type of featured snipped gives a short but a straightforward answer to the searchers' question. Most commonly, this kind of featured snippet answers the question "what." Lists – List featured snippets usually contain an unordered number of suggestions and items. Usually, it is presented in a bulleted list format. OneBox Results – OneBox results are inline answers or tools in search results. For example, boxes that showcase time or weather forecasts will be considered as a OneBox result. How to Optimize Featured Snippets? Depending on the featured snippet type and the topic you're writing about, there are different ways of optimizing featured snippets. Let's say you're writing about how to buy a house as a first-time buyer. You either will need to optimize your page for the step- or list-type featured snippets, depending on the direction your article takes. As experienced SEO specialists suggest, the first thing you should do is to do your research. And by researching, we mean checking other similar content pieces with keywords you want to rank for, as well the "People also ask" section. What Is a Featured Snippet? As we already mentioned, featured snippets are somewhat of a phenomenon, a dark horse in the SEO world. Without higher rankings, featured snippets can appear above the first position and a lot of times get a big chunk of traffic for so called no-click searches. What might be a great experience for casual internet surfers in terms of instantly getting the answer for the question they're searching for, doesn't exactly translate positively for the content creators, unfortunately. As experts showcase, with Google's attempt to give an instant answer through the featured snippet, they see a drop in traffic and most probably this issue will only become bigger and bigger. And even though you can opt out of featured snippets, as some studies showcased, it leads again to the loss of organic traffic across the whole website. So opting out of the featured snippets might not be a good idea. But, in any case, you should test it on your own website and see it for yourself. To opt out of the featured snippets, you can use a nosnippet tag that looks like this: <meta name="robots" content="nosnippet"> Another way is to limit characters for the snippet. This way, if the text has a lower number of characters, featured snippets won't be shown for your page. <meta name="robots" content="max-snippet:40″> To view the original article, visit the Realtyna blog.

Google and Real Estate, Part 2: Search Engine Optimization
In the second part of Google and Real Estate (read part one here), learn about SEO and how we can optimize our efforts online to improve organic lead generation. What Is SEO? SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and it has been the buzzword in online marketing since the beginning of search engines. It is a broad term with various interpretations, but the best way to describe it is a set of strategies and action plans to improve rankings of a business in search engines, especially Google. It is not only limited to Google. On YouTube, Facebook and other social media where visibility and ranking defines the fate of business, SEO is applicable. The strategies might include: Optimizing the content of a website or page Optimize key terms and phrases which are the subject of searches Optimize technical aspects of web development like tags and organic data And there is a lot more. In simple terms, every action that Google or other search engines consider valuable for the user is SEO. This is why most experts believe that the best approach to SEO is meeting the demands of your target audience. Google uses a mindset that is often referred to as Turing Machine Theory. It is based on the idea that a successful algorithm is the one that makes a machine as close to human beings as possible. Imagine there is a computer and a person behind a wall. Now, a user approaches this wall and tries to interact with the computer and the human behind the wall. Turing theory succeeds when this person cannot understand whether she is interacting with a person or a machine. The aim of Google is to achieve this with its search engines. SEO for Real Estate Business? IDX websites can also benefit from higher ranking on Google. Organic MLS integration is one of the key features of a successful SEO campaign for real estate websites. This list of activities can help you improve your status on search results: Use Organic Feed An organic MLS feed can help Google index your pages and display them for respective keywords. Using iFrames will deprive you of this chance since Google won't recognize them as valid pages. Optimize Tags Using the right set of tags can help you rank better on Google. Make sure you use the organic and valuable tags and not generic ones. Overuse of tags, especially those that are not related to the content may get penalized by Google. Learn more about tags by visiting our blog Tags in Real Estate Online Marketing. Create Content This is, as we all know, the most important element in Google recognition of your business. If you provide regular and on-demand content for users, you are most likely to enjoy a truly deserved ranking. Content can be blogs, pictures, images, infographics, etc. Keywords and Phrases The whole content of your website should be relevant to your niche, so it can get ranked more accurately. Research keywords and phrases that are closer to you and your area, and avoid generic and difficult keywords. Learn more about real estate top keywords by visiting our article Best Real Estate SEO Keywords. Internal /External Linking Proper linking inside and outside your website will help search engine crawlers understand your content and website better. This will also lead to more accurate results and eventually more qualified leads. Maintain a balance of internal links to different pages, and make sure you have some external links to reputable websites in the niche. Optimize Your Loading Speed Nobody likes a slow website. Google gives a lot of credit to this. Use Google's page speed tools to analyze this. Optimize for Mobile Clients spend more time on their phones than their PCs, so you need to make sure your IDX website is optimized for mobile responsiveness. Referrals and Traffic Use social media and other outlets at your disposal to attract more people (traffic) to your website. However, be aware that it can sabotage your ranking as much it can improve it. In other words, if you draw traffic from spammy activities and generic sources, Google will penalize you and your ranking will suffer. Use Quality Hosting Services Hosting services are of utmost value to real estate websites. An IDX website holds a lot of listings data that might be hosted locally or on the fly. This can not only affect your loading speed but also the organic nature of your content. SEO Checklist (printable) Here is a printable SEO checklist for your real estate website. Feel free to print it and share it with your colleagues: SEO Checklist What's Next? Having a SEO friendly platform and making further optimizations of SEO through organic techniques will definitely help maintain a solid performance by your website. Nonetheless, the market is highly competitive and you need to try more than that to stand out from the crowd. Needless to say, advertising is your next viable option, and that is why we are going to discuss Google Ads and its implications for real estate websites in the next part of our Google series: Google and Real Estate, Part 3: Google Ads. To view the original article, visit the Realtyna blog.

Answering Your Questions About SEO and Your Real Estate Website
I have spent over 20 years helping a wide variety of companies grow their businesses on the Internet. Here are two of the most frequently asked questions I receive and their answers: What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)? Why does SEO need to be approached differently within the real estate industry? What Is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)? First, let me define what Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is from my perspective. SEO techniques are used on and off websites to make a site more appealing to search engines. The more search engines like a website, the more they visit to index its pages. The result of SEO work done correctly--search engines push your website higher in search results for specific key phrases associated with your products and/services. Traffic generated from SEO is called "organic traffic." SEO in the Early Days Over the years, SEO has evolved, but I'd argue the core fundamentals have not changed that much. Early on in the infancy stage of SEO, it was the Wild West (late 1990s). Many people resorted to keyword stuffing or paying link farms to create thousands of links back to a site. While this process resulted in short term gains for these companies, any advancement made was quickly replaced with penalties once search engines caught on to their spammy techniques. Even during these Wild West days, savvy developers and online marketers understood it was all about designing sites for the end user. Eventually, search engines started publishing best practices, many of which still apply today. SEO Best Practices You need to build a site that is easy to use and navigate. The website needs to be technically sound. It needs to perform well speed-wise. The website needs designing with the end-user in mind, not the search engines. It needs to have unique and engaging content. You need to research high authority 'complementary' sites and obtain links back to your site. It needs to be trustworthy Add on-page optimization and internal linking throughout your website to help search engines better understand what the site is about and to navigate it easier. This last point is evolving a bit as the search engines are becoming smarter and don't need as much assistance. There are different approaches to SEO if you are a B2B or B2C company, but at the end of the day, the goals for any SEO campaign should be to increase traffic and leads/sales. Why Is SEO for the Real Estate Industry Approached Differently? Within most other industries, whether you are B2B or B2C, you are dealing with information that does not change often. For example, if you are a carpet cleaning company, your services will not change much over time. Or if you have an online store, products are added or discontinued over time, but generally speaking, your offerings stay pretty consistent. The consistency in these two examples allows the marketer to focus more intently on specific products and/or services, building out valuable content and links over time around the core services or products. The most significant difference with a real estate website is the lack of consistency with the products: homes, buildings, land, etc. Each property has a unique SKU number, so to speak, so it makes things even more challenging; the properties are only online until they sell. In major markets, we are talking thousands of property listings turning over quickly. Instead of trying to optimize each listing individually, many marketers in the real estate industry will focus on areas--states, counties, cities, neighborhoods, school districts, subdivisions, etc. For example, if you are a real estate firm in Sarasota, Fla., you may create a landing page with listings for Sarasota. And from that page, you'll drill down and create additional pages for neighborhoods within Sarasota. Consequently, you would use SEO tactics on all of those pages. This process is a fairly common practice within the real estate industry. The downside to this approach is that you will be missing out on visitors searching for a specific home for sale. Surprisingly, we have found that single address property searches equate to a significant amount of monthly traffic. Some of our clients see nearly 50 percent of their traffic originating from single address property search--i.e., 123 Main Street, Sarasota. Moreover, when it comes to recruiting and retaining, a firm with real estate listings displayed on the first page of Google has a distinct advantage over local competitors who cannot. To stay ahead of the curve, you should review your current website from two different aspects. 1. Technical Aspect of SEO The technical aspects of SEO (the how and why behind search engines crawling and indexing a site) are even more important with real estate sites than other industries because of the sheer amount of data processed daily. Clear paths for search engines need to be created to crawl from page-to-page, gathering pertinent information throughout your site. I have found that many real estate websites struggle in this area. To determine if your site has technical issues, look at how many pages you have indexed in Google (example: type site: www.hpw.com into Google search). Based on the number of listings and other content throughout your site, if the number of indexed pages seems low, there may be underlying issues. 2. Content Aspect of SEO Within the real estate industry, content is essential given the industry's competitive nature and some of the previously mentioned challenges. Blogging is a popular way to grow your site's visibility in search engines. As a rule of thumb, blogs should support the site's overall SEO strategy. However, in many cases, blogs are the only area where SEO is leveraged. For example, if your website is not ranking for the markets you serve, a blog may be your only avenue to publish optimized content for better visibility. Unless you are willing to invest significantly in time and money to make an impact, this option may not be ideal for you. Some companies do it and are successful, but having a better understanding of the website's shortfalls and correcting them will save you time and money in the long run. Taking a Look at the Competition I also wanted to touch on the industry's competitive nature and attempt to set proper expectations if you are a local firm engaging in SEO. The real estate industry is competitive, REALLY competitive. You have portals led by Zillow, corporate franchises, and then all of the local firms all competing for the number one position within the search results. The more competitive the market is in general (e.g., Dallas or San Francisco), the bigger the hill is to climb because there are even more online competitors. Realistically speaking, most local firms are not going to outrank the portals or even corporate franchises for phrases like "Dallas real estate," for example. These sites have an enormous amount of content because they have a national presence and all of the listings and associated content to go along with it. That is a big deal and one that is tough to beat. It's not impossible to outrank bigger players because many of our clients do. The clients that do tend to be very large and have spent years investing in SEO and content strategies. A realistic approach is to focus on less competitive phrases and ensure that your listing shows up on the first page of results. Less competitive phrases revolve around neighborhoods, subdivisions, and school districts. If you are successful and climb to the top for these phrases, it generally produces better quality traffic and leads. Also, visitors using these types of search phrases have narrowed their focus and are a bit more qualified. With SEO, Patience Is a Virtue... Really! A word to the wise: SEO is a long-term play, meaning don't expect immediate results. My rule of thumb is that if you don't at least stick it out for a year, look to invest your marketing dollars elsewhere. We are fortunate that we can move the needle fairly quickly for most of our clients. However, we run into some cases where it takes a bit longer, and that requires patience. Many factors determine SEO success. Every market and every company is different even though we are all in the real estate industry. So be patient and look at it as a long term investment. If It Sounds Too Good to Be True, It Probably Is Be cautious of companies making wild guarantees like: "We will get your site to the first position in Google for 'real estate.'" This sounds great to someone that is not too familiar with SEO, but realistically, most have no shot. When communicating with a potential partner, you need to feel like you can trust them, know what they are doing, and have your best interest at heart. If it doesn't seem logical or feel realistic, you should probably be concerned. Finally, just because a company claims "to do" SEO, be highly skeptical, especially in the real estate space. It's vital to understand precisely how these companies "do" SEO, and what success looks like based on data they have collected over time. Remember, SEO is about increasing traffic and leads. If they cannot provide you data on how they have helped other firms–run! It's also essential to understand the retention rate for the clients they currently serve. If they cannot retain clients, they are not providing value. So do your homework. Aaron Geh is a featured content contributor for Delta Media Group's industry magazine, Real Estate Marketing & Technology. Sign up today to receive your free subscription to Real Estate Marketing & Technology. To view the original article, visit the Delta Media Group blog.

Google Search Console and Your Real Estate Site: Part 1
We get asked about SEO... a lot. What can I do to boost it? How do I know where I rank? Anything I can do for free? The answer to all these questions (and more) can be found with Google Search Console. Of course, there are no magical, overnight SEO fixes. But Search Console is free, it offers a ton of crucial information about your site, and it's a basic, user-friendly tool you should have in your SEO toolkit. We use it every day!

SEO and Content: The Perfect 'It' Couple
Just like Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds, Lois Lane and Clark Kent, or spaghetti and meatballs, some couples are a natural fit. The same holds true for search engine optimization (SEO) and content. For people who are new to online marketing strategies, they might assume SEO and content exclude one another. That could not be farther from the truth.

How to Use Google My Business to Boost Local Awareness
What is Google My Business? Do you own a business? Are you looking to expand the customer awareness of your business or its online reputation? Do you want your business to be seen on Google? If you said yes to any of these questions, then Google My Business might be just the thing your business needs!

Creating SEO-Friendly Content for Real Estate
Once you've put in the time to assess and update your website with SEO in mind, the second piece of the puzzle is creating content that can drive traffic to your site. One of the best ways to do this is to have a blog component built into your site, with plugins, such as Yoast, that make posting SEO-friendly content easy. Once you've got the capability on your site for blogging, the key is to regularly post content that people want to read and see. Luckily, most real estate pros are neighborhood experts and creating local content is one of the best ways to reinforce your knowledge and credibility while also cornering the market on your chosen keywords.

Natural Language Processing for Real Estate
Natural Language Processing (NLP), as a subcategory of artificial intelligence, has continued to grow in its practice by the real estate industry. This growth is evident as seen by the proliferation of chatbots on real estate websites and new innovative products like Homebot, which won the 2018 Realogy FWD Innovation Award. Let's dip into Natural Language Processing and how to use it for SEO in real estate blog articles.

Google Flags Websites that Are Not HTTPS as Not Secure
It's for your clients. It's for your security. It's for Google. Our team heard "rumblings" as early as two years ago from Google strongly "advocating" website owners move to HTTPS encryption to make the Internet secure and protect the privacy of your users. If you have not yet acquired an SSL certificate, you may have already noticed Google has flagged your website as "Not Secure" in Chrome.

Real Estate News Curation for Your Website
Which two different audiences have a common interest that can make real estate news very important for your website? Your prospects and Google is the answer, and here's why. Google can index your website, and every now and then their bots will drop by to see if there's anything new. If Google begins to see regular new content, their bots will increase the frequency of their visits and you'll pick up some SEO clout. As for your prospective buyers and sellers, a great many of them will appreciate one place to get relevant real estate news, especially when it's localized as well as national. Active buyers, sellers, and investors want to know what's happening that can influence their next sale, purchase, or investment. The good news is that there is an easy and free way to have fresh content news delivered to your website regularly.

Google Isn't Dead! Why Real Estate Searches Are Surging
We've got three words for you: Google. Isn't. Dead. With the rise of third-party real estate apps, there's some question about whether Google is still the go-to for buyers and sellers. Sure, Google drives 100 billion website visits each month — but is any of that actually real estate related?

5 Black Hat SEO Tactics You Should Avoid
Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most powerful, essential tools for growing your real estate business online, and it's also a big business in its own right. Many SEO providers offer reputable, white hat SEO services that help grow your business without damaging your reputation, relying on their in-depth knowledge of how search engines work and what Google's algorithms want to see from high-ranked websites. However, you'll also want to be aware of marketers who try to cheat the system by using black hat SEO tactics, which are ultimately bad for business. Let's take a closer look at five black hat SEO tactics to avoid as you grow your real estate business online.

How Google's New SEO Updates will Affect Your Business
Google has once again updated their SEO protocols. Page speed has been important to desktop searches for some time, but now page speed will be a ranking factor for mobile devices, too. Read on to learn how this will affect you and what steps you can take to improve your website's SEO ranking. How will this affect me?

SEO Tips for Optimizing YouTube Real Estate Videos
Struggling with real estate video SEO? We've got the information you need to tap into YouTube's masses. The second largest search engine by volume (after Google), a winning marketing strategy for optimizing your content via YouTube search is one of the easiest ways to maximize ROI from your video marketing campaign. Simple, Effective Tactics for Optimizing YouTube Real Estate Video SEO:

Tips and Tools to Boost Your Firm's Website Traffic
By Dane O'Leary In 2018, just about everyone has a website. While this means there's incredible amount of real estate information available online, it inevitably means a lot of competition. Is there anything you can do to draw more attention — and traffic — to your real estate website? Fortunately, there is. Whether you're running a website with local listings for a brokerage or you're spearheading a real estate blog, there are a number of things you can do to help your website stand-out from the crowd. In fact, we've compiled four tips and tools that you can use right now to boost traffic to your site.

Google Loves Video – Are You Leveraging That Love?
On the fence about real estate video marketing? You could be missing out on an advertising goldmine. In online search results, top U.S. search engine Google gives preference to websites with video content, listing sites with video higher in page rankings. What's more, sites with video have lower bounce rates, keeping potential clientele right where you want them – with you. Used the right way, video can be a game changer, improving SEO, boosting website rankings and steering customers to your site. Six Ways to Target Your Audience

[Infographic] How to Optimize Your Business for Better SEO
One of the best ways to draw more buyers and sellers to your website is by improving your position in search rankings. On a recent webinar, Kelly Shelton, SEO Expert and VP of Marketing at Boostability, shared his advice to bring more (and better) leads to your website. Check out the infographic below and then catch the full webinar for more tips!

Trust and Time: The Two Ts of SEO
You've probably heard the saying, "Anything worth doing is worth doing correctly." This is true when it comes to implementing a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy for your real estate business. With the proper strategy in place, you will see your business reach new heights by making its way to the first page of any search engine. However, there is no quick and easy shortcut to real results. If you want to get to the first page of search results, you have to be prepared for the long ride ahead. Why does SEO take so long?

How to Optimize Your Video Strategy for SEO
Video has long been considered the most engaging form of marketing content. But when it comes to SEO, many marketers run into the challenge of making sure their videos are actually seen. If you want to optimize your video strategy and improve your SEO, you need to focus on searching, indexing, and shareability. Best Practices for Improving Your Video Marketing SEO

3 Real Estate SEO Myths to Avoid
The keys to effective search engine optimization (SEO) are constantly evolving, and if you're not a full-time SEO professional, it can be more than a little difficult to keep up with the latest developments. So the tips, tricks, and tactics that worked well for SEO a few years ago may not be the same as what works best today. Mix in a pile of SEO articles and content creators that all have their own opinions of the best SEO advice, and you've got a recipe for confusion. That constant supply of SEO advice means that there will always be myths about what works best, and debunking those myths can go a long way toward improving SEO performance for your website. Today, we're going to take a closer look at three SEO myths to avoid for your real estate website.

How REMAX Results Boosted Website Search Traffic by 25 Percent
RE/MAX Results is one of the crown jewels in the RE/MAX franchise group, with more 1100 agents across Minnesota and Wisconsin. RE/MAX Results is among the largest franchises RE/MAX has in the world. The company recently switched website vendors and launched a new custom site developed by TRIBUS. This represents the largest broker to deploy a custom TRIBUS website. Growth in Search Engine Traffic

Local Prospecting with Search Engine Optimization
Real estate customers love using search engines to find information, whether they're scouting neighborhoods, visiting homes virtually or trying to find the right real estate agent. So for real estate brokers and agents, your position in search engine results ultimately plays a major role in the visibility of your brand. Search engine optimization is one of the most effective tools for helping prospects find you. Local SEO is a natural extension of your overall SEO efforts. Today, we're going to take a closer look at actionable local prospecting tips to help your real estate business shine online. How to Attract New Business Through Local SEO

5 Things Learned from Launching a New Website
Lone Wolf recently launched a new website with the same goals any brokerage would have: increase traffic, improve visitor experience and increase conversion rates. Consumers expect your website to be fresh and modern. As technology and real estate evolve, your consumers' needs evolve. Whether your site needs a new look, to become mobile friendly, or have content rewritten or reorganized, a new website may be a cost effective investment for your brokerage. Here are 5 things to consider when refreshing your website:

How to Optimize Tags as Keywords to Boost Search Rankings
Seeing lackluster results from video usage in real estate marketing? It may be tag optimization issues. Does that sound Greek to you? No worries. We'll cover it here. What are Tags? The term 'tag' can be confusing, because it refers to two types:

6 Tips on Optimizing Your Real Estate Video for Local Searches
Video usage in real estate marketing can sometimes seem tricky – especially when it comes to optimizing your latest creation to gain viable, local leads. S-E-Uh-Oh Search engine optimization, or SEO for short, is key to those top Google rankings everyone covets. You use it every day – keying in your search du jour to magically populate information. But there's a method to this informational insanity... Rising to the Top To get your video in front of the right eyes, you'll need the right recipe for success: 1. A relationship with YouTube. The no. 2 search engine after (and owned by) Google, YouTube offers reliable – and highly visible – video hosting. Listing videos here weights in page rankings, which are seamlessly integrated into Google search results and can integrate with your G+ account. 2. A killer title. Your chosen title should be relevant, stand out, and entice with strong adjectives, catchy phrases or interesting questions. 'Breathtaking Farmland' or 'A Little Slice of Heaven' with the property address. Not that creative? A traditional listing name will get the job done: '123 Any Street, Roy's Real Estate, Detroit.'

SEO or Search Marketing For Brokers
We just escorted a client though a double audit of their search engine optimization on their broker website. We reviewed Domain Authority and ranked it against their competition and saw a range of authority from 44 to 48 for leading broker websites. We reviewed Moz Report, CheckPageRank.net, and others. We carefully analyzed all area search keyword traffic using a combination of searches that include Nielsen, ComScore, Google Analytics, and Hitwise. You can ignore any site data from a third party that is free (e.g., Quantcast and other free services are way off). Often, firms look too closely at their Google Analytics. Google Analytics can only tell you what is happening on your site. Nielsen, ComScore, and Hitwise give you a vision into the size of the online audience in your Demographic Market Area, or DMA. They provide you with competitive matrix against your category competitors. These competitive sites include your brokerage competitors, national sites, and MLS consumer sites. They give you a look at the whole picture, not just your website stats. When you understand the total size of your consumer audience, you can review your share of consumer audience. You can understand your demographic audience versus competitor sites. Armed with this information, you can develop your web strategy to be very focused and very targeted on your local audience. You can map your progress against competitors, and make sure that your strategy is working.

The Who, What, Where, Why, and How of SEO for Real Estate
Have you ever asked the internet something completely ridiculous (Where did I leave my keys?) before realizing there's no way the internet will know the answer (though there is an app for that)? People are so accustomed to having access to answers that being unable to type in a query and instantly receive relevant information is strange. This dependence on search results is why having a strong SEO strategy is so important. In a recent online event, Colton Miller, Senior SEO Strategist with Boostability, shared his tips on what it takes to rank highly in search results. He starts with five questions to ask. Check out his tips below and view the full webinar for more details. What? First, Miller explains, you have to ask yourself, "What would you search for if you were looking for what you offer?" Would you search "homes for sale" or would you look for "250K condos in Provo, UT?" The term a person chooses to use often indicates their goal. Buyers who are just beginning their home search are more likely to use general search terms while those further along tend to be more specific. How? Once you have a good idea of which searches you want to target, ask yourself how to target them. Luckily, you already have a whole list of websites that rank well in the keywords you want to use. Simply search your chosen keywords to find out who your competition is. Miller suggests that you then study those websites to discover "what they're providing, what kind of information they're talking about, how they might be displaying that information," adopt those strategies, then add a few extras to boost your results.

Why SEO Is So Important to Brokerages
So many companies, admittedly ours included, try and sell real estate brokerages on search engine optimization (SEO). We focus on the increase in traffic, return on investment, so on, and so forth. What I sometimes fail to communicate is the importance SEO plays in the overall profitability of the real estate brokerage. For too long real estate brokerages would struggle for profitability. They would yield to the idea of hoping to just break even in their brokerage business and would look for ancillary services for the profitability they needed. The beautiful thing with SEO is something I call the "gift that keeps giving." I always prefer SEO over PPC (Pay Per Click). Since about 2002, I've been passionate about SEO. I've always believed that I, along with a great team of smart people, could figure out automated ways to get real estate properties indexed by Google on the web sites we created. And we did. I'll never forget getting phone calls from MLS executives in around 2003. A number of them were calling us because they were upset with us. They thought we were sharing IDX data with Google. What happened at that time is we figured out very effective SEO methods and Google rewarded hundreds of our brokerage websites across the country. In just about every single market, websites powered by us were showing on Google for all MLS market searches. It was a fun and interesting time. This is when I knew we could be very effective with SEO within the real estate industry. So, what can, or does, or should SEO mean to brokerage business? Granted, your business needs to be operating well in all areas, but SEO can mean the difference between profitability and losing money. And, when done properly, SEO continues to yield results over time.

5 Real Estate SEO Hacks
SEO is one of the most effective, important tools for real estate marketing, and it has an impact on nearly every aspect of your online presence. Search engines like Google are the highest-volume drivers of online traffic, and real estate prospects are constantly using search engines to shop for homes in their desired neighborhoods. In order to tap into that massive source of potential traffic, you're going to want to land on the first page of search results. Most people only check the first page of search results before choosing where to click, so the competition for those coveted top spots is fierce. Have no fear, we're here to share some of our SEO expertise. Today, we're going to highlight five proven, effective SEO hacks to give your real estate business a boost online. Five Simple, Smart SEO Hacks to Improve Your Real Estate Marketing Online Create Content – Custom content is at the heart of SEO, and of online marketing in general. So at a minimum, you're going to want to maintain an active blog on your real estate website. But don't just start blogging about whatever you feel like. Do some keyword research through Google, read other real estate blogs, and create the type of content that your prospects are searching for. You don't just have to stick to writing, either, as photo and video content is also very popular. If you create photo or video, be sure to brush up on how to create SEO-friendly tags. Keep It Local – Local SEO is not just for targeting people who live near your real estate business. It also helps you connect with people from out of town who are looking for a REALTOR® to help them find a home in your area. Improve your local SEO by featuring your address on your website pages, creating content on local topics and events, signing up for directories, and researching the keywords that people use to search for homes in your town.

How Long Should a Real Estate Blog Post Be?
Or what's the shortest post I can publish and still see good results? The following is an argument for short real estate blog posts—even though I know that longer posts will perform better. The 300 Word Myth? The idea that a post needs to be at least 300 words in order to be seen as long enough for Google is one that I see and hear frequently. The idea is that is falls under what Google calls "Thin Content." But the idea of Thin Content is content that doesn't satisfactorily provide value to your website visitor. If your blog article is one that doesn't require more than a couple of sentences to make a point, or answer a question, then how can it be seen as lacking value? I think that to best understand what Google means with their goal of stamping out Thin Content is to look at the spirit of the rule. If your website is a consistent violator of publishing content that is copied from elsewhere, or syndicated from another account, or causes your audience to bounce (as opposed to stay and read), then I would say that you are violating the spirit of the rule, and you deserve what Google penalizes you with. But if your content is unique, frequent, and engaging (people actually read it, share it, and/or subscribe to it) then the length of the post it takes to make that happen is irrelevant. My take: If you get blogging, then counting your words is a distraction you shouldn't be bothered with.

Using Local SEO to Get More Leads for Your Real Estate Business
Our world has become a digitally driven society. In fact, the web has revolutionized almost everything we do--including searching for a home. The National Association of REALTORS®' Digital House Hunt study says nine in 10 home buyers use the Internet as a primary resource to house hunt. That means 90 percent of house hunters are using the web to find homes for sale in a specific location. That leads me to the question: "How can you make sure customers are finding your website over your competition's website at a local level?" One answer is local SEO. SEO... Local SEO. Is there a difference? A good way to explain the difference between SEO and local SEO is: SEO is a jigsaw puzzle and local SEO is a piece to that puzzle. When all of the puzzle pieces fit together correctly, you can leverage that power to grow your website traffic and leads. As you develop a digital marketing plan for your real estate business, it's important to recognize that local SEO should be a part of your overall SEO strategy. It's important to understand the differences in approach. From an SEO perspective, the focus is on high-quality link building, building domain/page authority and producing unique and outstanding content. Local SEO, on the other hand, focuses more on your physical location, citations (mentions of your name, address and phone number [NAP] on other sites), reviews, localized linking building and content. More simply, SEO revolves around content and page optimization and local SEO around location and NAP.

The Death of Desktop
Last year, we entered a new era--the era of mobile internet. 2015 was the year that searches on mobile devices overtook searches on desktop or laptop computers, according to Google. ComScore also reported that the share of digital time that consumers spend on their computers dropped from 47 percent in 2013 to 35 percent in 2015. While internet access via computer will not completely fade away anytime soon, changing consumer web habits means that agents and brokers need to adapt or risk missing out on sales opportunities. A Closer Look at Mobile Use in Real Estate To better understand what's happening within the real estate sphere when it comes to web usage, we spoke with Delta Media Group, a website and marketing solutions provider for the real estate industry. They host hundreds of broker websites, and they analyzed the traffic to their network of sites in order to offer us a clearer picture of how consumers are using real estate websites today. Here are a few key findings, taken from a sample of 10 different websites hosted by Delta that vary in size and market: In July, mobile website visitors grew from 28 percent at the low end to a whopping 70 percent in a year-over-year analysis. According to Delta, the sites that experienced the most growth were more active on social media and in advertising through social channels--which are primarily mobile in nature. Mobile and tablet web visitors now represent at least 58 percent of traffic to Delta Media Group websites. Real estate professionals who switched to a mobile first website strategy saw a 20-50 percent increase in total traffic and a 20-30 percent increase in leads.

Real Estate SEO Do's and Don'ts
Search engine optimization is one of the most powerful tools available to real estate professionals for generating business online, and helping new clients find you. Most clients will have done significant research on homes in your area, the reputation of your business, and more before they ever engage you directly. You have the opportunity to make a positive impression before you ever meet face to face, and that process starts with an understanding of effective real estate SEO. SEO Do's & Don'ts: How to Help New Clients Find You Online DO Take Advantage of Local SEO: With so many businesses using SEO, it's important to find ways to stand out from the crowd. Local SEO is a great fit for real estate because your content and listings will naturally include geographical information. By prominently featuring the towns and neighborhoods where you do business, you make it easy for new clients to find you when they're researching a move to your area. The best part is that local SEO still works even if the person doing the search is located far away. DO Keyword Research: Optimizing keywords is basically the process of anticipating how clients will search for your business, and it's very easy to get started. You know those auto-fill search terms that come up when you start typing your query on Google? Google's algorithms churn out auto-fill terms based on how people search, so you can get a basic idea by experimenting with that feature. Once you get your SEO rolling, your analytics will provide even more detailed data for keyword optimization.

Ready, Set, Keyword: Writing Effective Content for SEO (6/29)
Wednesday, June 29, 2016 at 10:00 AM PDT Last week we learned that leveraging your Communities Served pages increases leads from your preferred areas by improving the visibility of your site on search engines. Join us for this week's Power Hour to hear how one agent tripled her team's business by customizing the content on her Market Leader website. Learn how to identify which topics buyers and sellers are researching, select highly effective keywords to drive qualified leads in your market and get first page rankings on Google and other search engines. Customize your website to maximize lead generation Choosing effective keywords to improve rankings SEO: 1st Page Ranking Factors and Best Practices Register now!

How to Create an Online Reputation That Gives Clients Confidence! (6/9)
Thursday, June 9, 2016 at 9:00 AM PDT The latest numbers are in, and many agents are stunned: "Currently, 2 out of every 3 people are Google-searching agents beforechoosing to do business with one." That's why this week's live training features a "done-for-you" plan to create an online reputation that gives more clients the confidence to choose YOU! Here's just some of what you'll learn this Thursday: How you can get on the first page of Google Search, dominate the competition and impress prospective clients who find you online How to improve your online reputation in 30-days or less, so you can attract new clients who are looking for you online right now! Easy ways to improve your online presence (and how to always look professional and competent) ... even if you don't have a website! The essential social posting strategies to showcase your skills, knowledge and expertise to get more referred customers and "warmed-up" prospects Live Q&A session with two industry experts so you can get your most pressing real estate marketing questions answered Register now!

How SEO Can Help Recruit New Agents
Attracting the right agents is critical to the success of your real estate business, and that starts with providing the most relevant, current tools for generating new business. Today, most home shoppers start their search online, even before they connect with an agent. That search process ultimately connects shoppers with their agency of choice, and the agencies at the top of the search rankings don't earn that prime position by accident. They do it through search engine optimization (SEO), and a strong SEO strategy will also help you attract the tech-savvy agents who thrive in today's real estate market. The team at Delta Media Group has extensive experience in the world of real estate SEO, and we've put together some tips to help you understand more about how this vital marketing tool will help you attract the best agents for your business. Real Estate SEO: A Match Made in Marketing Heaven We're going to spend most of our time on how the marketing benefits of SEO will help you offer an appealing package to agents, but let's start with a practical matter. Your website surely includes some promotional materials geared toward potential agents, so SEO will also help connect you with agents in your area who are looking for new real estate employment opportunities. When your agent-geared content is optimized for search, it's easier for the best agents to find you, as well. When it comes to helping your agents attract clients, SEO is now a necessity. Getting it right requires an understanding of how shoppers search for homes, and expertise in how search engine algorithms work.

The RIGHT Way to Build Your SEO
Is your website packed full of great meta tags, keywords, and directory links? Are you getting the results you expected? Stuffing your website with SEO infused verbiage used to be the best way to rank on search engines. However, SEO best practices are constantly evolving and the techniques that worked in the past need to be continually updated to get the best results. The latest technology no longer requires search engines to rely on reading your keywords, links, and meta tags to know if your site is relevant to their search query. Google looks for consistency when determining rankings by searching for websites that are delivering the best results for its users not once, but consistently over time. The websites that consistently build good content will create more signals of trust with Google, and the more signals of trust you gain, the more likely you are to see top rankings. So what can you do to make sure your website is seen more often by consumers? The first thing is to understand that building a good SEO strategy isn't an overnight process. It generally takes between six and nine months of concentrated effort to produce visible results from an SEO campaign. For the best results, it's important to include both onsite and offsite optimization throughout your SEO campaign.

A Look Inside Google’s Page Quality Rating
Google recently released the guidelines for manually reviewing a website to determine its page quality rating. This document provides an insight into the traits Google thinks is important for each website/webpage to demonstrate. You can review the entire document here. The actual page quality rating stored within Google's search index is computed systematically. However, Google uses these manual reviews as a reference point to make improvements to their algorithm. Here are the top 5 takeaways of Google's page quality rating guidelines: 1. Purpose – Each webpage should have a specific purpose. Websites and pages should be created to help users. The reviewer will rate the page on its purpose and how well it achieves that. 2. Content Main Content (MC) – Any part of the page that directly helps the page achieve its purpose. Webmasters directly create and/or control the main content of the page. Supplementary Content (SC) – Contributes to a good user experience on the page, but does not directly help the page achieve its purpose. Supplementary Content is created by webmasters and is an important part of the user experience.

The Mobilegeddon Effect
The dust has settled and the panic is over. It's been six months since Google's Mobilegeddon, and many are starting to think the mobile-hype was exaggerated. While this may be partially true, now that the rubble has been cleared, it's a good time to check in on the aftermath. In a recent Hubspot blog, the company analyzed 15,000 of their customers' websites to determine how each was affected by Google's Mobilegeddon. They found that websites that hadn't been optimized for mobile use had an average organic traffic decline of 5 percent, while mobile-optimized sites lost only 0.5 percent (likely due to seasonal traffic changes). While that may not seem like catastrophic decline, businesses who work to bolster their site's search ranking and conversion rates will find that this translates to a large number of leads lost each month. This is especially true when considering that, if your organic search traffic has declined, so has your Google search rank. So, what can you do? Here are four tips to help you keep the traffic you've been working for. Test Your Webpage The first thing you'll need to do is find out whether your webpage is mobile-friendly. To help with this, Google created a test to let you know. It's a simple process. Just paste your website's URL in the bar provided and it will generate a checklist to show the areas Google analyzes to determine mobile-friendliness. If your site needs some work, Google will also tell you where your site could use some help and provide ways for you to fix any problems.