Over the past few years, the market for property management has drastically changed. One of the aspects that has also undergone this change is the marketing strategies. Along with those changes has come one specific strategy that has greatly transformed businesses: search engine optimization (SEO).
If you do not know about this digital marketing strategy for growing your business, you have come to the right place. In this article, we will discuss everything that you need to know about search engine optimization and how they have property management companies grow and succeed.
What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
In simple terms, property management SEO is the practice of optimizing your property management website in order to have it rank higher on search engines.
If you are a property management company, it is important to monitor your website's SEO to make sure that you are ranking high in search engine results. By doing this, there is a higher chance that someone will click on the link for your property management website instead of another link.
This is essential to your company because it has the potential to ramp up the traffic to your website, thus making you more money.
If this sounds like something that you would be interested in, continue reading to find out exactly how to optimize your website for property management.
To begin, we will go over what kinds of things affect SEO.
What Factors Affect Search Engine Optimization?
When it comes to SEO, there are various factors that affect how effective it actually is. To make your website rank as high as possible in search results, it is important to consider all of these factors and work them all into your plan.
Below, we have listed some of the most important things to consider when trying to optimize your website for search engines.
Searcher's Keywords
One of the most important factors to consider when optimizing your website is keywords. When someone is doing a Google search, for example, they use certain keywords. The top websites that come up with that search are the ones that use those keywords in the best way.
The order in which the websites show up, or the search engine rankings, depends on how relevant the content is to the keywords. The more relevant your content is to what the searcher is looking for, the higher it will land in the search engine. This could mean a lot for property management websites because it could drive loads more potential clients to your business.
Property managers can use lists of popular keywords for their content to help increase their search engine rankings. These lists come with a number of keywords that people tend to search up more often than others, which should always be included in the content. Also, you may find that some may be a long-tail keyword or a short tail keyword.
However, as the algorithms for SEO have gotten more sophisticated, they have been able to detect what is called "keyword stuffing". Keyword stuffing is the practice of filling your content with a certain keyword to try and land it higher on the rankings. Years ago, this method would actually work because the algorithm was not able to pick up on these tactics. Nowadays, search engine algorithms have gotten more advanced and this method of keyword stuffing can actually hurt the website's rankings.
New Content
Apart from showing the most relevant information, search engines also show recent information. As a property manager or owner of a property management company, you should be putting out new, fresh content regularly in order to increase your SEO for property management.
The search engine algorithms are on the search for property management websites that put out new content consistently. One great example of content that can be put out on a consistent basis is blog posts.
Blog posts are a great way to add tons of content to your property management website that caters to your whole target audience. For example, you can write blog posts to property owners about the "Best Rental Property Management Software", or for property managers about "SEO Tips for your Property Management Business" (like what you are reading right now). These blog posts can continuously help increase your property management SEO.
Page Speed
Another aspect of your website that must be optimized to land higher on search engine rankings is the page speed. Since one of the goals of the search engine algorithm is to improve the user's experience, and a higher page speed achieves just that.
The reason for the page speed being so important is mainly because of user abandonment. Google studies have shown that users tend to abandon a website after only 3 seconds of waiting. Google does not reward these websites with high SEO rankings because they provide a negative user experience. For this reason, it is important to make sure that all of your website content and media loads very quickly. This will ensure a user-friendly experience that search engines will rank higher in the SEO rankings.
It is also important to make sure that your website is also mobile-friendly, as many search engine activity comes from mobile phones.
Not sure about how to check this statistic?
One very useful tool for checking your web vitals is Google's Core Web Vitals report. This report gives a full analysis of how quickly and efficiently your page loads. This is a good indicator of how the website will rank among other websites because, as mentioned before, higher speeds equals higher SEO rankings.
Now that we know what the most important things to consider are when optimizing your website, let's get into some tips on how to actually do it.
SEO Tips for Property Management Companies
When it comes to property management companies SEO, there is not much of a difference from other kinds. The goal of all companies wanting to optimize their websites is to be the first links on search engines.
Below, we have listed some useful SEO tips and tricks to increase your property management company's SEO rankings.
Changing Alt Text and File Names
If your website has any images or media on it, you may be missing out on some points for your SEO ranking. When you upload a file to your property management website, it is important to look at the file name at the time of the upload.
Although this may sound weird, the file names have a big effect on the SEO rankings. The reason for this is that when the search engine algorithms parse through your site, they need to have a way to know what the media is. They do this by checking the file names and the alt text, as shown below.
Using Local SEO
Another useful tip to utilize when trying to increase your search engine rankings is to use local SEO. Local SEO is when you use your location to attract visitors from around your area. For example, if someone in Miami, Florida searches for "the best property management company", they are going to get completely different results compared to if they search for it in another city.
One tool that is useful for increasing your local SEO is Google My Business. This tool allows you to create a complete profile for your business. This profile includes information like your website, location, and other important details.
Also, it may be a good idea to combine local SEO with pay-per-click advertising in order to increase local, organic visitors. Pay-per-click advertising is a method that advertises a link to your website on a search engine and charges a fee every time someone clicks on it. Although this may be a pricy option, it could be greatly effective for your company's exposure.
Changing Meta Descriptions
Although meta descriptions are not necessarily ranked by search engines for SEO, they are still important for driving visitors to your website. Meta descriptions are the short descriptions that are shown under the SEO Title in search engines, shown below.
A good meta description should be a short, detailed description of the contents of the website. It should contain information that attracts more visitors to your site. It is also important that it is not too long, because it may get cut off. A good practice is to also include keywords in the meta description to get the attention of the searcher.
Optimizing URL Slugs
Another aspect of your website that has an impact on your SEO rankings is your URL slug. Your URL slug is the section of your website's link that follows the forward slash, shown below.
A good URL slug contains the keyword but is not too long. A good practice is to keep the URL slug to around 50 characters. To increase property management SEO, you should only use letters, and avoid special characters, numbers, or uppercase letters.
This section of your property management website is crucial for increasing your SEO ranking because it is the first thing that search engines read. After they read the slug, they know whether or not the content will be about what they are searching for.
Including an SEO Title
When optimizing your webpage, it is vital to include an SEO title that is attractive to visitors and the search engine algorithms as well. These titles, also called header tags, catch a visitor's attention and help them understand what is going to be discussed in the article.
This is especially important when publishing content, like blog posts. It is important to include the keywords that you are focusing on in the SEO title in order to attract more visitors and increase your SEO ranking as well.
Bottom Line
When it comes to gaining more exposure for your website, optimizing your SEO is crucial. It is a modern method that can revolutionize the number of visitors that you get on your site. And with this increased stream of visitors, comes more money to the company.
And finally, as important as this method is to increase organic traffic, it isn't the only factor that you should consider to increase business. There are dozens of other factors to consider when trying to drive business, like converting visitors to actual clients.
If any of these strategies seem confusing, or you want to learn more about property management websites, make sure to visit DoorLoop's blog to get caught up on everything that you need to know about property management.
Also, enjoy a complimentary website audit, focusing on SEO and other crucial aspects, to help you maximize the number of leads on us! Visit this page to get started!