We know you’re very familiar with spring cleaning – a time to refresh and prepare before summer begins. But what about during the winter? Just like swapping out your wardrobe or changing the decorations around your house, real estate websites need seasonal updating, too!

Taking the time to go through your website (or partner up with someone who can help) before each season and during the slower months in the winter, is a great way to keep your website looking fresh and giving your SEO a boost. 

Keep reading to learn more about some of the ways you can optimize your real estate website during and for the winter months.

5 Ways You Can Optimize Your Real Estate Website this Winter

  1. Create recommended searches
  2. Write content about each town you service
  3. Update your bio
  4. Refresh your site photos
  5. Check for broken links

Create Recommended Searches

Recommended searches are the foundation of a strong long-tail SEO strategy. Think of recommended searches as a curated search experience: instead of a user coming to your site and then having to type in what they’re looking for, you’re helping guide them through the process. Recommended searches can be set up in just about any way you can think of… common ones include:

  • By town
  • By price
  • By property type (residential, condo, multi-family, land, etc)
  • By bedroom or bathroom count
  • By school district
  • By waterbody or water access
  • By location
  • By architecture style (farmhouse, ranch, log home, etc)

You can also create recommended searches using a combination of the options above.  A common one is “All homes in town name under $500K”.

Best of all: Recommended searches are a set-it-and-forget-it tool. You set them up once and Union Street Media’s data team does the rest. And, since we update the results daily based on changes in the MLS, Google sees frequently updated pages with keyword-rich content and indexes them, giving you a great boost in SEO.

At Union Street Media, we believe that good website support is answering the next question before it is asked. Recommended searches are the real estate search equivalent. You’ve worked with many clients over the years and know what kind of properties they’ll want before they do… so set up a search for them and it will also help you find the clients too. If you need a refresher on how to create a recommended search please get in touch!

Write Content About Each Town You Service

Have you ever found yourself saying the same thing about a town in your marketplace to more than one client? Imagine if that information lived in one space (your website!) where you could direct clients to learn more about that town? Or, even better, a prospective client might search for your town, find the content you wrote about it, and then contact you as a result!

Check out this page about Dover, New Hampshire on AdamDow.com for an excellent example of an area information page. 

Extra credit: create a one-paragraph description for your recommended searches that includes the phrases in the search.  Update your title tag to include those keywords too. 

Check out this page about Cedar Lake, Indiana on McColly.com for a good example of a town-specific recommended search.

Update Your Bio!

Broker’s written biographies seem to be the only thing less frequently updated than their headshots. When was the last time you looked at what is on your bio? Have you joined a new volunteer board? Set a new sales record? Does your bio say that “in 2016…”?

Unless you are committed to updating your bio annually, we recommend not putting in too many specific dates (such as “in 2016…”) or the ages of your kids. We also suggest that once you’ve updated your bio on your site, you do the same on your other social media platforms, the real estate portals, and your local MLS.

Refresh Your Site Photos

Is your site still full of fall foliage imagery?  It’s certainly appropriate to have some seasonal imagery throughout the site and we recommend trying to keep it in balance. Your town is a great place to live all the time, not just for a few months out of the year.  

Extra credit: Reading is hard, watching a video is easy.  If you have video imagery of your community add it to YouTube (the second largest search engine in the world) and then put the video up on your website.  

Check for Broken Links

One of the easiest ways to give your website a boost in SEO is to check for any broken links. Spend some time going through your website and clicking on any links you come across to make sure they work or lead where they’re supposed to; this applies to both internal and external links! By creating an internal linking system and having good, relevant content that other websites can link to, you’ll build up your domain authority and position your site higher up on search engine results pages.   

Give us a call

Looking for more ways you can improve your real estate website? Connect with us today for specific recommendations to help grow your business!