Why do some commercial property websites rank better than others on Google?
A website’s ranking on Google can make the difference between its success and failure as a business generation tool - and there is a simple way to make sure that your site does better than a competitor’s.
There are many reasons that some websites focused on the commercial property market have a higher rank on Google Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) than others, with one of the most important factors being the presence of current, up-to-date and relevant content.
In August 2019, the importance of ‘relevance’ to the results of online searches was highlighted in a ‘Webmaster Central Blog’ from Google regarding core-updates to its search engine which, it said, were designed to make sure that Google was “delivering on our mission to present relevant and authoritative content to searchers.”
But why not let us tell you a story about relevant content?
Are you sitting comfortably?
Then let us begin...
A tale of two websites
Once upon a time, Google’s search spider was crawling around the web, indexing web pages as it went, when it came across two new websites. Both sites were all about commercial property.
The two websites each had lots of relevant, well-written text about offices, industrial & distribution properties, shops, valuations and other services. The spider indexed the pages and soon after they began to appear in the results of Google searches for people interested in commercial property.
A while later, the spider returned to the two websites, to check how they were doing and to see if there had been any changes.
The spider crawled the first website. It was exactly the same. It still had relevant content, but it has not been updated or refreshed.
Then it moved onto the second website, crawled all over it and found that it had been updated with fresh content. The website’s blog was full of opinions and up-to-date comments about the market, while the news section had stories about instructions that had been won, properties that had been let or sold and information about new developments coming out of the ground.
The spider liked this new content. It indexed the news stories and fresh content, and the website was pushed a little higher in Google’s search results.
Time went by, and the spider returned to look at the sites again. The first site was still exactly the same. It was still relevant, but it hadn’t changed there were no new stories. Google’s spider noticed that this site was beginning to look a little stale and might not be so useful to people. It made a note not to bother visiting so frequently.
Meanwhile, the first site had dropped a page on the search results and wasn't visited by clients and applicants so much. Its owner looked on in envy at the second website, that belonged to a competitor, who won lots of new business, retired early and lived happily ever after!
The moral of this tale is, keep your website fresh with news stories and content that are relevant to those searching for commercial property and the services that you provide.
This is where Realiser helps property professionals - by providing a fast and cost-effective method of transforming basic information about a transaction into a news story which has been optimised for use online and as a news story for the media.
The end.