Almost every aspect of technology experiences upgrades. From smartphones to the apps installed on them, change and innovation are inevitable. It’s exactly the same for the website and various web assets you own/manage.
As a result, you need to make sure you keep them up to date with the changes rolled out by the most popular search engines.
Since you want your page to rank highly, the majority of updates will be SEO-related. These search engines have ever-evolving algorithms they use to rank these web assets.
However, you may think they’re more sophisticated than they actually are. Search engines are always on the hunt for new and altered websites.
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This is because they need to categorize them and match them with the people that require this information. If you can do everything to help a search engine know the contents on your website, that is half the battle won.
Why a Technical SEO Audit is important
Apart from making your business more visible to the public, a technical SEO audit holds a great deal of importance. Let’s explore some of the other main benefits of this task:
- You can quantify your success – If you take into account how your website was performing before the audit, you can track your success after it. You can also set tools in place to track the success of certain keywords.
- Keep track of the competition – You are more than welcome to perform audits on any website out there. You can learn what your biggest competitors are doing right and replicate their strategies.
- User satisfaction – Since Google prioritizes the user experience, if you adhere to their requirements users will enjoy the added convenience.
- Increased traffic due to better ranking – This is obviously the main goal but it deserves to be mentioned.
Perform a full technical audit of your real estate website
Use this as a checklist for vetting your site:
- Use an SEO-friendly URL – Try to make the URL self-explanatory and closely related to the topic being searched.
- Optimize your Title – The title tag is HTML code that indicates what part of your page is indeed the title. This is what will be displayed in bold blue on the Google search engine results page (SERP). The target keyword should be in your title but it should also entice the viewer to click on your link.
- Optimize your meta description – The meta description is the chunk of text displayed under the title in the Google SERP. The best amount to use for this text is 155 characters. This way it won’t trail off. Don’t use any unnecessary punctuation or symbols. Long-tail keywords work well in the meta description. Make use of real estate meta tags to allow web crawlers to know what information is contained on your page. Just keep in mind that meta tags for your real estate website should remain as minimalistic as possible.
- Internal linking – You should link other content you’ve created within the content of your own site. This can redirect viewers to more of your material that they may be interested in and also helps search engine crawlers/spiders to discover new contents for indexation.
- Broken Links – Remove any broken links from all of your content. These are links that take a user to a site that no longer works.
- Redirects – If you’ve recently changed domains or rebranded in some way that caused you to create a new website, you need to redirect your clientele to the new one.
- Optimize page speed – If your page loads too slowly, people will leave it. Additionally, it will negatively affect your site’s SEO. To optimize your page load speed try to limit the number of videos and unoptimized images you embed.
- Optimize content – Use all the content sorting resources to your advantage. Make sure you use all of the heading types and include keywords and phrases. Keep the flow of new content consistent and make use of high-quality images and videos within the text.
- Lower Bounce rate – Bounce rate lets you know the level of engagement your page is getting. It measures how many people visit your page and then do nothing further before leaving. Quick ways to lower bounce rate is to remove pop-ups and make the site mobile-friendly.
- Increase CTR – CTR or click-through ratio is the number/percentage of people that click on your website on the Google SERP as opposed to the other options available. Increasing CTR has the same methodology as lowering bounce rate.
- Use Website Schemas – This is a way of telling search engines directly what the contents of your page actually are. There is then no need for the algorithm to try and decipher what content you’ve created. For example, you can tell Google which part of the page has listings, contact information, or market research text. This is added to the structured data of your page. It is the code you see when you right-click on a webpage and select ‘’view page source’ or ‘inspect’.
- Use Structured Data for Real Estate listings – This relates to the point above. However, the structured text is different for each application as one would assume. You need to add specific properties such as how many rooms the listing has or when it was posted. You can start with some basic examples shown here.
- Use a Robots.txt file – A website crawler is a piece of software that scans and analyzes website contents to determine what information it has. A Robots.txt file is a text file with a set of instructions for these crawlers. You can tell the crawler what it is and isn’t allowed to search and it will see this file before it sees the rest of your domain or directory.
- XML sitemap – This is a step above using a robots.txt file to help web crawlers. An XML sitemap is a guide to let Google know which website pages of yours are most important. This is important to use if your website is large and contains a lot of content.
- SSL Certificate – A way to prove your website is secure is to get an SSL certificate. They count for a lot in terms of website security and are prioritized over unsecured hosts. If you get this certificate your URL will change from HTTP to HTTPS.
- W3C validation – This is a free web service that validates web documents written in HTML ,XHTML MathML, SMIL and SVG. It is like a code checker, but for markup languages. You can simply insert your link into the W3C validator and observe the results. It may not help greatly with SEO, but it will improve the overall quality of your website to make the suggested amendments.
Understanding Page Experience in Google Search results
Page experience is an algorithm developed by Google. It has recently (August 4, 2021) experienced an update. Page experience is a way of measuring how well viewers can interact with your webpage.
This algorithm will check your webpage against its criteria giving it a score. This score will influence your ranking in google search results. If you and your competitors have similar content, the one with a better page experience will probably rank higher.
Here are some of the signals that indicate a great user experience:
- Core Web Vitals – The page loads quickly, is visually stable, and responds to user input (button clicks, personal data entry) quickly.
- Mobile-friendliness – The page loads equally well on a mobile phone as it would on a PC.
- The page is secure and served over HTTPS. HTTPS or Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure is a way of keeping user data secure on the internet. It will make your webpage trustworthy and maintain user privacy.
- Non-intrusive interstitials – Interstitial adverts are ones that require interaction from the user and block the entire screen. To not fall foul of this update in the algorithm, your advertising techniques should not bombard/distract the user.
This is a superficial look into the algorithm update. There are countless other benefits to improving page experience apart from ranking higher in search results.
Make sure that your website is ADA compliant
Although this is a means to increase your SEO score, it is also just generally important for the inclusiveness of the public. Some easy options include:
- Using captions on videos
- Having video content with narration
- Having large text or magnifying options
- Employing a straightforward website layout
- Underlining links as another form of demarcation
These are just beginner steps that are the most feasible to implement. You will need to delve deeper into how you can be totally compliant.