Lead generation is the number one objective for any real estate business. This means that your website along with your other online presence, must attract as many visitors as possible and to convert a large percentage of it into sales. But how do you attract visitors to find you? How do you rank in search engine results? Could IDX help you with improving your SEO?
Here’s a guide on the most important aspects of real estate search engine optimization, and how IDX could help to improve it even further.
IDX INTEGRATED LISTINGS
Your real estate website must have an IDX integrated listings out of the box. The integrated listings are pages native to your site and they are indexable by search engines.
This means that when a search engine crawls through for information from your site, it will be stored in an index, and when this happens your website could show up as a possible search result.
The more integrated listings on your site means, the more you are feeding information to search engines. Which translates that your site has good amount of probability to rank highly in the search results.
HOSTING
It matters where your MLS property listings data resides.
To ensure that you get maximum SEO benefits, you want the IP address of all your property listing pages lead back to your website. This also gives you the ability to control the listings on your website.
If you want to focus on a particular property type or location you can set up your data feed to reflect this, allowing you to focus the content on your site.
Ubertor Tip: If you’re focused on your organic content, this will help you create your niche and out compete others with IDX in your area.
SUBDOMAINS
If you want to have the best performing SEO, you should have your property listings in a subfolder on your main website domain (ex. yourubertorwebsite.com/listings/123_avenue)
If your property listings are on a different subdomain or has a different URL address, search engines are going to treat this as a separate site. This setup has the potential to disturb your search ranking because:
– The property listing pages won’t add to the total page count on your site
– Links between your main domain and subdomain may not be considered as internal linking by search engines
URL STRUCTURE
URL structure of your real estate website should be simple and direct. It should be readable and relevant to your website content.
Take this URL for example, yourubertorwebsite.com/listings/123_avenue is better than yourubertorwebsite.com/idx/9rf7/post?ID=77
You should also organize your URLs so property addresses are in the second level. If the property URLs are on a much deeper level it will affect page authority and its ability to rank well on search engine results.
TITLES, KEYWORDS, METADATA
Your property listing pages must have proper page titles and descriptions, appropriate keywords, and metadata. This will give search engines more information about the pages on your site to help users know what they are clicking on.
—-
Now that we’ve covered everything you need to know about the impact of IDX on SEO ranking and performance, you should plan now on how to apply these tips to your website. You don’t want to be left behind in this SEO ranking game.