Your real estate investor website NEEDS more TRAFFIC. Read this post on How To Boost Search Engine Traffic by hacking an unused page on your website.
Check it out. If you are doing content marketing for your real estate website you probably have a blog full of useful information about your company, the real estate market, how you can help leads sell their houses, and more.
But how do you use this content to boost your search engine rankings to get more FREE traffic from Google?
In this post, we will break down a strategy to hack category pages to boost your Real Estate SEO rankings.
If you are a Carrot member or use a blogging platform like WordPress you are able to categorize all of your blog content so they fit into logical collections of content.
In the past, marketers would try and get these categories pages to rank when someone types in a search term that is an exact match to their category name.
After all, the thinking was sound. If a website had 50 posts about selling an inherited house Google would want to show a collection of all these useful pieces of content for a user to read.
But if you have been around SEO long enough you know that ranking a category is really difficult.
Even if you give the category’s meta description a nice long 500-word description you will still have a tough time ranking that content in search engines.
Why is it so hard to rank a category page in Google search?
In short, Google looks for targeted keywords and how they are related in order to understand your content’s purpose.
The user would need to click on multiple blog posts to get their questions answered and Google doesn’t like that. Google wants to serve highly relevant content on the first search of a user’s experience.
Google’s algorithm is really smart and can tell when a search result is a WordPress category versus a regular blog post on your website.
So now that you know this information you can give Google what it wants and simultaneously have Google give you what you want (free traffic).
Here is how it works
Create a mega resource blog post list
You know that Google wants to serve content that is a blog post style page. So take all of the blog posts in a particular category and put them on a page with a link to the post and a short description of what the post is covering.
You basically duplicate the purpose of the category page but in a way that Google views as regular blog content.
Let’s pretend you have a real estate investor website that has a category “Real Estate Articles“
We will take all of the blog posts in this category and put them on a new post with a new introduction (a couple hundred words) and an explanation of each post (a couple more hundred words) and link to the post in question.
You can beef up the content in many other ways like linking to highly relevant blogs or websites that share information about housing statistics, you can add images, and testimonials from your clients.
The sky is the limit with adding content to this page.
At the end of the day, you are looking to create a highly valuable resource page that lists all your previous content you have spent time and energy to create.
Create value for the reader
As a marketer, it’s critical to remember that your content must provide value. This SEO strategy isn’t meant to be a lazy approach to ranking content. In fact, it takes more work than just creating categories and washing your hands of the content.
Don’t just slap some links and boring text on a page and expect it to rank.
You have to take your time to craft a message that is valuable for the end user so Google will want to serve it to them.
Going back to our example here is what a piece of content might look like.
In this example, I took the 4-5 blog posts in this category and wrote a little more about them.
To make this resource page over the top valuable I would have sat down and found a category with closer to 20 posts.
How To Boost Search Engine Traffic With Category Pages
Hacking category pages isn’t the only way to get more search engine traffic to your real estate investor websites.
Creating resource pages like this can be used in a wide variety of strategies. You could create a list of popular blog posts from other bloggers in your niche and link to them. After the post is live you could ask them to leave a comment or review your article with the hope of getting a backlink from them.
You could do a resource page of all the real estate transactions you have done in the last 6 months to build credibility for your brand and be viewed as the authority in your market.
Google pays attention to how many clicks your pages are getting and how long people are staying on them.
If a resource page can attract a lead and answer their question you are going to win the SEO game in your market.
If you have a lot of similar content on your website (like city specific landing pages) try and group them together into a resource page and see if you can get it to rank.