6 Common Property Management SEO Mistakes That You Should Avoid

By Shawn Mac Gavin | October 9, 2019

As a property manager, you rely on SEO to get your properties found online. When people are looking for an apartment or a property management service, they will start with a search engine.

You want your site to rank at the top because the top sites get the most clicks. Making that happen can feel like climbing Mt. Everest. There are over 200 ranking factors that Google Uses to rank websites.

There are a lot of misconceptions and SEO mistakes that property managers make when trying to rank their sites.

Read on to find out what the most common SEO mistakes are and how you can avoid them.

1. You Don’t Know Your Target Audience

You always have to start with your target audience. The more you know about them, the more you’ll understand how they think. Renters who are looking for a luxury apartment with a lot of amenities will have a different way of searching than someone who just needs to find a place fast.

Knowing your target audience also helps you to develop a good keyword strategy for your website. You can also develop content that is geared towards solving a very specific problem.

2. Directory Listings Aren’t Filled Out

There’s a difference between local SEO and SEO that tries to reach users nationally. Depending on how your business is set up, you may want to do a little bit of both.

Local SEO starts with directory listings. Search engines keep their own versions of The White Pages and you want to make sure that your property management company is found when people are searching.

Start by going to the directory listings on Google My Business, Bing Places, and Yelp. Your information in these directories also tells search engines that you are a real business and you should be listed when people search for property management companies in your area.

Be sure to completely fill out the listings beyond the name and address of the listing. You can add details of the work that you do and photos of the properties you manage. For larger apartment complexes, you may consider having individual listings for those properties.

3. Your Site Can’t Be Found By Search Engines

Your job as a web person is to tell search engines to crawl your website and what each page is about. This is the technical side of SEO.

How can you do that? The first step is to make sure that your site is connected with Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.

The second step is to go through each page on your site. They need HTML code called title tags and meta descriptions. This is how search engines figure out what the page is about. It’s also how your pages are displayed in search results.

You can also submit an XML file to search engines, through Search Console and Webmaster Tools. This gives the search engine instructions as to which pages should be crawled.

4. You Use Outdated SEO Methods

One of the most common SEO mistakes made by property managers is that they use old methods to rank their sites. SEO changes all the time, and techniques that were in a couple of years ago could get you penalized.

It used to be that you could rank a website by having a keyword appear dozens of times on one page. Web developers would take a keyword and match the text color with the background color. Search engines would pick up the text, but readers couldn’t see it.

Search engines have caught on to people trying to get one over the system, so they changed their algorithms. Now, that kind of move will get your site penalized for spammy tactics.

You need to stay up to date on the latest property management SEO changes that will affect your site.

5. You Don’t Have Reviews Online

Reviews and testimonials are the lifeblood of any business. If you don’t prove that you can do a good job or don’t have a track record of results, it will be hard to get anyone to sign up. Plus, people look at reviews before making a buying decision.

That’s especially true in the digital world.

Reviews also impact your search engine rankings. The more social proof you have, the higher ranked you will be. Google and other search engines are going to deliver the most useful and relevant sites in their search results.

If they display nothing but sites with bad reviews, no one will use those search engines. That could be disastrous as these search engines depend on eyeballs for ad revenue.

6. You Don’t Have a Secure Website

Google sees its responsibility to internet users to deliver sound and secure results. That’s why it made having your site start with HTTPS a ranking factor.

All this means is that you have an SSL certificate installed on your website. This ensures that the connection between your website and your users is secure.

The good news is that more website hosts provide free SSL certificates through Let’s Encrypt.

7. Your Website Delivers a Poor Experience

Using SEO to drive traffic to your website is a good thing. Now you need to have a website that closes the sale. A website that delivers a bad experience to users won’t turn into calls to your property management business.

You want your site to be mobile-friendly, fast and have a clean updated design.

Avoid These SEO Mistakes

SEO is a complicated web of robots and algorithms. There is a steep learning curve to understand and it’s easy to make some of these SEO mistakes.

You have to make sure that you put your users first by giving them a sharp website that’s focused on delivering value. You also don’t want to use old ways of ranking sites that can get your site penalized.

Instead, turn to a team of experts that can help your property management sites rank higher. That can lead to more clients and a steady flow of tenants to fill your properties.

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