One of the key trends in Real Estate marketing today is hyperlocal marketing or niche marketing. Many Realtors® know that having their boots on the ground in their communities have huge value, and they are using that specialty knowledge to win the battle with syndicates.

It is easier to rank high or even first in community or neighborhood searches. SEO is a tricky task to master, but many of our customers are up for the challenge. They depend on the Buying Buddy IDX CRM to help them in their quest to rank high in local searches and bring in the leads. However, the ever changing landscape of search algorithms (specifically Google) bring many challenges.

Use SEO optimized pages to rank higher in local organic searches

With the exit of Matt Cutts, former head of Google’s webspam team, also went any regular announcements of algorithm updates. Google also announced that the majority of key updates have been grafted into the core algorithm, therefore, major updates would no longer be announced. In addition, some of the algorithms (not rolled into the core) now update in real time. While it’s great that you don’t have to wait so long to recover from a penalty, it is now more difficult to pin point the cause of any dip in traffic.

If you experience a sudden dip in traffic it may not be immediately apparent why it happened. You are going to have to go on an exploration expedition to figure out what when wrong. You need to eliminate all other possibilities (like seasonal lulls) or past problems that might be back again (like bad links). Even after you have gone through all these exercises, you are going to have come to terms with the fact that your SEO strategy will never be perfected. You will never be able to know all of the factors acting on your SEO, and the always changing nature of algorithms means that you will need to examine your programming in a different light to determine results.

Start by examining your site and rankings by the key elements each search algorithm looks for. You can begin by identifying which algorithms might be touching your site. For example:

•          Panda- Looks at content for length, duplicates, clarity, topical relevance, grammar, spelling and readability, site architecture, advertisements, site load time and more. Panda’s last announced update was in October 2015, but it has now been rolled into the core ranking algorithm.
•          Phantom- Looks at low-quality pages, and it is an all-inclusive quality algorithm. It focuses attention towards sites with content issues, crawl issues, aggressive ad placement and deceptive ads, bad UI/UX and more. Phantom casts a wider net than Panda and updates are not regularly announced by Google.
•          Penguin- Looks for links that appear to be spam or “unnatural”. It looks at sites page by page instead of as a collective, and because it is a real-time process, it is easier to recover from hits.

Follow Google's EAT acronym to improve your search ranking

When it comes to hyperlocal marketing and your SEO rankings, keep the main thing the main thing. Don’t get caught up in perfection. Follow Google’s simple rules: present your website as having Expertise, Authority and Trust (Google’s EAT acronym). Make sure you fix all the technical issues you can find and pay attention to the speed of your site (especially on mobile). Lastly, keep up to date on the impending move to mobile-first indexing and be prepared to adjust.

If you need a solution that can transform your website into a search engine friendly IDX site that helps you rank for SEO and also integrates to a CRM for lead and team management, contact us.