5 Ways to Quickly Improve Your Agent Sites

Your agents are (ideally) busy people. Custom real estate brokerage websites are often constantly growing and refreshing their content, but your agents and teams may not always have the time to bolster their own, individual websites. If they are in the middle of your selling season and don’t have time to undergo a full website overhaul, we’ve put together this handy list to pass along to them (or even put into practice on your own personal website). These are five easy ways to quickly improve your agent sites without having to break a sweat.

Step Away From the IFrame

Avoid IDX solutions that use iframes. So, what is an iframe? An iframe is a snippet of code that you drop on a page, and listings magically appear. Yes, this is super convenient, but your real estate website SEO will suffer. You want your listings to integrate seamlessly with your site, not simply exist as a window that populates information from another source. Think of it this way: An iframe signals to search engines that you have content on your site that is not really yours. Not all iframes are bad, but a full integration will go a long way to improve your agent sites. (TRIBUS IDX feeds are directly plugged into each of our real estate brokerage websites, including agent and team sites, so this won’t ever be something you’ll have to worry about from us.)

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Monitor the Google Search Console

Google Search Console — what the heck is that? GSC is a way for Google to say, “Here are the errors we have found on your site. You are going to want to fix these.” SEO is orienting your site so that search engines can make sense of your online property. And if you have errors, dead links or missing pages, Google will send you to the search-results jail, and you don’t to be there. Register your site on the Google Search Console and see what feedback Google is willing to offer; your agents often don’t know what they don’t know, and this sort of accountability is sure to improve your agent sites.

Set Up Google Analytics Reports

For the most part, Google Analytics can be a huge time drain, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Set up free, automatic reports from statsbot.co, which are sent directly to your device. They have a fantastic integration, with a far improved interface, for timely Analytics updates. Instead of clicking all over to find the stats you need to improve your agent sites, you can just figure out what you need to know all at a glance.

Run a Speed Test

Not all hosting is created equally. If you cheap out on hosting, you might be penalized by Google. Remember a while back when Google was demoting sites for not being mobile friendly? Well, the same is happening for poor site speed. If you don’t know what hosting plan you have, or you’ve noticed that your site is painfully slow, give Pingdom’s speed tool a try. You’ll not only see if your site is lagging, you can also identify what is going wrong (all for free).

Add Alt Tags

Do you ever wonder how Google interprets images? Not too long ago, Google ran an image recognition test, and the subject was cats. Google’s AI was able to recognize a cat properly 75 percent of the time, and that may sound impressive until you realize that a small child can do the same task flawlessly. Although they are working with cutting-edge recognition technology, you may be less impressed with how images rank and become available for us. Google and other search engines use alt tags to identify what images are all about. An alt tag is a simple description of the image. So many agents add images without taking the time to fill out the alt tag. This is a must if you want to improve your agent sites. And don’t deviate from your keyword strategy. If you are trying to rank for certain keywords, then include the alt tags, so your SEO strategy can work in concert with your imagery.

Hunter has been in the real estate tech space for the last several years. Primarily focused on geolocation and data systems, he is eager to find new ways to apply technology to the vast industry of real estate.
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