Many SEO experts believe that repeat visit ratio is now a “signal of quality”. So we should focus on mechanisms which can drag your users back to your site multiple times a month. If Google can detect users coming back and back to your website, this can only help, and yes, you guessed it, it’s just plain old fashioned good customer experience too!
So you need to ensure your website's email alert system is optimised for very smooth and obvious sign up. Your site should allow saving of properties and searches without forcing an account creation (you’ll get more sign ups, and more email alerts if you drag people into a deeper commitment with your site first). And every enquiry form on your website should offer email alerts as a standard follow up.
Then you want to ensure your email alerts fire on a near continual cycle (rather than in 24 hour batches), ideally with real time integration of your property data with your software system: this means that as soon as you get a new property matching one of your applicant’s requirements, you can get the email out to them, often hours before they get their Rightmove alert for the same property.
The alert system should send out beautiful template emails which reflect your main site design – and, critically, those emails need to link directly back to your website (many don’t, linking to generic URLs outside of your website domain instead, so check). All of this results in a stronger than average repeat visit ratio to your own site, rather than to the portals… and that results in better SEO performance than your competitor.
You’d be amazed how many sites fail at one of these steps, yet it’s such a simple, wide open goal to fix and the prize is huge.
If you are interested in other SEO best practices for estate agent websites, we have a whole host of posts about search engine marketing. If you’ve done that, you might want to understand why Homeflow sites are a better foundation for your SEO.
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