SEO for Property Management Businesses

Search engines continue to provide the lion’s share of traffic to property management websites. Website owners who optimize their content to match search engine’s ranking criteria tend to dominate the rankings.

There are rewards for making the effort — visibility, prestige, traffic, leads, loyalty. And it’s the only FREE benefit you’ll receive in the „monetized era.“

It’s so convenient when your property management platform includes a beautiful, fast, high functioning website for your business. It’ll be even better when it appears on the top of Google and Bing search results.

It’s Good But You Can Make it Better

Your ManageCasa customer website looks good and is easy to manage. You can optimize your pages and add interesting, relevant content for tenants and prospective tenants. Websites are good for business.

Never Underestimate Visibility

Renters regard online listings highly and website pages are an engaging and persuasive landing page for advertised listings and to showcase a  house/apartment for rent. It’s the addition of virtual apartment showings, videos, listing info, high definition photos, and other features that draws renters and captures their preference.

And the benefits of our next generation property management platform doesn’t end there. We also offer syndicated vacancy listing services to help you advertise your apartments for rent easily across many major rental sites such as Zumper, Apartment Guide, Zillow, Apartments.com.

As an example, Apartments.com reported they generated 10 million more true leads in Q1 2021 compared to Q1 2020  – a 64% increase.  65% of renters visited Apartments.com before visiting landlord’s sites. Much of these arise from Google.

Let’s return to the matter of appearing strongly on FREE search engine results pages.

Search Engines: Where Renters Go

Renters and rental property investors use Google and Bing and frequently every day.  And renters hunt for apartments for rent, look for help and advice, check listings and property features and amenities, as well as to check out potential landlords and properties.

When we talk about the rental market, owners and renters often visualize Google search results.

When your rental property website is visible in search engine rankings, you become visible and relevant to them. This has huge business value — persistent visibility and relevance.

Apartments for rent searches. Screenshot courtesy of Google.

If you’re a small business landlord, you may not be able to hire a marketing person to handle content creation, search engine optimization and web design. Using your ManageCasa customer website, you can handle these tasks yourself.

ManageCasa’s Customer Websites

Although the big rental listing companies dominate results, there is plenty of opportunity for you to rank high on less general keyword searches such as „pet friendly houses for rent, Phoenix“ or „2 bedroom apartment for rent , Queens NY.“  Renters are particular, because they dislike wasting time searching. These renters know what they want.

8 Great Benefits for Search Engine Optimization for a Property Management Company:

1. Loyalty – when they find your company and see relevant answers they may stop their search and remain confident you’re professional and are providing the best value, so they see no reason to jump ship.
2. Credibility and Relevance – your business appears associated with the resolution of their problem, up there with the best in the industry. And now, if even briefly, with prestigious high rankings and good content, you’re considered relevant and reliable, so they trust your communication.
3. Promotion – if you reach quality tenants and landlord prospects, you keep them away from competitor’s messaging (who may make your units seem less desirable), and establish your company’s unique value proposition or selling proposition, thus increasing your rental prospect leads and lease renewal.
4. Reducing Turnover – your message of value can hit home with any tenant thinking of moving out by reminding them your rental properties and professional management services are the best available. The message that your rental experience is ideal and that moving away might be a negative lifestyle change for them.
5. Fill Vacancies – broad continuous exposure keeps you in touch with potential renter prospects ensuring demand is always high and you can fill vacancies easily and quickly. Some can pre-register should any vacancies happen.
6. Build your Business Brand – branding, your reputation, is so important to renters. The prestige of some locations keeps tenants leased.  You can send a message about rental unit quality, tenant relations, value delivered, amenities offered, and how they should feel about renting from you, or how a landlord should feel about hiring your property management or maintenance service company.
7. Reducing Maintenance Calls – providing quick, easy access to FAQs, tenant portals, and help pages lets tenants resolve issues more rationally, and help them manage the unit better so unneeded service requests don’t happen.
8. Growing Revenue – the collective value of reach, impact and loyalty building will translate to solid bottom line results.

After finishing your site setup and developing some relevant, on topic content, you can submit your url to Google and Bing for indexing. It’s how every property management and rental property website begins its journey to high visibility online.

SEO for Property Management Websites

This entails creating content for your site, and writing and tagging it correctly so search engine robots can collect your pages, understand them, and index them properly.

This content can be your marketing pages, blogs, videos, help pages, contact page, and photos/illustrations and more. In each of your pages, you’ll be able to edit sections of your documents such as page title tags, headings, text copy, and create hyperlinks between your pages. That’s the basics of on site SEO.

To rank highly on Google or Bing, you must also encourage other publishers/web site owners to mention your business and link to it from your website. Google and Bing pay big attention to the links that point to your site. Acquiring them is not easy, which is why a promotional budget is necessary. This is off site SEO.

Since your site is locally oriented, you’ll also be practicing something dubbed local SEO.

8 Tips to Help you Build Rankings and Visibility for Your Business Website:

1. Review top ranking competitor website’s content to clues on content you might create on yours. Take note of the keywords they use and use a keyword finding tool to target the right keywords (e.g., „apartment listings San Diego„, or „property management companies San Francisco„).
2. Register your website with Google my Business  and Bing Places for Business. Both will require a physical street address, as virtual businesses may not be trusted. These listings will help you appear in Google maps and Bing maps when users search for local companies.
   

   Local Bing map listings. Screenshot courtesy of Bing.

3. Create some interesting content on your site and talk about your community and business district in a helpful and generous way
4. Contact other business owners in a casual friendly way and work your way toward asking them to mention your website and business on their website. Don’t be aggressive, blunt or demanding. Linking is about relationships. If they link to you, link back to them. Right now, you’re just beginning so be generous and link to others to gain their attention and support.
5. Open an account with Yelp and Brightlocal and so some advertising with them to gain visibility. You need to let everyone in your defined geographic area that you exist and are open for business.
6. Avoid listing on poor quality web directories, including Craigslist due to low quality inquiries and Google spam penalties. Think high quality and read up on that website’s guidance on listing requirements.
7. Create Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts and begin connecting with their accounts or following them
8. Open a Google Webmaster Console account and a Bing Webmaster account so you can view your track your search engine visibility and clicks

The scope of search engine optimization for landlords is vast, complex and demanding in competitive keyword spaces. If your market is in a competitive market such as Manhattan, New York City, Boston, Los Angeles or the Bay Area, you may need to hire a search engine optimization specialist experienced in property management business to help you do it right and become competitive.

Given the value of leads from Google or Bing, you can understand why it is competitive.

Your customer landlord or property marketing website is of great value in helping you serve your tenants and building your brand image. It definitely saves you a lot of money. And, it has the potential to be more fully developed.

Check out the value of ManageCasa more fully now and see why this next generation software is the favorite of many landlords and property managers in the United States, Canada, UK, Germany and Australia.

If you have questions about SEO on your site, please contact us for further assistance. We want to see you succeed.

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