18
Aug
SEO for Estate Agents – “How long will it take before I
get onto page one of Google?”
In the world of
Search Engine Optimisation, there is one question that will
forever leave us with an uncertain answer.
However we will usually answer this question by trying to
explain how Google works and that we can’t control the
process of which Google goes through, so therefore won’t be
able to give you an exact answer. We will then follow it up by
giving you an estimate which will be anywhere from 4 weeks to a
year depending on a few factors like the age of your domain name
and the levels of competition for your chosen keyword.
There are quite a few elements that will help give us a better
clue of timescale. These factors are divided into new websites vs.
redesign or reformatted (which means a new URL website).
New websites
With a new domain it will be difficult to get the necessary
“respect and trust” for ranking for moderately
competitive terms for at least a few months, usually between three
to nine month depending on the competitiveness of the keywords.
This isn’t always the case though, if you provide Google with
useful content and you get fortunate enough to gain reliable links
on a regular basis then you can start seeing results a lot
quicker.
This also can go the other way, if your website structure is
hard to crawl and your content is hard to understand, your website
may never be recognised by Google.
Re-design and Reformatted Websites
With re-designed websites the best thing to do is to not think
about the timeline and to just think of delivering good quality
content, with a good site structure and easy usability. This will
obviously benefit you in the long run and once the site has been
live for a while it will be easier to predict a more accurate
answer as the crawling and indexing patterns will have been
established.
How difficult is it to maintain Current Rankings after
Launch?
With new websites, brand terms should rank nearly immediately
after Google has crawled it. Maybe not position one but it will be
visible within the search engine. However if your brand name is
anything like “Apple” or “the Sun” then
ranking will be very difficult indeed. Although a unique brand name
should have relatively no problem ranking high.
In conclusion for a new
Estate Agent website the first task should be to rank for your
company brand and possibly a few long tail keywords. Give the
process time and continued attention and ranking should be visible
within a few months.
For a re-designed website, the first task should always be to
focus on maintaining your current rankings for high traffic terms.
Once you are sure this has been done you can start working on
developing trust in new pages.
By Luke Stanley
SEO Consultant
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