Using office web pages for Estate Agent SEO

Google have announced that companies with offices in different locations should not hide that information. If you want your office pages to be found, the best way to do this would be to provide unique and an easily crawlable URL for each Estate Agent office and also a HTML sitemap that shows your offices exact location.

Matt Cutts (Google SEO Guru) advised Pinkberry’s website on how they should go about showing the information on separate stores. He says "My advice to Pinkberry would be to add a sentence to their store locator page that says "Or see the full list of all Pinkberry store locations." That would be helpful not only for regular users but also for search engines."

Here is a perfect example of this: Penyards Estate Agents has a "branches tab" to show all of their offices. This tab button takes you to a ‘Google map’ showing you all the locations of each office. Down the left hand side is a "navigational links bar" this has all the different offices names. If you click on any of the offices it will take you to a keyword rich page with a short description of the specific office.

This makes it so easy for search engines to crawl through your website allowing them to find all the information they need. Without a HTML sitemap it makes it really difficult for search engines to find its way to these office pages.

You should always keep in mind 1) have a web page for each office, have the office address, phone number, hours the office is open and any other relevant information you think it will need and 2) create a good HTML sitemap to point to the office pages with regular HTML links.

Google Places (formerly known as Google Local Business Centre) is another way of showing Google your separate offices. Google has allowed us to be able to tell them directly about our businesses.  You provide Google with such information as your address and some other details and this enables you to rank on the search engine under Google Places.

This is brilliant but you do also need to have web pages for each store as it will help with crawling and enable users to find your offices more easily.

Troy Stanley, CTO of Resource Techniques comments, ‘We have been telling Estate Agents to create a office profile on their Estate Agent website for years now. The SEO benefits are huge and now Google have now openly said that all local businesses should follow this tactic.’

By Luke Stanley
SEO Consultant