How to Improve Your Rental Property Website Rankings

In order to build a bigger brand, establish yourself as an authority in your local real estate industry, and improve your rental property website rankings, you need to learn how to capitalize on your website’s SEO (search engine optimization).

After all, 70% of all links users click on are organic, meaning they originate from search engine results.

All major search engines, such as Google, Yahoo and Bing, yield search results when users input keywords into the search bar.

These search results are then ranked according to their relevance to the search query, meaning the better your website’s SEO, the higher you will likely rank in search results and the more exposure your website will experience amongst users.

And, just in case you aren’t sure how you officially rank in search engine results, here is the rundown:

1. Internet bots crawl your website looking for any content and images you have published

2. The bots then organize your content and images into an understandable format so that search engines can read what your website is all about

3. Based on the indexing the bots have done, and the search queries users put into search bars, search results appear for users to view and click on if interested

The goal is to appear on the first page of all search engine results.

However, this takes time, experience, and some SEO knowledge.

If you are looking to improve your rental property website rankings, check out these exceptional SEO strategies that you can easily incorporate into your overall marketing efforts.

Top Ways to Increase Your Rental Property Site’s Rankings

1. Start a Blog

It is not enough to advertise your available rental properties on your website.

You need to make sure that site visitors feel their time is being spent wisely when they visit your site.

And, you do this by creating consistent, valuable, and informational blog content for them to engage with.

The longer an interested tenant is on your website, the higher your overall search rankings will be. This is because major search engines, like Google, reward websites with engaging content that site visitors interact with for long periods of time.

2. Increase Page Load Speed

Another important search result ranking signal is page speed.

There is nothing more frustrating than clicking on a website, especially one such as a rental property listing site, and having it load at painfully slow speeds.

This is why optimizing your website to load as quickly and efficiently as possible is so important for your website rankings.

Here are some great ways to boost your website’s page loading speeds, according to the CrazyEgg:

• Reduce the number of HTTP requests your website needs
• Compress your property images so they load faster without sacrificing their quality
• Enable browser caching so your site visitors don’t have to wait for your entire site to load each time they visit because it is stored in their browser cache
• Place your best content on the top half of your website, which loads first
• Minimize the number of errors and redirects your site visitors experience

Although some of this may seem quite confusing to the novice website owner, it is actually very simple and can make your website load faster than ever.

This, in turn, will increase your rankings, improve user experiences, and lessen the chances a site visitor will click on your site and leave immediately because of slow page loading speeds.

3. Use Keywords

Whenever you add content to your rental property website, it is crucial you think about the main keywords that encompass your website, your business, and your properties.

This is how site visitors will find your website using search engines.

They enter keywords that relate to what you have to offer and, if done correctly, your website and corresponding web pages will appear on the first page of the search engine results.

It is important you research which keywords are being used in the rental property industry, so that you use only the strongest keywords that apply to your website.

It is equally important to find keywords that set you apart from even the toughest competition so that you rank for unique keywords that don’t have as many search results to display.

4. Utilize Real Estate Aggregator Sites

Sites such as Trulia, Zillow, and Homes.com are well-trafficked websites that people looking for real estate properties trust.

If you want to piggyback off the thousands of visitors sites like these see every day, consider signing up to list your properties on their sites, and include a link back to your own website so site visitors can explore more of what you have to offer.

The extra traffic that is directed to your rental property website will boost your site rankings immediately.

5. Add Video

Video consumption is at an all-time high these days.

People are naturally visual and love to consume video content of all types.

One great way to increase website engagement, boost your site’s SEO, and experience higher search rankings, is to include video footage of your available properties on your website.

This video content, paired with proper optimization through keyword titles, alt meta tags, and a detailed meta snippet that visitors will see in search results, will increase your rankings dramatically.

6. Be Mobile-Friendly

These days, people are using mobile devices more than ever.

This is why it is increasingly important that you make your website mobile-friendly.

Those on mobile devices expect the same fast loading pages, easy user navigation, and great looking websites that those on desktops get to experience.

In fact, being mobile-friendly is so critical to site visitors that Google has made that a ranking signal as well.

Take the time to make sure your property website renders seamlessly on all devices, no matter the screen size, so that not only do you rank higher in search results, you provide an exceptional experience to everyone that visits your website, even those on the go.

7. Use Links

As part of your SEO efforts to boost site rankings, you can take advantage of two types of links:

• External Links. This is when you link out to other reputable websites to help qualify your content and make it more convincing, engaging, and valuable to readers.
• Internal Links. On the other hand, when you link to content on your own website, you help readers find additional, valuable information that goes more in depth on that particular topic. In doing so, you also keep visitors on your website for a longer amount of time, which signals to search engines that you have quality content on your website that visitors are finding useful. Since search engines’ ultimate goal is to provide the best experience to users, they are more likely to rank these websites higher in the search results.

Optimizing your website’s SEO is a great way to boost search engine rankings and get your website seen by tenants that are more interested.