Essential SEO tips 2015

Estate agents are becoming more aware of the crucial need for having a SEO optimised website, even if it is just at the basic level. However if you aren’t familiar with SEO it can be quite difficult to split apart the good information from the bad, which can lead to some very misinformed actions and decisions.

Get it right this year by following these 10 basic SEO tips to ensure you make the most of your SEO efforts:

1. Be patient

If you take away one thing from this article it should be to be patient. SEO isn’t instant; real results can take months depending on your business. If your business is small, in a highly competitive area and/or you are pretty new to doing business online then it is likely to take a lot longer to achieve any real rankings.  

2. Stay committed

SEO isn’t a one off strategy. Search engine algorithms change frequently, meaning tactics and strategies that worked last year may not work this year. This means SEO requires an ongoing, long-term commitment to ensure your rankings stay on top.

3. Learn about SEO

Even if you have hired an SEO agency to deal with this, it is still useful to at least learn the basics of SEO and stay on top of the latest changes and tactics. There are plenty of useful resources online to help you understand all you need to know.

4. Build an amazing website

Being found through the search engines is of course very important but ask yourself, “Is my website really better than my competitions?” If the answer is no, your high rankings may be wasted.

5. Set up a Google Analytics

It is crucial that you set up a Google Analytics account for your website and monitor it regularly. You should have set yourself some goals for your SEO efforts and Google Analytics will help you track your progress and see what’s working and what isn’t.

6. Include a sitemap

Your website needs to be easy to crawl. If Google’s spiders can't crawl your website then it can’t be indexed. A sitemap will make it easy for the spiders to find all the important pages on your website.

7. Write for your audience

All the content on your website should be written for your audience and not for the search engines. Of course you need keywords in the text, but don’t add them unnaturally.

8. Create great content that is unique

Every website needs to have great content that is unique to entice their audience and keep them on their website. Avoid copying any content from another site as you may be penalised by Google for doing so.

9. Keyword anchor text

Use your keywords as anchor text when linking internally. Anchor text helps the search engines see what the page they are linking to is about. Instead of using “click here” as a link, try to make the link relevant to the page it is pointing at and better yet try and make it a keyword or phrase you want to optimise for (as long as it is relevant).

10. Use more traffic sources

Google is likely to bring you a huge percentage of your traffic but if the next algorithm update hit you hard you could lose out on a lot of business. It’s a good idea to target other sources for traffic, not only as a backup but just to drive more traffic to your site in general. Other traffic sources like newsletters, social media, etc. will also help you grow a loyal audience, which means a large reach, more enquiries and more sales.