Websites with no character loads slowly are hard to navigate and have low visibility on search engines. When CRE Collaborators ask us to advise on a website for an agency, real estate professional, or individual, we use the following top of mind checklist.
Build
- Consider a minimalist website for customer-centric clarity, beautiful design elements, a simple user interface (UI), and mobile compatibility (a mobile-friendly real estate website is a must for SEO. Minimalist websites help users think and act faster.
- White backgrounds allow essential elements like calls-to-actions and meaningful text to stand out for maximum impact; its brightness, contrasting colors, enhances accessibility.
- Black backgrounds convey a minimalist, content-focused UI imparting a serious feeling.
- Bold colors contrast nicely with both white and black backgrounds, although when used as background colors themselves, they can look almost as minimal as white or black while also conveying a bit more emotion and meaning.
- Sans-serif fonts look cleaner than serif fonts. Combining sans-serif typography with large font size and bold font weight builds impact and emotion.
- Gradients are an excellent solution for using bold colors without overwhelming the user, especially when paired with a sans-serif font.
- Focus on clarity/clickability first and visual appeal second. Interactive elements must be easy to follow.
- Display links to your social media and industry-specific portals such as www.creco.ai.
Build
- Build your design with the Astra WordPress theme with Elementor for the best speed, most outstanding design and maintenance flexibility, and long-term value.
- Become familiar with and use the Yoast SEO Professional plugin to have H1, H2, H3, P tags for every page or post. Add title tags and meta description tags for posts and pages. Post meta data such as author name, modified date, first published date, etc. Use the plugin to create an XML sitemap for your real estate website. Submit the sitemap and test it after creating an account on Google Search Console.
- Do some research on selecting 'Focus Keyword' and 'Long Tail Keywords' in the content for every page and post. Don't cannibalize keywords; it confuses Google.
- Create internal links. Ensure that each page or post links to other pages on your site. Use anchor text. Posts should also have outbound links to authority websites in your niche.
- The speed of your website impacts Google rankings. Your website must load in 2-3 seconds. Many small onsite components contribute to speed. Your hosting service plays an important role.
- This Google tool will measure your site load speeds. Consider having an Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) version of your website. AMP-enabled pages load very fast when a visitor comes to your site from Google.
Run
- Have a blog and post one or two times a week. Post content to your social media with links back to your content. Keep your Google My Business filled with new content in parallel.
- Articles need to be informative and targeted to your target audience. Vary length from 250 words to 1000 words. Don't overuse keywords. Include title blocks, images, charts, and infographics designed in Canva. Embed YouTube videos in your blog posts and pages. Whenever you upload an image to your site, make sure you add a title tag and alt tag.
- Structured data markup is an essential element of on-page SEO. According to Google, the Structured Data Markup Helper helps you mark up elements on your web page so that Google can understand the data on the page. Once Google understands your page data more clearly, it can be presented more attractively and in new ways in Google Search.
- Your site must have an SSL certificate with your URL starting with HTTPS rather than SSL. Use WordPress to add a necessary SSL certificate with a single click simply. A website with SLL begins with HTTPS, while a website that does not have SSL starts with HTTP in browsers. Site traffic is wary of entering any data or even using insecure sites.
- There shouldn't be any coding errors on your website. You can find out coding errors using this official tool.
- There shouldn't be any broken links on your website. You can use free plugins to find and fix broken links quickly.
- Whenever you delete a page from your website (Google has indexed that), make sure you set up a redirect. Many WordPress plugins make it very to redirect the URL of deleted pages to your website's existing page.
- Whenever you upload an image to your site, make sure you add a title tag and alt tag.
- Keep the URLs for your pages and posts short and make sure that you optimize them for SEO. You can use your target keyword in the URL and remove unnecessary words and numbers.
- Sign up for Google Analytics and Google Search Console accounts. If Google finds any policy violations or errors, you will probably get a Google Search Console warning.
- Keep a tab on what keywords drive traffic to your site and which webpage is ranking wherein search results for a particular keyword. Keep adding those keywords to optimize your content.
Keep these pointers in mind when working with your website designer through the Design, Build Run process. We welcome your comments on this admittedly large and crucial topic. Contact me directly if you have any questions or comments. howard@creco.ai