By Ellie Shaw
Here at Property Webmasters, we truly understand the importance of Search Engine Optimisation. We also understand that the results of SEO aren’t just around the corner. However, being able to track your SEO efforts will allow you to see if your strategy is heading in the right direction in the short and long term.
We have created this blog so you can see what metrics we believe to be the most important to track when it comes to real estate SEO. With more than 50 years of combined experience in the property industry, our professional advice and guidance is bound to help your agency thrive.
Search Engine Optimisation can increase the number of organic visitors to a particular page on a website, when planned correctly. These organic visitors are key indicators that your website and brand are being recognised while gaining leads. This is a great digital marketing strategy as you don’t need to pay for clicks! Despite SEO taking time and effort, the results can be amazing!
Tracking SEO metrics allows you to gain key insights into your SEO efforts and how they are performing. Without tracking these metrics, you will not know what your strong and weak points are when it comes to SEO. Understanding what your ‘ weak’ points are, allows you to iterate and improve your current strategy or formulate new strategies, arising greater results.
All Metrics mentioned in this blog can be influenced by your strategy, contribute to website performance and user experience, as well as helping you to achieve your goals:
Organic traffic refers to visitors who access a website via organic search results, meaning they have landed on the website through SERPS as opposed to other sources, such as paid campaigns. This is done through a search engine like Google, where visitors locate a website through their own search terms.
Organic traffic is important as it is a great indicator that your website is building an audience and functioning in the right way. As well as this, tracking your organic traffic allows you to identify how your SEO strategy is performing.
When it comes to achieving your SEO goals, it all boils down to your organic traffic. Although you may have plenty of goals, for example an increase in conversions or an increase in leads, this wouldn’t be possible without your website obtaining traffic.
Organic traffic can easily be tracked via Google Analytics, where you are provided with an overview of the traffic your website received in a certain period of time.
Rankings refer to the position of a certain page on a website that appears on the search engine results page. This is determined by the content on your web pages and how relevant it is to the search term used. Ranking is a big factor when it comes to SEO and organic traffic.
Rankings are important as they allow your website to be positioned in the search engine. Without this, your website may not appear high in the search results leading to less traffic, recognition and potential leads.
One huge factor that can influence the rank of your web pages is keywords. In order to measure how well your keywords are performing, you want to turn to position tracking.
Position tracking is the process of reviewing the keywords you have chosen, for your on-page content strategy, that will help your site to rank on the search results page. The keywords you choose to add to your site will determine how effective your SEO strategy is.
Keywords help your website to rank highly in search engines, providing you use relevant and well-performing keywords. Without this relevant content, you can expect very little organic traffic. Therefore, position tracking is a great way to review whether the keywords you have chosen are effective for your strategy and goals.
Position tracking can be easy to track in SEMrush. Here you are provided with an overview of the keywords chosen and what the performance of the keywords have been like over a certain period of time.
Website speed is extremely important for user experience. If your website speed is poor, then you will most likely receive a poor conversion rate. It is known that over 60% of users expect a website to load within seconds of trying to enter the website, meaning if it doesn’t they will move to the next site. Having a poor website speed could end up in a loss of potential leads.
On average, a good website speed should be 2-5 seconds. If your website’s speed is beyond 2 seconds, this will most likely result in a greater bounce rate. Real estate websites typically take longer to load as the property feed and heavy use of images slows the process down.
When tracking your website speed, you can use Google’s tool PageSpeed Insights. Here you can enter the URL of the website you are tracking. You are able to see the results of the website’s speed on both mobile and desktop.
Bounce rate is the percentage of which visitors enter a website and leave straight away (single interaction), as opposed to navigating to other pages on the site.
Ideally, your bounce rate wants to stay low as you want your visitors to engage with your site. If your bounce rate is high, this may mean the visitor didn’t have a great user experience. This could be down to the likes of content not being relevant or even the layout of your website.
As your SEO goals won’t include having a high bounce rate, you need to include factors in your strategy that could enhance the chances of visitors staying engaged from the second they enter your website.
In order to review your bounce rate, you could use Google Analytics.
Google Analytics allows you to track your online traffic, understand your visitor’s behaviour and track more important metrics! We have previously produced a blog which explains exactly how you can track your Agency’s data through Google Analytics.
Property Webmasters
Is your SEO strategy not providing you with the results you hoped for? Here at Property Webmasters, we offer a SEO service for estate agents where we plan and implement a SEO strategy tailored to your website and goals. If you are interested in our services don’t hesitate to contact us.
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