“Dear website owner, 

I visited your website and noticed that you are not listed in most of the major search engines and directories…”

If you’ve been in business for any length of time, you’ve most likely received similar emails/advertisements. Did you know Google even reports receiving similar messages? The Internet is filled with companies, mostly snake-oil salesman, promising businesses the moon – and charging an arm and a leg – when it comes to their search engine rankings. The service performed by the few honest companies out there may be valuable, but what can they do that you can’t? If you have your website hosted and optimized with HERO PM, the answer is usually…not much.

Go to Google right now. Go ahead, we’ll wait.

Once you get there, type in “Property Management in {your city name}”. Does your company come up on page 1? If so, that’s great! Page 2? Not bad. Beyond that? Chances are, your website is missing the target, and you’re missing business.

It’s true that no company can guarantee you a specific ranking on the major search engines. And HERO PM is no exception. But, we can guarantee you industry-leading search engine optimization and expertise, an industry-specific website design, and the ability to customize your site for your target customers and location, based on proven strategies that will positively affect your major search engine rankings. And the best part? If your website is hosted by HERO PM, you’ve already got these tools at your fingertips!

In addition to the way a site is designed behind the scenes, there’s a lot you can do to also affect your rankings. Below is a list of some of our suggested strategies and tips that you can employ to ensure your website ranks as high as possible.* More detail on these suggestions, along with other tips and tools, and a description of what HERO PM does behind the scenes can be found in the Site SEO section of your Website Admin panel.

• Make sure your site is geared toward your clients, and not just to search engines.

• Ensure your pages have content relevant to the service you offer. This content should be in plain English, but include key phrases that you think someone may search on.

• While mostly used for ad consideration, Google’s keyword tool could be helpful in determining the relevance of keywords to include in your site’s content. https://adwords.google.com/o/KeywordTool

• Ensure the main page of your website contains at least 200-400 words of text. Place the most important text “above the fold”, where it can be seen without scrolling.

• All of the main page text should describe your company, your services, and your website.

• Ensure all your pages have appropriate titles that are both descriptive of the page’s content and contain key phrases that may be searched on.

• Add page shortcuts that include keywords related to the page’s content.

• Get other significant, industry related, websites to link to yours. Getting Joe Blow down the street to link to you may not help your cause, but having a reputable high traffic related website will.

• Use the available tools, including Google Webmaster tools / Google Analytics to monitor and improve placement.

• Understand that rankings grow slowly, and change constantly. A well-designed, well-implemented website is much better than one that is always in the process of trying to “trick” search engines into improving their ranking.

 

* While previous versions of the HERO PM Website module contain basic SEO tools, the majority of the SEO features described in this article can be found in our PM Website version 4. If you have a previous version (yellow bar across the top of your Website Admin Panel), you can request an upgrade to version 4 through your HERO PM Control Panel (Configuration > Orders & Upgrades > Order a Website Upgrade).