Top 5 on-site SEO tips for estate agents

Optimising websites for search engines can be tough enough in any industry, but the spending power of the major property portals make it doubly so in estate agency.

I've blogged before on how many people search on Google to find local estate agents, but I didn't mention just how cost effective those visitors can be. Delivering value on marketing spend is hugely important to estate agents - and a bit of a personal interest of mine - so I'm sure I'll come back to this theme regularly.

For instance, take a couple of typical queries that an agent in Crawley might wish to target. You do already consider these things as part of your website strategy, right?

1. Houses for sale Crawley (1,000 broad local Google searches in November 09)
2. Flats to rent Crawley (1,600)
3. Crawley estate agents (2,400)

For the first of these, the top 10 organic search results are monopolised by the property portals, with FindaProperty in number one position. In fact, the first estate agent listing is back in 29th place.

The rental side is little different. Rightmove are at the top and the first letting agent result is back in 21st spot.

However, for lettings in London, Foxtons make it into 6th, with Zoopla topping the list. So we're not talking impossible dreams here.

Fortunately, the more important vendor focused keywords are considerably simpler to rank well for. Portals do not target these keywords with the same enthusiasm, so the competition is limited to estate agent directory websites and other estate agencies in your area.

So, what is the secret for estate agents to improve their ranking for these important searches?

Content, content, content!

Along that line, my top 5 on-site SEO tips for estate agents are:

1. Ensure you have an individual web page for each property and think about how to best describe a property for both your human and search engine visitors.
2. Keep all of your content within your own domain name. Don't allow your website to link to photos and property descriptions hosted on your estate agency software provider's website, or use free off-domain hosting services such as Picasa.
3. Add local area information pages to your website and offer area specific property search pages. Use keywords in the links to these pages
4. Blog about your local market knowledge and use relevant content to target long tail search terms. I'll blog in more detail about the 'long tail' in future.
5. Use Google Analytics to track your website performance and give indications about the search terms people are finding your website with - and use those previously used terms to improve the ranking of your site by referencing them in new pages and blog articles.

Generally accepted estimates suggest that around 25-50% of all internet search queries are completely new. The number of variations on the example keywords that we listed above is simply massive. Don't feel that you have to try and match the terms exactly. Be human and generate content regularly and the search engines will do the rest.

Of course, if you need a hand, don't forget that my company build great estate agent websites!