I'm often asked what will be included in an REW SEO project by smart Realtors who are looking to enhance their digital marketing strategy. The truth is that every single project at REW is a bit different, because we look at your company, competition, and opportunity within your market, and then develop a strategy accordingly.
Your designated SEO expert will be able to create an individualized strategy for your site and share it with you fairly early into your project. In the meantime, let's take a look at what we plan to accomplish for every new SEO project that comes across our desks.
We want to transfer existing content
If you have existing content on an old site, our first activity will be evaluating what you have and determining what is worth preserving. We'll want to transfer any pages that either have unique, well-written content, reinforce your brand, or have a strong level of existing authority.
Transferring content involves manually moving content from your old site to your new one, and then formatting it to match the new design. We may have to strip out old HTML code that no longer applies, restructure some of the paragraphs, and add in new headings and formatting. We'll also have to save and re-upload any important images, and create new IDX snippets for pages that require listings. Once we transfer the content, we'll redirect the old page URLs to the new ones to make sure that we preserve that valuable page authority!
Exactly how long this takes will depend on the size of the site. Some smaller sites can have their content transferred over in just a few hours, while sites with dozens of pages will take longer. We strongly recommend having your content transfer estimated through your Product Consultant before starting a project.
We want to get your site live
If your new site isn't live, our SEO experts' goal is to help you get your site online as quickly as possible. We'll help you hook up the navigation, install tracking codes, prepare your basic page skeleton, and ultimately make your site live ready.
Our team uses a checklist to ensure we've crossed all the T's for your website, which includes details like:
- Creating Home and About Us page content
- Developing a minimum of four community pages, complete with listing snippets
- Optimizing the site's navigation structure
- Updating IDX Settings to force registration
There are two reasons we want you to get your site live quickly: The first is that SEO authority takes time to develop, so the sooner your site is recognized by the search engines, the sooner you'll see traffic. The second reason is your ROI—the faster your website is out of the gate, the faster you'll see leads coming in. When it comes to both authority and ROI, speed is your friend, and the first step to building either is having a site that's live.
We want to build up your foundation
Once we've tackled the basics and your site is ready to go, we'll evaluate your existing foundation of content and navigation, whether your site is in development, or it's been live for years.
Here are a few activities we may incorporate into your foundational strategy:
- Creating additional community pages
- Maintaining an ongoing blog
- Reviewing and optimizing active social media profiles
- Rewriting stock Buyer and Seller sections
This foundation helps search engines understand what your site is about and it's how we begin to drive organic visitors to your business. A strong foundation is a critical part of your SEO strategy.
We want to drive more leads to your site
Last but most definitely not least, we want to drive more leads to your site. Using the foundation we've built, we'll employ a strategy that drives as much traffic and leads to your site as absolutely possible. Our goal is to build up your traffic over the long term, in ways that are sustainable yet profitable.
SEO is all about the "long game" but we'll be looking for ongoing growth, and an organic traffic trend that looks something like this:
Just note that fluctuations are completely normal, and the best way to measure SEO success is by comparing 3-6 month periods of time to the same period of time in the years prior.
Here are some ongoing activities that we take to ensure that your site continues to see increasing traffic and lead volume over time:
- Tracking and reporting the site's success
- Recommending site customizations - for example, extra MLS fields, auto-generated content, and tactics to improve your users' experience
- Improving local SEO and online profiles, such as Facebook
We want to help make you successful
At the end of the day, SEO is meant to help you become more successful as a real estate agent. We'll work with you to drive more traffic to the site and convert that traffic into leads. We succeed when you succeed.