How can you tell if your website has been Search Engine Optimized? A lot of vendors out there promise that they can maximize your website for SEO, but how do you know it’s been done?
SEO will help you earn higher search rankings, and it’s important to harness this potential to grow your property management business.
Understanding Different Types of SEO
Your site can attract on-page SEO, where you can build a website or improve the website you already own. You can also work with off-page SEO, where your website is untouched and benefits from activities that happen on other websites to help your own site.
Six Ways to Check if You Have On-Page SE
Check Your Title-tags
Check out the titles on your pages. These pop up on your browser, and you’ll find them written in the tabs.
Google treats title tags as an important indicator of your page’s purpose. So, instead of saying “Home – Bob’s Properties,” you might want it to say “Portland Property Management.”
Why?
Because people aren’t searching for your company name. They’re searching for services. You don’t need SEO for your own company name because anyone searching for “Bob’s Properties” already knows who you are and what you do. But, someone searching for Portland property management, which is more likely, will find the sites with the best SEO.
Consider this real-life example from the United States. Which title would be more likely to show up on the first page of Google for “Sacramento property management companies?”
Option A: Sacramento Property Management
Option B: Property Management Sacramento
Although option A sounds strong, option B is your best choice.
URL
Just below a title is a URL address, which also plays a part in how search engines understand your website and your company.
Here’s an example of a bad URL: fourandhalf.com/id=152 or fourandhalf.com/page_407.
Your URL should reflect your site and what it’s about. Instead of spaces, use dashes. A URL written with SEO in mind might say:
fourandhalf.com/sacramento-property-management-services
Google Analytics
Get some Google Analytics on your website. This won’t add to your SEO, but you’ll have access to tools that tell you if everything is running the way you need it to on your site. Google Analytics allows you to analyze your website traffic in many ways.
Content
Your home page serves to send visitors to the right internal page on your site, so you don’t need a lot of content there.
However, one your visitor arrives on the page they need, you want to provide more than a form asking for their information. When a prospect arrives on your Services page, it should have valuable content. Google wants to see between 200 and 400 words of content. This is the page where you should address the pain points your potential customers are experiencing. This is where you show them the solutions.
Blog
We are always surprised when a property management company purchases a new website but doesn’t have a blog. The blog is critical and allows you to add fresh content to your site on an ongoing basis. Even if you don’t plan to update your website regularly, you do need to upload new blogs on a regular basis. With blogs, you can get in front of people who have questions about property management. You can cover topics like tenant screening, evictions, and maintenance. It’s a golden opportunity to rank for the long-tail keywords that effectively bring in leads.
Mobile Friendly
Make your site mobile friendly? Google’s search algorithm is “mobile-first,” so if your site is not mobile friendly, you’ll suffer when people search on mobile devices. Test your site on the Google Mobile-Friendly Test Page, and do it now.
Off-Page SEO
When someone contacts you and wants to SEO your site without having access to the code, they aren’t doing it on the page or changing your site in any way. They are typically looking to point links to your site in the form of backlinks and citations.
Backlinks
When other sites link to your site, a backlink is created. It’s important to avoid “black hat” SEO tactics when it comes to backlinks. An example of black hat SEO is using a farm of fake sites to point links at your site. This is a very bad practice, and Google will get a hint of it pretty quickly. If you fall into this trap, rebuilding your credibility in search takes a long time. It’s not worth it.
The other way to achieve backlinks is more honest. Someone might reach out and offer to write articles on other sites that will then include a link back to your site. If you hire someone and have them write content that points back to you, this is honest work that won’t be punished by Google.
Citations
Citations can provide stronger local search results. Make sure you have your office’s name, address, and phone number on Google, Bing, Yahoo Local, Yelp Australia, TrueLocal, and StartLocal. You’ll get higher local search results if your information is listed consistently on a number of directory sites.
A useful resource is Moz’s Local Citation Checker tool. This will tell you which online directories your company is listed on and whether your citations are complete and/or consistent with all your other online listings.
Find out if your website is ranking as well as it can. If you have questions about any of this or how you can grow your property management business in Australia and new Zealand, contact us at Fourandhalf.