Yesterday Google revealed changes to its search guidelines. This is kind of a big deal. ‘Search guidelines’ is the company’s term for criteria to judge websites by and determine rankings in search results. Since around 90% of North American internet searches involve Google, these rules can have a huge effect on any company’s online visibility. Luckily, there aren’t any earth shattering changes in the most recent round of updates. In fact many of the new developments fall in line with common sense or broader industry trends. That said, adopting early to any change in search guidelines is an easy way to get a quick jump in rankings and a lasting advantage over competitors that fail to do the same. Even if none of the updates specifically apply to your company, it’s impossible to develop an effective digital marketing strategy without being aware of how search engines evaluate websites. With that in mind here’s a look at what the main changes to Google’s search guidelines mean to real estate agents.
Less Emphasis On Supplementary Content
Google has been emphasizing quality content for a long time. By quality they tend to mean things that have immediate value to users or pages that answer the question implied in the initial query. It also has to look nice and be easy to navigate. The last updates actually increased the need for strong supplementary content, meaning if any part of this one is shocking this is it. Obviously high quality content is better than low quality. Your website is the point of contact between the internet and your business and everything on it should be awesome. Since you can’t spend all day on your website, understanding how Google differentiates between main and secondary content will help you know what types of content to prioritize.
Hopefully everybody reading this knows that main content is the dominant subject of a webpage. On a blog post, the actual post is the main content, videos are the main content on a YouTube page, and items for sale are main content on ecommerce sites. It’s kind of an open secret that Google’s decision to deprioritize secondary content is driven by the shift towards mobile browsing over desktop. Knowing this it becomes easy to identify secondary content as ‘bells and whistles’ that improve user experience on a desktop but are often not included in a site’s mobile version. Take a look at the difference between the desktop and mobile versions of realtor.ca (swear they are not a client). There homepage is essentially a search tool, making the search bar the main content and everything else secondary, therefore absent in the mobile version. The mobile versions of any site could probably look more appealing than realtor.ca. Regardless the site ranks near the top for general real estate queries like “homes for sale”, “appartments for rent”, and “real estate listings” on mobile devices within the Greater Toronto Area. Google assumes people initiating these searches want to browse properties for sale and directs them to a site which will allow them to do so.
For agents managing their own website, the lesson here is to work smarter not harder. Identify keywords you’d like to rank for and design pages that specifically meet the need implied by those searches. If you already have a site, begin shifting towards a mobile friendly design, move popular widgets like mortgage calculators to their own pages so they do not detract from pages where the main idea is to browse for properties, and remember that just because supplementary content counts less, does not mean it can be completely ignored. The real lesson here is to nail the primary content before moving onto things that are not as important by definition. The days of rankings boosts from just having social share buttons, pretty colours, and embedded videos are over.
E-A-T
This acronym has nothing to do with food. Now Google is all about “Expertise-Authority –Trustworthiness”. For agents this is actually very good news. This is an attempt at reducing spam content by prioritizing pages obviously written by people who know what they’re talking about. People like professional real estate agents. This is nothing new. Valuable information has always been treated better than fluff. The change comes in how Google describes what is valuable and how a site can demonstrate its authority in order to receive higher rankings.
Quality and amount are easy. Longer is usually better than short as long as it remains coherent. This is really for blog posts. Please don’t fill landing pages designed to get someone to click to another page with novel length paragraphs. It will not work. We all know what a quality post looks like but showing it to search engines can be tricky. Click through rate, back links, and engagement (shares, retweets, comments, ect) are some ways search engines determine the quality of an article. Therefore they are seen as lower quality by entities like search engines that can’t actually read the worthless content. Pieces that don’t share anything worth knowing or are filled with grammar mistakes tend not to get those things. Basically anything that helps you generate real estate leads can help boost engagement.
Similarly, authority and trustworthiness are not hard concepts to understand but many authoritative and trustworthy agents struggle to communicate their status to search engines. Unfortunately for people just getting started with digital marketing a track record is the best way to prove expertise. Someone who’s been online for a while with years worth of backlinks, comments, and quality content will have an immediate advantage over a new site. You can catch up fast by actively seeking out authoritative backlinks from industry associations most agents are likely already affiliated with and properly coding your site with schema to announce you are a real estate agent and an expert at selling property. Trust enhancers are also another good way to demonstrate authority and increase your click through rate. All that involves is the logo of high profile clients you’ve worked with or associations you belong to somewhere on your homepage to give a more professional first impression. Depending on your exprience anything can be a trust enhancer. Besides professional associations, highlighting awards or press mentions, involvement in initiatives that rely on your expertise like real estate concierge services, and testimonials from former clients can all be effective trust enhancers.
Site Maintenance Is Important But Context Is Key
The big take always from this update had to do with authority on particular subjects and distinguishing between main and secondary content. If I had to sum it up in one word that would be “context”. Understanding the supposed context of a web page or how it is most likely to appear to a typical search engine user will tell you what to focus on. This emphasis on context has officially clarified something many seos suspected, but was never made explicit until now. It’s necessary to regularly update some types of pages while others can stay the same for years. I had heard of people advising clients to redesign their websites or make inconsequential tweeks to their homepage in the hope of generating new content. Don’t do this. Unless your office moves, your contact page does not need to change. New content updates should correspond to new information. Regularly update blogs, pricing information, and any time sensitive data. Take care of your website but don’t look for excuses to make changes. From a technical standpoint, absolutely stay up to date. In terms of content, there has never been a better time to leverage your status as a real estate expert to methodically build an online presence with insightful targeted content.
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