February 1, 2023
Technical SEO basics are essential for real estate agents looking to maximize their website’s visibility and performance. By knowing the fundamentals, you can find problems with your site that might be stopping it from ranking where your future clients can find it. In this guide, we will explore the basics of technical SEO as they relate to lead-generating real estate websites, as well as some tools that can help you get started on improving your online presence. So if you’re ready to make sure your site meets all the necessary requirements, let’s dive into these technical aspects of SEO for real estate.
What is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO is the process of optimizing relevant elements of a website to improve its visibility in search engine results.
It’s an umbrella term used to refer to all aspects of improving a website’s technical performance with the aim of boosting its rankings in organic search results. A technical SEO audit may include tasks such as ensuring proper coding structure, creating optimized URLs, improving page speed, and removing content that doesn’t adhere to Google’s best practices.
Google (and other search engines) use a program called “crawlers” to examine webpages and categorize data. The search engines’ algorithms then use that data to appropriately rank your web pages. Part of technical SEO is making sure that the website’s URLs, HTML code, and meta descriptions are set up so search engines can crawl and index them easily. By taking care of these details, you are helping your site rank higher by making sure it’s easy for Google bots to understand what each page is about and how relevant it is for users searching for certain keywords or phrases.
Benefits of Technical SEO
The main benefit associated with technical SEO is improved visibility in organic search engine results pages (SERPs).
When done correctly, this can result in improved local SEO and increased traffic from qualified leads who are ready to buy or sell a house. Additionally, good technical optimization ensures that your pages load quickly, which has been shown to have positive effects on the user experience, leading to more visitors staying longer on your site and thus increasing conversion rates as well as time spent per visit overall.
Examples of Technical SEO
There are several types of technical optimizations that should be taken into consideration when working towards better SERP rankings, including but not limited to:
- URL structure
- Meta tags optimization
- Image/video sizing & formatting
- Schema markup implementation
- Internal links audit
- Sitemap creation
All these page components help ensure that Google bots can easily identify and interpret each web page accurately, so they know exactly what content should be displayed when someone searches related terms or phrases online, resulting in better visibility within SERPs.
Common Issues with Real Estate Websites and Technical SEO
Poorly Optimized URLs
URLs are the foundation of a website’s technical SEO. Poorly optimized URLs can make it difficult for search engines to understand and index content, resulting in lower rankings. To optimize your real estate website’s URLs, they should be short, keyword-rich, and include hyphens between words. By creating a uniform structure for URLs at the beginning, you can quickly create highly optimized pages in bulk.
Low-Quality Content
Low-quality content can be detrimental to any website’s success in organic search engine results pages (SERPs). For real estate websites, this means providing helpful information about properties or local markets as well as answering common questions buyers may have when searching for a home or investment property. Creating high-quality content regularly will help improve visibility in the SERPs over time.
Google’s Helpful Content Update targets lower-quality content and penalizes it accordingly. A technical audit can reveal non-helpful blogs that need to be removed.
Duplicate Content Issues
Duplicate content issues occur when two or more web pages contain similar text or images without proper attribution links back to the original source page. This can lead to confusion among search engines as to which page should rank higher for certain keywords and phrases related to real estate topics, such as “buyer tips” or “home inspection checklist,” which could result in reduced visibility on SERPs due to being penalized by Google algorithms. It is important that all webpages are properly attributed with canonical tags if there is duplicate content present on multiple pages of the same domain name.
Slow Page Loading
Page loading speed is a critical yet often overlooked factor when it comes to SEO. Long loading times can drastically reduce organic search engine rankings, as well as hurt user engagement and satisfaction. Making small tweaks like optimizing images, minifying code, and reducing server response time can improve page load speeds, thus boosting overall SEO performance.
Additionally, by leveraging tools such as Google’s PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix to identify areas of improvement, website owners can further analyze the ways they might enhance their pages’ loading times for better SEO results. Keeping page loading times low is essential for a successful SEO strategy; don’t let slow page speeds sink your website’s ranking potential.
Best Practices for Real Estate Websites and Technical SEO
Conduct a Technical SEO Audit
Conducting an SEO audit on real estate websites involves thoroughly examining your website and determining if it is optimized for search engines. This can involve looking at the technical infrastructure of the site, assessing any existing content, evaluating the links to other sites and pages, as well as analyzing the visibility of the site in search engine results.
In addition to ensuring your website is technically sound, an extensive audit should also include a review of user experience elements to make sure visitors are able to easily navigate the site and find relevant information. A comprehensive technical SEO audit can help you identify any issues that may be adversely impacting your website’s performance in organic search results so you can quickly make changes to improve rankings and increase visibility.
Optimize URLs
Optimizing URLs for search engines is a key part of technical SEO. This includes using hyphens instead of underscores in between words, avoiding unnecessary characters such as brackets or exclamation marks, and ensuring the URL isn’t too long. Making sure the URL structure is understandable to search engine crawlers helps them comprehend the content of each page and how it connects with other web pages on your site. For real estate websites, this means making sure the URL structure is logical, easy to replicate, and includes keywords related to homes for sale in your area.
Consolidate & Redirect Duplicate Content
Duplicate content on a website can significantly impact technical SEO, making it important to recognize and fix any problems. The best way to identify duplicate content is by using a tool that analyzes both the content within pages and metadata. This process helps reveal any similarities between pages while also searching for noticeable page duplicates. It is possible then to consolidate redundant pages by determining which page should remain live, deleting irrelevant pages, and redirecting them if needed to keep users informed of their new destination. Seeing as how insightful search engine algorithms are getting, it is imperative that site owners promptly and properly address duplicate content issues in order to leverage potential business opportunities and increase visibility.
Improving Load Times
Improving page load times should be another priority when optimizing a real estate website for technical SEO purposes. Slow loading speeds not only frustrate users, but they can also affect rankings since Google takes page speed into account when determining where sites appear in SERPs, meaning faster loading pages tend to rank higher than slower ones. To improve load times, consider compressing images before uploading them onto your site or enabling caching so static elements like logos don’t need reloading every time someone visits the webpage again.
Tools to Help with Real Estate Website Technical SEO
Google Search Console is an essential tool for any real estate website looking to improve its technical SEO. It provides detailed information about how your site is performing on search engine results pages (SERPs). With Google Search Console, you can identify errors on your site and quickly fix them, as well as monitor keyword rankings and organic traffic. You can also use it to submit sitemaps, check mobile usability, and review the security of your website.
The Screaming Frog Spider Tool is a powerful tool that helps you crawl websites like Google does. The tool enables you to rapidly inspect all website components, such as URLs, pictures, titles, and meta descriptions. This makes it easier to spot potential issues with technical SEO, such as broken links or missing meta tags. Screaming Frog also provides detailed reports, which make it easy to track progress over time and compare performance against competitors’ sites.
Moz Pro Tool Suite is another option for real estate agents looking to optimize their websites for better search engine visibility. These tools provide valuable insights into how well-optimized a website is from an SEO perspective so real estate agents can take actionable steps toward improving their ranking in SERPs.
Ahrefs offers a comprehensive analysis of backlinks pointing at your domain or specific pages within your site, something that is essential for understanding why certain webpages are ranking higher than others in SERPs. Ahrefs’ Site Audit feature will scan through every page on the domain, identifying any potential problems with title tags, redirects, etc. The Content Gap report shows where there may be opportunities to outrank competitors by creating content around topics they haven’t covered yet. All this data combined should help real estate agents understand what changes need to be made if they want improved rankings on search engines like Google and Bing.
Boost Your Search Rankings With Technical SEO
Technical SEO is an important part of any real estate website’s success. Technical SEO can be a beneficial tool for enhancing the visibility of real estate websites in search engine rankings as well as tackling common issues. By utilizing the proper strategies and tools, you can boost your chances of being visible to potential customers through effective technical SEO. With this knowledge in hand, you should now have all the basics necessary to start optimizing your own website for technical SEO.
