What Can a Real Estate Website SEO Audit Reveal?
Real estate websites provide essential local market data to potential home buyers by displaying MLS data in the form of listings. While real estate websites can have the same SEO issues that other websites have, they tend to have a significantly larger amount of SEO issues due to the large amounts of data they process through MLS feeds.
Pagination And Large Data Sets
One of the largest SEO issues that occurs is Pagination. Pagination can happen in a significant way on real estate websites with big data sets.
Example:
You are displaying MLS listings on a Geo farm page, that is well optimized for SEO.
Elements this page has:
- Page title
- Static content
- Heading tag (h1 tag)
- Sub-Topic heading tags (h2 tags)
- Call to action heading tag (h3 tag)
- Internal links to other Geo Farm Pages
- Displays up to (12) MLS Listings
- Meta Description
Pagination and Duplicate Content
As we can see above, the properties of the page look great. Where things can get confusing is when there are more properties in the MLS feed then can be displayed on one page. As stated above, the page will display up to 12 MLS listings. If there were 120 MLS listings in this Geo farm and the MLS feed, there would be 10 pages of content, with each page sharing the same page elements listed above.
Does A Duplicate Content Penalty Apply?
In this instance the content is not maliciously being duplicated, so there should be no penalty, however, Google can become confused as to what page to rank, as there are ten pages sharing the same information.
What different duplicate content signals does this send?
- Duplicate page titles
- Duplicate static content
- Duplicate h1 tags
- Duplicate h2 tags
- Duplicate h3 tags
- Duplicate internal links
- The MLS listings are the only unique content on the page
- Duplicate meta descriptions
What Other Pages Can Be Seen As Duplicate Content?
- Category Pages
- Tag Pages
- Agent Pages
- Author Pages
- Archives
- Archives by Date
- Sub-Archive Pages
Basically, any page that displays content that has been published elsewhere on the website is considered duplicate content!
Typically these pages do not provide any static content, and serve more as an internal search result.
In the end, the functionality may be great for web visitors to find content they are looking for on the site, however these pages should be set as NOINDEX and their sitemaps should be excluded from the site, as they provide little to no value to Google.
Keyword Cannibalization
Sometimes when Google gets confused on which piece of your content to rank, it affects your content from ranking well in Google. This can lead to lower rankings, the wrong content ranking, or no rankings at all!
A perfect example of this is when categories and tags on a blog post compete for the optimization of a Geo Farm page that is displaying MLS listings.
This is called: keyword cannibalization
What Other Issues Can An SEO Audit Reveal?
- A lack of a keyword strategy targeting Geo based keywords with search volume for Geo farm pages. Geo farm pages can reveal good local search volume:
Geo Farm Pages, Keyword Search Volume Opportunities
Keyword research is key to forming a topical keyword strategy. Search volume is a part of this strategy as Geo farm pages with poor focus keywords may rank, but not provide a substantial amount of incoming leads.
Start your keyword research strategies with the below formulas:
{Geo} Real Estate
{Geo} Homes For Sale
Of course there are variations when you start looking for search volume around communities in a Geo.
- Lack of a local Geo based keyword strategy for sub-topics in content
- The use of Geo based sub-topics can help sell the location by demonstrating attractions, amenities and resources.
- The use of Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) keywords helps Google to better understand what the page is about.
- Having your hyperlocal content be strategically written, so that it links to neighboring Geo farm pages, that border the current Geo farm page helps indexation, and is a good strategy for showing related local communities.
On Page SEO Issues:
- Duplicate page titles
- Missing page titles
- Geo based keywords in title with search volume?
- Page title character limit issues
- Duplicate meta descriptions
- Missing meta descriptions
- Meta description character limit issues
- Duplicate h tags
- H tags found in navigation as a class
- H tags found in design instead of CSS
- H tags not utilized within copy as sub-topics
- Hierarchal h tag issues
- No self-referencing canonical URLS
- Google mobile friendly test issues
- And more…..
Off Page SEO Issues:
- Is the website’s link profile made up primarily of business citation websites?
- Are the linking websites selling links as a link scheme, or providing easy access through automation?
- Are links built only to the home page?
- Are links built to the Geo farm pages?
- Are the linking websites topically relevant sites?
- Do the websites who link have a relevant link profile to the real estate market?
- Are there spam websites and websites that do not conform to Google’s webmaster guidelines?
- Does it appear that link manipulation is taking place?
- Who is linking to the competition?
- What link opportunities are being missed based upon content on the site?
Want to learn more on what you can discover in a SEO audit for a real estate website?
Home Junction’s Next Webinar:
10 Steps to Discover SEO Issues in a Real Estate Website
During this free LIVE webinar you will learn…
- How Google Crawls and Indexes Your Content.
- What Google Sees as Duplicate Content
- How Duplicate Content Affects Your Content Rankings
- Why Relevant Content is Critical to Local, Organic Rankings
- How Off Page SEO Helps Push Rankings
- Plus Live Q&A and much more….
Webinar Times & Reservation
Register today space is limited to 500 seats
Thursday, October 5th at 3:00 PM Pacific, 6:00 PM, Eastern – Register Here