Everyone wants to know about SEO. Anyone looking to get noticed in the vast realm of the worldwide web certainly needs to know about search engine optimization. Otherwise, prospective clients could find their way someplace else, to someone else. But just like staying fit or making money, there are plenty of people offering ideas and, more particularly, shortcuts when the real answers are, as they are in other cases, simply doing it right and doing it consistently right.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand the impact of this. Anyone who uses the web recognizes their own habits. It all usually begins with an online search engine. That’s not just anecdotal. That’s statistical fact: More than two-thirds of online experiences begin with a user typing into a search engine. And more than 90% of global traffic comes from Google, the world leader in search engines. Clearly, search engines matter.

Pulling back the SEO Curtain

So, what exactly does that oft-used abbreviation, SEO, mean? It’s best understood as increasing the probability that someone will land on a given site through use of search engines. If someone is using an online search engine to track down a given business or service, in this case, commercial real estate, it means taking steps to get people to your firm rather than the competitor’s.

A critical first step is ensuring Google knows a given company’s website is there waiting to be landed upon. Google’s automated crawlers find almost everyone, but, inevitably, some get missed or it takes time to find them. That’s why Google provides a way for companies to establish their business details with Google, starting with claiming their business profile.

In addition to crawling, Google’s engines rely on indexing and serving, or ranking. To boost crawling results, Google advises verifying that its search engine can reach a given site and that the pages are correct. Google provides a mobile-friendly test to see how a site is performing.

Indexing refers to the engine seeking to understand what a page is about. Webmasters can ease this process by creating short, meaningful page titles. Make sure every page, in fact, has a title and avoid stuffing those titles with keywords. Make the titles to the point and make the text distinctive.

Serving, or ranking, refers to an engine seeking to provide the most direct and relevant answers to users’ queries. Sites rank higher when pages load fast and are mobile-friendly and when content is useful and kept up to date.

SEO is More Than Just Key Words

Often, people think SEO is about using the right key words so that their sites will turn up in searches. That’s true. If a company is in the commercial real estate business, those words need to appear on a website. If that company features commercial real estate site videos, those words should appear there, too. But these steps will mean nothing if the basics aren’t minded. Slow sites with stale content aren’t optimized no matter how many of the right keywords are there.

Other steps help. Search Engine Journal offers first among its 101 tips to improve SEO using and optimizing video. But Search Engine Journal also stresses mastering the fundamentals, starting with a focus on users.

Looking for help improving SEO? Give us a call or send us an email. We are eager to assist you in all your commercial real estate marketing needs.