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