Words: Ashley Rigg
Published: 11th March 2009
10 cost-effective ways to improve your Google rankings
The days of lavish spending on exhibition stands and print advertising are over. Just look at the number of traditional media businesses in our market that have gone into administration recently.
There’s still room for marketing spending on traditional channels but online is the most cost-effective route to market for our industry and those of you that get this right will come out of this current crisis stronger when the upturn does arrive.
To help you improve lead generation in these tough times, here are 10 practical tips that will help improve your Google rankings without breaking the bank.
- Identify keywords that convert well using Google Analytics and concentrate your time and effort on these terms. It might be that a certain location or development name results in a high number of enquiries. If so, prioritise your Adwords spending and SEO efforts here. Without this information you’re acting blind.
- Find keyword phrases that contain the words you have identified above, that you already rank naturally for in the top 20 on Google and work on improving your rankings for these terms. For example if you rank at number 11 for “property for sale in Burgundy”, it’s often easy to make a few simple tweaks to get onto the first page. See points 3 - 7 for some pointers on how to do this. Tip: You can identify keywords that you rank for by manually searching for phrases that appear in your analytics data but tools like Enquiiste can save you time.
- Make a list of the pages on your site that rank for the keywords above. These are your target pages. Check they have a meta title and H1 heading that contains the words that you are already ranking for. For example this page below from Globaledge ranks for phrases like “property developers in spain” . It contains “property” “developers” and “spain” in the meta title (very top left of the screen) and the in the main heading.
- Link to your target pages from your homepage to give them extra link power. If you’ve not already done this, this can be enough to push some of your page 2 rankings onto the first page.
- Identify other powerful pages on your site by typing in “site: www.mysite.com” into Google. The pages that appear first in the list tend to be the most powerful. Consider also linking out to your target pages from these pages.
- Include your target keywords in the anchor text of the links to your target pages. Be careful not to make your link anchor text, headings and meta titles identical. Mix up the text to them look natural.
- Be careful trying to improve your rankings for two word phrases like “Marbella property” as they are often highly competitive and improvements are harder to acheive. A number one position is worth almost four times that of a number two position and ranking on page 2 is virtually worthless. This means it is often better to try and achieve top spot on longer phrases like “property for sale in Marbella” than waste your time on higher volume but more difficult keywords.
- Add modifier words to the meta and page titles of your target pages. For example, overseas buyers often use the country name in conjunction with the town or region name. So in the example above “Property for sale in Marbella” would become “Property for sale in Marbella, Spain”. A page optimised like this allows you to target both phrases on one page and should result in extra traffic.
- Identify pages that you do not want to rank in the search engines, for example your About Us and Contact pages. Ask your web master to add a nofollow attribute to any links to these pages. Your site has a finite amount of link power. This will help ensure that this power goes to the pages that really need it and is not wasted on pages that you don’t want to rank. This concept is called Page Rank Sculpting.
- Identify news and blog sites that cover the property market in the areas where you sell. Write an article of your specialist market and ask them to publish it with a link back to one of your target pages. Engel & Volkers do this brilliantly on Spanish Property Insight with their analysis of the market in Mallorca.
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Globaledge offer a range of website design, SEO, translation and hosting services. Sites can be translated into up to 15 languages. Prices start at £175 per month. Contact Ashley Rigg on ashley.rigg@globaledge.co.uk for more information or
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