SEO for housebuilders

Generating targeted traffic for your website is increasingly important in a difficult market, so it's important you use what is available effectively.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is often referred to as the Holy Grail of online marketing. Get it right, and your site could be sitting at the top of the Google for keyphrases relevant to your locality, generating hundreds of targeted enquiries. Get it wrong, and you could have not only invested large sums of cash for no return, but you could even be banned from the search listings altogether. With large amounts of marketing budgets often allocated to SEO, I thought it would be beneficial to explore some of the basic principles.

SEO is the process by which websites are manipulated in order to generate high positions on search engines for desired keywords. Search engines like websites to be:

• Indexible - so their programs can quickly assess what structure and content a particular site has.
• Relevant - to what has been typed into the search box (very important!)
• Valuable - so visitors who arrive at a website have a good experience, and find what they are looking for.
• Popular - a benchmark for whether visitors are going to find websites useful or not.

An effective Search Engine Optimiser would carry out a variety of tasks to ensure sites have these characteristics. It's important to remember that SEO is a long-term process, and results can take up to six to nine months to be seen (sometimes longer - depending on the competitiveness of the industry). It's also important to remember that while Google's results are able to be influenced, it's ultimately Google that controls what is displayed in the search results. If a search engine is a newspaper, then SEO would target coverage in the editorial, and Pay-Per-Click (PPC) helps you to advertise around the editorial.

Keywords
Keywords are at the heart of all SEO activity, and keyword research is probably the most important part of the SEO process. Target the wrong keywords, and you could be investing heavily on achieving high rankings for traffic which simply don't convert visitors into enquirers.
Typical questions property websites have to ask at this stage are:

• Which locations are you targeting at present (or will you be in the future)?
• What types of keyword convert the best on your website? "Homes in location", "location property", "apartments for sale in location"? PPC campaigns can be used to test the performance of long-term SEO target keywords. Keyword performance data can also be extracted from your Analytics accounts to see which keywords actually result in "conversions", i.e. enquiries.
• Which keywords are searched for the most? It's futile targeting "three-bedroom bungalows for sale in Devizes with garden" if nobody is using this as a keyword.

Ultimately, you should have an agreed, definitive target keyword list for the campaign. It doesn't need to contain thousands of keywords, but just a handful in order focus the SEO activity.

Site structure
It's important that a search engines' programmes (often called spiders or robots) can assess a site quickly, and are generally happy with it. An optimiser can help with this by ensuring doesn't contain any duplicated content (a surprisingly common obstacle to getting high rankings), or checking for any live broken links on the site, and either fixing them, or redirecting them to an alternative page.

Content
The more unique, relevant content there is on a website, the more likely the site is to be indexed highly. Content has to be focused on keywords, and relevant to the overall theme of the website. Remember, visitors will click on that 'back' button if your content is neither relevant, nor easy to read. Also, content needs to be added to the site regularly. The more frequently content is added, the more often search engines come back and take a look!

Links
A link from another website is a measure of your site's popularity, which strongly influences search engine positions. The more quality links at site has coming in to it, the more likely the site is to be indexed highly. Again, like content, links need to be focused on keywords and relevancy - are you starting to spot a theme here?

In a nutshell, those are the core components of an SEO campaign. It's not rocket science but you'd be surprised at how many campaigns disregard some of these basics. Make sure any campaign you invest in is measured on not only the additional traffic it delivers, but also the return on investment it generates - remember, a ranking is a means to an end, it is enquiries and sales which matter!

Remember to also consider the appeal of those landing pages you are optimising. Not only in terms of content, but also in terms of design, calls-to-action, navigability, and all those other important factors which effect site conversion rates (see my Crying out for Conversions post for elaboration). There is no point in being first when the visitors don't enquire.

SEO was once regarded as the 'black art' of online marketing, but if approached correctly, can be an investment in the long-term value of your website - not just for your business, but for your website visitors too.