6 Tasks to Getting Your Real Estate Site to Rank Well in Google

Are you trying to get your real estate website to rank well in Google? Here are six tasks that you can do to get your real estate website to rank well.

1. Find a search engine friendly website provider

If you are serious about building a web presence, start with a good foundation. You can always change providers once you have created your website but it is less of a hassle if you just start with a good company from day one. Not all website designers are the same so do your research and get recommendations from existing clients. It is much easier to spend a little time up front and make a wise choice than to jump into something that you will regret down the road.

I use Real Estate Webmasters and am happy with their services and content management platform (CMS). Check them out and call some of their customers to see if they feel the same as I do.

Another possibility would be to use Wordpress software to create your website. Wordpress is a very popular blogging content management system (CMS) that is quite search engine friendly. It has a templating system, which includes widgets that can be rearranged without editing PHP or HTML code and also has themes that can be installed and switched between.

Here are a few questions to ask of a website provider:

• Do any of your clients rank well?
• Can I see some of your clients and contact them?
• How easy it is create a page?
• What language is the site written in?
• Can I customize the site? If so, how much does it cost?
• Do you offer a property search?

Whoever you decide on make sure it is easy to build pages. One of the important elements in ranking well in Google is plenty of good content. Do not use a provider where it is difficult to build website pages easily. Otherwise, you will just be swimming up stream.

2. Choose your key phrases

Write down a list of key phrases that visitors might search for in Google. Come up with as many as you can. You will use these phrases when you are creating and optimizing your website. There are several tools on the internet to determine the popularity of the key phrases. Google adwords has a keyword tool that you can use to measure search volumes.

Use these phrases when you are building your web pages. Many SEO professionals will tell you to target one to three key phrases per page. Use the key phrase in your page titles, description tag, heading, URL and page content.

Keep in mind that it is harder to rank for highly searched phrases like ‘Sarasota real estate’ than phrases like ‘condo on Siesta Key with a water view’. Some agents ignore the highly searched phrases and optimize their sites to rank well for hundreds of these long tail phrases.

3. Provide a good property search to your visitors

In my opinion a good real estate website should have a quality property search. Most visitors come to a real estate site to view homes for sale. The competition for web traffic is getting stiffer so it is important for you to have a good home search to keep visitors on your site. That does not mean you have to go spend thousands of dollars on a custom IDX search. There are several affordable solutions that you can add to your website.

A good search will also help your rankings in the search engines. Google rewards good, useful websites that consumers enjoy with higher rankings. Their business model is built on the goal of providing the best websites in their search results. With all else equal Google will rank real estate website A over real estate website B if it provides a better user experience for the visitor. There are many reasons why a property search can help your rankings in Google but the most important one in my opinion is that it improves your visitor experience.

There are many real estate websites that rank well in Google with average or poor property search solutions. However, I think the importance of a good property search will grow as the competition for traffic grows.

4. Write good content

Good, unique, original content is important to good rankings. Do not even think about cutting and pasting content from one of your competitors. Search engines know when you do that so they won’t trust you as much as someone that creates their own content. You need to be an authority on your field of expertise and prove that to Google by writing original content. If you are not a good writer hire someone or just do your best. Not only will the content tell Google that you are an authority on the subject but more importantly it will prove to your visitors that you know what you are talking about so they will hopefully become clients. Make a point to add quality content as often as possible.

5. Post in your blog

Blogs are short for weblog. It is a website that is typically maintained by an individual with consistent entries of events, commentary or other content like video or images. The content is displayed in reverse chronological order. Blogs are a great way to consistently and quickly add content to your website. They allow you to write short thoughts or blurbs of information that may not merit a whole page by itself. Realtors can use them to give updates on the market, show inventory levels, new listings and properties that they recently sold.

There are many blogging platforms to use. The most popular is Wordpress. A blog can be a stand alone site or added on to a more traditional website. More and more Realtors are using Wordpress to as the platform for their entire website.

Blog as often as you can since Google loves the frequent updates. The more often you write in your blog the better your chances of ranking well. Your visitors will also come to love the frequent updates and you might build a loyal following of visitors.

6. Find Links

Last but certainly not least are links to your website. Google puts a lot of importance on the links that point to a website. With all else equal real estate website A will outrank real estate website B if it has more and higher quality links pointing to it. Books have been written about the importance of links, how to get them, how to judge them and everything else you wanted to know about them. Article writing, posts on other people’s blogs, social networks, commenting on blogs and trading links with other Realtors and people are a few ways to get links to your website.

Be careful linking with other Realtors. In 2007, Matt Cutts of Google penalized numerous (me included) real estate websites for abusing reciprocal linking. Take some time and learn more about link building and how to judge the quality of a link. Links are very important to Google and cannot be ignored.

To reiterate, performing these six tasks will help your rank well in Google:

• Use a search engine friendly platform
• Optimize your site for key phrases
• Provide a good property search to your visitors
• Write unique content
• Post in your blog frequently
• Get some links

You don’t need to be a search engine expert to get your site ranking well in Google. Perform these six tasks well and your site will do well. I have barely touched on search engine optimization (SEO) in this article. There is much more to learn.

To keep it simple - your goal should be to build a great website on a search engine friendly platform with tons of unique content, a useful property search, a frequently updated blog and to have plenty of links pointing to your website. While not easy, if you accomplish these tasks your sites rankings will improve.