The 3 Biggest Real Estate SEO Factors You Are Not Focusing On

It’s Not Link Building, Adding Content, or Keywords

“So, if building links is not what you should be spending your time on, what is? It’s user experience—because it will impact rankings more than anything else.” ~ Neil Patel

User Experience or UX is the biggest deal in Real Estate SEO.

That does not mean drop everything else and focus only on this.  Nor does it mean that Link Building is dead, or that you do not need to be creating content on a regular basis, or that you should not be focusing on local long tailed real estate related keywords.

Those things are still ingredients in the SEO batter.

There are 3 Real Estate SEO Factors that you may not be looking at… and should be!

What is User Experience or UX?

us·er ex·pe·ri·ence

noun: user experience;

the overall experience of a person using a product such as a website or computer application, especially in terms of how easy or pleasing it is to use.

“if a website degrades the user experience too much, people will simply stay away”

How would a Google bot measure User Experience?  I mean it’s not like they can check your site like a human.  There has to be a measurable.

Neil Patel, of Quicksprout, breaks it down to 3 measurables.

3 User Experience Ranking Factors

1. Click-Through Rate
2. Bounce Rate
3. Time On-Site

You may recognize these terms, as they have been a part of internet marketing vocabulary for a long time.  Most notably when talking about Google Webmasters, Google Adwords, or Google Analytics.

These are 3 factors that we have looked at in the past to get an idea of how well people like our website.

Interesting!

We have used this as a measurable to decide how real humans like our site for a long time.  It makes sense that Google would do the same thing.

Google has not announced publicly that they are using these factors, but many of the top SEO’s in the country feel that they are.  Including, Rand Fishkin, of Moz.com.

“…folks in the search, technology, and marketing worlds have surmised that Google is using query and click through data to bias search result rankings. I recently observed several examples of this via some industry colleagues…” ~ Rand Fishkin

He ran a test in which a blog post was ranked #7 on the Google Search and asked his Twitter followers to do a search for and click on his blog post.

3 hours later a few hundred people had clicked on the blog post and the blog post ranked #1!

As he points out, this does not definitively prove these as ranking factors… but if it walks like a duck.

Click-Through Rate

According to Google’s Adwords Help Center:

A ratio showing how often people who see your “ad” end up clicking it. CTR can be used to gauge how well your keywords and “ads” are performing.

CTR is the number of clicks that your “ad” receives divided by the number of times your “ad” is shown expressed as a percentage (clicks ÷ impressions = CTR).

For example, if you had 5 clicks and 1000 impressions, then your CTR would be 0.5%. Here’s how it’s calculated:

Can we just replace the word “Ad” with “Page Link”?

In Terms Of Real Estate SEO:

What is most important here is an Attention Grabbing Title, and Meta Description that relates to the Keyword being searched.

Meaning, when your page shows up on a search result, the percentage of time that it is clicked versus the other results will help determine your search rankings.

Bounce Rate

According to Googles Analytics Help Page:

Bounce Rate is the percentage of single-page sessions (i.e. sessions in which the person left your site from the entrance page without interacting with the page).

There are a number of factors that contribute to a high bounce rate. For example, users might leave your site from the entrance page if there are site design or usability issues. Alternatively, users might also leave the site after viewing a single page if they’ve found the information they need on that one page, and had no need or interest in going to other pages.

In other words the visitor has to click on at least 1 thing!

In Terms Of Real Estate SEO:

What is most important here is to have links to other content on your site easily accessible.  You want your visitors to click 1 more thing once they have found your site.

You will notice that in this post there are many links you can click on to get more information about the word it is linked to.  In addition there are many links and buttons in the sidebar, header, footer, and multiple “Related Content” plugins being used.

Time On-Site

This one is pretty self-explanatory… how long are people staying on your site once they have clicked the Google Search link.

In Terms Of Real Estate SEO:

While there really is no benchmark for this one you should have content that is compelling enough to keep people on your site for at least 30 seconds.

Conclusion

Google wants to give the best search results possible.  And having a ton of links to a page is a good sign that it is well liked, but it can be manipulated.

But you can not manipulate User Experience.  If people like your site once they have found it that is the best signal to Google that it should be ranked high.

User Experience can be measured by 3 SEO Factors:

1. Click-Through Rate
2. Bounce Rate
3. Time On-Site

These factors can be improved by:

1. Writing Better Headlines and Meta Descriptions To Get People To Click Your Result
2. Providing Links To More Information On Your Site To Get People To Visit Other Pages
3.  Providing Better Content To Keep People On Your Site Longer