Technical SEO – Why your real estate website needs it?
A quick read to help you navigate through the intricacies of technical SEO for your agency's real estate website.
Intro to technical SEO:
First, let’s clarify what technical SEO is.
If your website is a house, then technical SEO is the foundation it’s built on.
Of course, the user doesn’t see it, but It’s crucial.
But just like selling a property, it’s not just you and the client. In our case, Google performs a “house inspection” on your website.
And if it doesn’t meet the requirements, you will have a tough time selling it (getting traffic).
Luckily for you, in this guide, we will show you how to make sure your website is technically sound, thus reducing the chance that you won’t rank due to “frail foundations.”
A couple of things before we start:
– The way search engines can see your website and display it on their pages is called crawling
– Robots crawl your website by going from one link to another on the website (you’ll know why that is important in a bit)
– Indexing is the process in which the bots add your page to the search engine
For a better understanding of the 2, check this article out.
Website architecture
What is it?
Website architecture provides a structure through which your users can navigate your website.
Why is it important?
Allows for a better user experience which means higher conversion rates.
It makes it easier for search engines to crawl your website, which means more traffic.
Header navigation
Having your main website sections always available for the user improves your structure by making it easy to access your main pages.
URL structure
Use: https://yoursite/products/category-A/product-B/size-C,
instead of: https://yoursite/1b3PI5aSK7GUKxkqCzA3hgGDKcAVoxdPBTAjsRZY
Consistent design
Internet users like familiarity. So have a uniform layout and design to avoid confusion.
Breadcrumbs
A good practice for a more extensive website (usually e-commerce) is to show users where they are on a given website and how they got here.
They aren’t a replacement for your main navigation.
Sitemaps
It is a list of all pages that users can access on your website.
An XML sitemap allows search engines to navigate through your pages—more on that in the next section.
Sitemaps
What are they?
Sitemaps allow you to list out all of your website URLs in one place and additional information about your pages – upload date, importance, and recent changes.
Why are they important?
New/huge/poorly/content-heavy websites give the search engine crawlers a hard time indexing all the pages.
Sitemaps help Google crawl more efficiently.
How to create a sitemap?
Luckily for you, most CMS automatically generate Sitemaps, so you don’t have to worry about it.
But if you want to create one manually, go to xml-sitemaps.com and paste your link in there.
How to submit a sitemap manually?
Open your Google search console, go to sitemaps and submit your sitemap.
Pagespeed
What is it?
Pagespeed is one of Google’s most important ranking factors.
It determines how fast users:
– see an element of your website
– can interact with your website
Why is it important?
Google wants information to be able to load fast, so page speed is vital to rank well.
It is also essential if you want a website with a good user experience that can lead to more conversions.
How to test it?
Go to: https://pagespeed.web.dev/ and enter your website’s URL.
You will get two results – 1 for mobile devices and 1 for desktops.
Causes for a slow website
– Image size is usually one of the most significant contributors to a slow site.
– Using a theme with too much code.
– A cheap host.
How to improve it?
– Minify images – we recommend tinypng.com
– Use a well-optimized theme.
– Get a good host
– Enable website caching
– Use a content delivery network (CDN)
Benefits of a fast website
A slow website handicaps your success regarding ranking, and it throws off any potential clients.
Most people leave a website if it loads for more than 2 seconds, so try to aim for a faster page speed time.
Duplicate content
What is it?
Duplicate content is when two blocks of content are 100% identical or nearly identical.
Why is it important?
Google wants unique content to rank web pages accordingly.
Duplicate content makes the search engine choose between two or more pages for rankings.
Causes for duplicate content
Having 4 versions of the same URL:
– http://
– https://
– http://www
– https://www
Having different URLs for the same listings – different versions of one property listing need to have only 1 URL
How to fix it?
Using 301 redirects makes sure all links redirect to 1 central.
Use the rel=”canonical” tag in the head tag to mark pages as duplicates.
Deleting useless pages
Tools and tricks
copyscape.com – plagiarism checker
siteliner.com – duplicate content on your website.
Typing in site:yoursite.com
Google will show you how many results there are. You might have a duplicate problem if it’s more than it should be.
H-tags
What are H-tags?
H-tags are lines of code looking like so:
<h1>text</h1>
Why are they important?
For 2 reasons:
It shows the search engines the flow of the content and how its hierarchy is structured.
It helps users with screen readers understand the content of your website better – website accessibility for all is critical to reaching the widest audience possible.
How to implement H-tags in the best way?
– H1 tags need to be used once per page – Think of it as the title of your book.
– H2 tags are like different chapters.
– H3s are sections within chapters.
– If you want to get into detail and subsections, use H4/5/6.
Here’s how we’ve used them in this blog post:
<H1>Technical SEO – Why your real estate website needs it?</H1>
<H2>H-tags</H2>
<H3>What are H-tags?</H3>
Security
One of Google’s ranking algorithms is website security:
Not only does Google use security as a ranking factor, but 80% of website visitors leave if it isn’t secure.
What is SSL?
Security Socket Layer is the protocol through which your website gets secure.
How to check if your website is secure?
You are set if it has a padlock next to the link. ( Don’t forget to redirect any HTTP links to their secure versions)
If your website isn’t secure, it should be a top priority to fix.
How to choose an SSL certificate?
Usually, the more expensive, the better, but keep in mind that real estate websites aren’t like big e-commerce stores, and there isn’t a large flow of data, neither do people pay on your website, so you don’t need the most expensive certificate.
Robots.txt
Back to where we started, search engines use robots to crawl and index your website.
But bots have something called crawl budget – big websites often do not get all of their pages inspected.
And there is the other case where you probably don’t want certain website pages to get indexed.
So what do you do?
You use a file called robots.txt, where you tell Google or any search engines which pages not to crawl.
Most websites do not need robots.txt, but knowing it exists is helpful.
As you can see, we do not use it either.
We recommend reading this guide from the bosses themselves: it’s pretty technical.
Conclusion
Well done, you now know everything you need about technical SEO. With solid foundations, you can go onto the next step of your organic traffic journey – on-page optimizations!
Not too sure where it fits in the whole picture?
Read our SEO guide for 2022.
Wanna have a technically sound real estate website without putting in the work?
Book a call with us on triffgall.de, and you can outsource your website’s organic marketing to an agency that focuses entirely on that.
