Updated, March 12, 2020

During these unprecedented times, it can be hard to find your footing. While many of us learn how to run our businesses from our home offices, this is a good time to get our online presence in order.

Now, more than ever, you need to focus on getting leads, and ensuring that while they visit your site, they are having the best possible experience.

Part of this is taking a good look at your website, and taking the time (while you have it) to clean it up, to ensure your leads are spending as much time on your pages as possible.

As you are practicing social distancing and working from home, so are they. And they have much more time on their hands to prepare to buy or sell their homes, once the fears of the crisis

We’ve all heard the old adage, “Content is King.” But how your content is structured on each page is just as important as the content itself. Internet users are a fickle breed, so you want to make sure you present the most important, interesting and valuable content prominently, at the top of the page.

In terms of a page that is highly optimized for search engines, there are specific places you should make sure you feature your main targeted keywords. This is, of course, an important step in ensuring that search engine crawlers understand the intent of your page, but it also helps orient human users as well.

Meta Information

The meta information is the content that will be displayed at the top of your web page browser window and in the search

Upgrading your site can be scary.

You've worked hard to build up authority, earn traffic, and create a system that effectively generates leads.

Therefore, it's understandable that one of the most common questions we get when people are considering an upgrade is, "Will this hurt my SEO?"

The short answer is "no."

Completed properly, an upgrade shouldn't have any negative impact on the authority you've built. If anything, it should only help. Here's what you need to know:

Steps of a proper REW website upgrade

A proper REW website upgrade is simple:

1. Transfer - All content is automatically transfered by REW in its current state to the new website
2. Format - Go through the website and reformat the content to suit your new website

We recently hired a third-party research company to interview anonymous buyers and sellers who bought or sold property, worth between $300,000 to $1.5 Million, within the past 12 months. The participants were asked a series of questions over an hour-long interview to help us better understand their habits, opinions, and decision-making processes.

We were particularly interested in finding out how buyers and sellers choose their real estate agents in this digital age. Here's what we found out:

People don't choose Realtors on portal sites

One of the most interesting observations in the market research results was that buyers and sellers are actively using portal websites to explore properties, but they don't use those same portals to find real

Towards the end of 2017, we surveyed close to 300 real estate agents across North America, checking in with nearly 200 of those Realtors to find out where they plan to spend their marketing budgets in 2018.

We broke the agents into three cohorts based on GCI:

• GCI under $100,000
• GCI between $100 - $300,000
• GCI above $300,000

Then we asked them whether they intend to spend less, the same, or more in several areas of marketing to figure out where their investments were going to go. Here's what we discovered:

Web Platform Spending

At least one in four Realtors plan to spend more on their web platform in the 12 months following the survey. In contrast, only 1 in 10 Realtors intends to spend less. That means the vast majority of

What are sitelinks?

Sitelinks are the smaller links that sometimes display below a site's primary link in the search results. Sitelinks are most likely to appear when someone searches for a specific company name or domain, offering quick links to the pages of the site Google thinks a user is most likely to be interested in.

What is the benefit of sitelinks?

The biggest benefit of sitelinks is the amount of visual real estate they take up on the search engine results page (SERP). We've seen anywhere from 4 to 10 sitelinks, which represents a large portion of the overall results page. Studies have shown that when a user is presented with sitelinks, their odds of clicking through to the site increase.

How do I get sitelinks?

Sitelinks

Google told the world that it was going to transition to a mobile-first index in the coming quarters, and it looks like that time has come. Last week, Google announced that they have started to transition websites onto the new mobile-first index. Let's talk about what that means for you.

What is the mobile-first index?

Google has only ever had one version of its index, which is the database you're browsing every time you do a search on Google.com. This index is a super-directory of every website out there and Google maintains it using bots that crawl all the sites on a fairly regular basis.

Historically, Google has crawled and indexed websites based on the desktop version of a site, browsing websites as if they were a person sitting on their

If there's one universal truth about Google, it's that their search engine and web tools are constantly evolving. Yet, until recently, one tool had remained the same for far too long. It's been a delightful change to see that Google has started to roll out big changes to its Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools) over the past few months, and it sounds like what we've seen so far is only just the beginning.

Old Search Console:

New Search Console:

In addition to a sleek new look, Search Console's new Beta version shares info differently than in the past and has also amped up the notifications. Let's review some of the changes we've seen to Search Console and talk about what they might mean for your REW site.

Increase in 404 alerts &

Disclaimer: Real Estate Webmasters is sharing these opinions based on our interpretation of WCAG 2.0 compliance guidelines. This does not constitute legal advice in any manner.

We've dedicated this week of our blog to talk about the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 and how they apply to our clients' websites. So far, we've covered the two largest principles: Perceivable and Operable. Today we're going to talk about the last two principles, Understandable and Robust.

The WCAG 2.0 guidelines help developers and content creators craft a web experience that is accessible for people with disabilities and beneficial for everyone else. In many ways, WCAG 2.0 follows the common-sense best practices we already see employed across the web. In

Disclaimer: Real Estate Webmasters is sharing these opinions based on our interpretation of WCAG 2.0 compliance guidelines. This does not constitute legal advice in any manner.

This week we're going to be talking about each of the Web Content Accessibility Guideline (WCAG) principles in further detail, to help you create websites that are friendly for everyone.

We started talking about WCAG 2.0 last month in our ADA Compliance for Real Estate Webmasters clients post. If you haven't had a chance to check it out, it's a good time to go back and take a peek. We talk about the American Disability Act's role in website compliance, go through a quick overview of each principle with some examples, and ultimately conclude why an accessible website is in