Making sure your Estate Agent website is found on Google on page one is very important.
And for estate agents, there are ten main things that influence whether you’re on page one or page fifty of Google.
Use this tick-boxing exercise to make sure you’re covering the basic areas of search engine optimisation (SEO).
Let’s get started.
1. Site Speed
39% of people say they wouldn’t revisit a website that took too long to load (Hubspot).
We look at why site speed is so important (and ten ways to improve it) here. For now, ask yourself this question:
- Do your website pages load in four seconds or less?
If that’s a ‘no’, read how to improve that here.
2. Google My Business Reviews
While this isn’t directly on your website, it’s still very important.
This is especially true when people in your local area search for your agency or ‘estate agents in my area’.
Ask yourself:
- Do you have a Google My Business page set up?
- Do you have at least 25 5* reviews?
- Do you ask for reviews regularly?
3. Paid Google search
These are the adverts that show at the very top of page one of Google.
If you’re unfamiliar with what paid Google search is – also known as Pay Per Click (PPC) – we look at it in detail here.
Ask yourself:
- Do you have a Google ads account?
- Are you paying for key search terms?
- Are you paying for competitor search terms?
You need to test different headlines, body text and call to actions to track how well your ads perform.
4. Keywords
These are the adverts that show at the very top of page one of Google.
If you’re unfamiliar with what paid Google search is – also known as Pay Per Click (PPC) – we look at it in detail here.
Ask yourself:
- Do you have a Google ads account?
- Are you paying for key search terms?
- Are you paying for competitor search terms?
You need to test different headlines, body text and call to actions to track how well your ads perform.
5. User Experience
Google’s artificial intelligence simulates user journeys to find out how easy your website is to navigate.
Google rewards websites that are well laid out and easy to use because they’re better-quality websites. So how easy or hard it is directly impacting your ranking.
- Is your website easy to navigate?
- Do you present all your information in an easy-to-read way?
- Do all of your links work? There are no ‘dead links’?
- Is it easy to get in touch with you on your website?
6. Creating Content
You may have heard the term ‘content is king’ and for estate agent websites, that’s truer than for most businesses.
‘How to’ guides are your best friend. If someone in your local area searches for things like ‘step by step guide to sell my house’ and you’re the agency that helps them, who do you think they’ll pick to sell their house?
- Do you post regular blogs?
- Do these blogs answer the questions your customers have?
- Do the blogs contain your target keywords?
- Do you share your blogs across your social media channels?
7. Competitor Analysis
You need to know who your online competitors are and you need a good understanding of what they’re doing well (and not so well) so you can expose their digital weaknesses.
- Do you know what keywords your competitors are ranking for?
- Do you know what content your competitors upload?
- Have you looked at their domain data and backlinks?
- How is their website laid out?
- How fast does their website load?
- Are they active on social media?
8. Backlinks
Backlinks are when websites have a link from their website to yours.
The more high-quality websites that link to your website, the better a resource Google deems your website to be. This improves your domain authority – a big factor when it comes to your ranking.
The way we see it, ‘link building’ is more about ‘relationship building’ because to get links from websites with high domain authority, you need to get to know the people in the teams who manage them.
- Have you identified websites with high domain authority you’d like links from?
- Do you know who is the contact for these websites?
- Have you a ‘cold pitch’ ready to send to them?
- How will you attempt to build a relationship with these people?
There’s a lot to learn
We’ve tried to keep things simple but we appreciate it may still seem overwhelming.
The truth of the matter is: SEO is difficult. It takes years of expertise to get right.
Investing in search engine optimisation with a company with a proven track record of getting their clients results is an incredible return on investment.
Just ask Advanced Vehicle leasing – who enjoyed 24% more traffic after we helped them with SEO.
Contact Kathy today at kathy@staging.white.digital and we’ll talk you through the full process to find out how many more enquiries from vendors you could be getting.
