Best Practices When Rebuilding an SEO Successful Real Estate Website
SEO is tough, and successful SEO is even tougher.
And that’s especially true when it comes to real estate-specific SEO – depending on what market you’re in, and how competitive that market is, it might take years for you to build a solid real estate SEO strategy that consistently shows up in search results at the right time and for the right searches.
If you’ve invested a lot of time and energy into your SEO strategy, and you’re getting good results, it can be concerning when the time comes to rebuild your website; and a lot of agents put off rebuilding their websites for exactly that reason.
So, should you rebuild your website if it already ranks well and you have a successful SEO strategy? If your website is old and dated (or now off-brand), the answer is definitely yes.
To keep your website, your strategy, and ultimately, your business, modern, you need to continually reinvest in your digital strategy – otherwise, your competition will get ahead of you. After all, even if you had the best-looking website in 2010, it’s going to look pretty dated nowadays.
Another reason to rebuild is because what worked 5 or 10 years ago probably doesn’t work as well today; and even if it does, with all of the changes in SEO, AEO, and AI, and how people search, it certainly won’t work into the near future.
Even if your SEO strategy is successful now, a competitor that invests in a more modern website, and a more modern SEO strategy, is eventually going to surpass you if you don’t make some changes.
So if you have a strong SEO strategy, and you need to rebuild your website, the first thing you want to know is will you lose a lot of your rankings and traffic as part of that rebuild?
The answer is: maybe…
But if you don’t do it properly, and take the correct steps as part of the rebuild, the answer is: definitely…
Planning for a rebuild successfully starts with looking at your website traffic, and determining what pages, posts, and content people actually look at on your website, in the form of a content and structural audit.
★ Want to learn more about using analytics and metrics to measure your website? Have a look at these posts:
- Measuring the Success of Your Content Marketing Strategy in Google Analytics 4
- Measuring the Success of Your Digital Strategy Through Engagement
- Why Your Website and Your Marketing Strategy Go Hand-in-Hand
A content audit involves looking at the analytics of your pages, posts, and listings, determining how they perform, and making a decision about each of them based on that. And that involves looking at a few different metrics, but mostly, page views.
When you look at page views for the last couple of years, you’ll probably see a lot of content that gets less than 100 page views (some might even have zero page views), and unless you know for a fact that those couple of page views have brought in leads, and the content is worth keeping, you need to decide what to do with it – and for that, you have 2 options:
- You can update it, repurpose it, and make it better,
- Or you can delete it altogether.
Any content that you’ll be deleting must be redirected; and any content that is going to be updated needs to be updated in a meaningful way (that meets EEAT), which can include improving the content structure, adding more links and images, and even updating the formatting to make it more readable.
★ Want to learn more about how to do a content audit? Have a look at this post called: How (and Why) to Audit Your Real Estate Website’s Content.
One of the safest ways to rebuild your website, if it ranks well in search, is to focus more on updating and modernizing the design, rather than changing the content on high ranking pages – the less changes you make, the less risk you’ll be putting on your SEO strategy.
When you’re rebuilding your website, it’s also an opportunity for you to refocus what you rank for. For example, if there’s a few competitive keywords that you rank for, but want to improve your rankings, when you rebuild, you can work on building that keyword into more of your website strategy – especially if you were previously unable to, or worried about, changing anything for SEO reasons.
★ Want to learn more about building a successful SEO strategy? Have a look at these posts:
- How to Do Keyword Research for Your Real Estate SEO Strategy
- Understanding SEO Titles and Meta-Descriptions on Your Real Estate Website
- The Three Components of a Successful Real Estate SEO Strategy
- Building a Successful Real Estate Off-Page SEO Strategy
- Understanding SEO Titles and Meta-Descriptions on Your Real Estate Website
But regardless of what you do, in most cases, as part of a rebuild, you can probably expect your traffic to go down, which might be temporary, permanent, and even, might by by design.
While losing your rankings for competitive keywords is certainly bad, and can even be devastating, losing traffic isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and in some cases, can actually be a good thing.
That’s because a rebuild is also an opportunity for you to consolidate the pages that aren’t working, and create opportunities for you to get better quality traffic.
When it comes to traffic, quality always beats out quantity (and engagement always beats out disengagement). For example, would you rather have 5000 page views a month from people that will never use you for a real estate transaction? Or 50 page views from people that are your ideal client and are ready to make a real estate transaction? The answer is pretty obvious.
Ultimately, you shouldn’t put off rebuilding your website just because you have a strong SEO strategy that successfully brings in traffic; you just need to make sure you take the proper precautions to do it properly.
If you have a successful SEO strategy in place, and you just blindly rebuild and redesign your website completely, you’ll definitely see a drop in your rankings, traffic, and probably leads; but if you spend some time getting a deeper understanding of why your website ranks well in the first place, and take the steps to capitalize on that, you can use you website rebuild as an opportunity to make your current digital strategy even better, and more successful.
Want to learn more about SEO and get more traffic to your website? Our SEO Strategy Building Guide is a mix of curated content and self-guided workbook that will help provide insight on how you can build and implement a modern SEO and overall search strategy.
