Property management is a highly competitive industry. That’s why having a solid online presence is crucial for property managers’ success. One of the most effective ways to achieve this is by leveraging the power of Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
Whether you’re brand new to SEO or looking to refine your property management company’s existing strategy, this comprehensive guide will dive into 7 actionable SEO best practices you can use today to boost online visibility and attract users to your site. Read on to discover how to optimize your property management website and stay ahead of the competition.
What is SEO & Why is it Important for Property Managers?
SEO is a set of techniques implemented to optimize your website and local business listing(s) and thereby improve their searchability and rankings on search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Even if you own a leading property management company in your service area, your target audience won’t hear about it online unless you utilize SEO strategies to allow you to be discoverable on the internet. SEO practices involve using organic, tested methods to make your property management website findable, relevant, and targeted towards popular queries searchers use online. These methods lead Google, Bing, or Yahoo to rank your site higher.
You may wonder, “Is SEO necessary for my property management business?” The answer is a resounding yes, and here’s why: it’s estimated that 91.5% of online searchers don’t go beyond Google’s first page, with only 4.8% of users clicking through to the second page. If your property management site isn’t positioned on Google’s top results, ideally positions 1–3, it won’t capture online searchers’ clicks anytime soon. Search engines are constantly crawling the internet for the most qualified, trustworthy, and reputable websites to list on their front pages. For example, if an online searcher looks up “Portland property management,” the search engine will find the most reliable, relevant, and authoritative companies to list on its front page. The result is increased traffic and clicks to your site, more visibility to your property management office location(s), and the reward of outperforming the competition. Increased traffic and qualified phone calls will ideally, of course, lead to you managing more doors.
How exactly can you optimize your property management site for search engines? There are numerous SEO practices property managers can apply to increase online visibility, but we’re sharing the following techniques today:
- Keyword Research & Implementation on Relevant Pages
- Creating State, County, and City Pages for Your Service Areas
- Optimizing Your Google Business Profile(s) & Other Local Business Citations
- Writing Content That Answers Searchers’ Queries
- Utilizing Backlinks & Targeted Link-Building Strategies
- Improving Your Site’s Technical Performance
- Tracking Leads & Re-Strategizing According to Results
Keep reading if you’d like to hear about these SEO tactics in-depth and beat your competition online!
How to Improve SEO For Your Property Management Company: 7 Best Practices
Whether you’re just starting or have a plan in place, here are 7 things you can do to improve your property management SEO strategy instantly:
- Perform keyword research and target relevant search terms on each page of your website.
The most fundamental SEO practice is targeting relevant keywords on your site’s pages to ensure you answer questions or queries your intended audience is searching for online. In keyword research, your goal is to find and filter search terms relevant to your target online viewers and then create appropriate content addressing those terms, whether in the form of core website pages (home, about, contact us, etc.), blogs, case studies, guides, e-books, and more. Google, Bing, and Yahoo read your website like you read this blog. First, the search engine scans your site’s headings to understand the content’s premise. Then, it examines the paragraphs for keywords and phrases to ensure they support the headers. That’s why it’s vital to include select search terms in the headings of your content first and then naturally throughout the rest of the content on your site.
Your first step in keyword research is to brainstorm a list of broad topics your target audience would use when finding your property management company online. This list can include subjects such as your services, geographic location, or any other topic your property management company targets. Here’s a list of property management-related topics for you to start with:
- Property management in [your service area]
- [Your service area] property manager
- Property manager fees
- Finding tenants
- Commercial property management [your service area]
- Marketing rental properties
- Property management services
- Rent collection
To expand keyword variations and add additional relevant search queries, enter these phrases into keyword research tools such as Google Search Console, Semrush, Ahrefs, Moz, Google Trends, and AnswerThePublic. These tools help you determine the language online searchers use in each area your property management company serves to find your services. Consider long-tail keywords and localized search queries relevant to your property management company when conducting keyword research. “Blog-soliciting” terms can be important as well, but they should be treated as a second phase of your campaign, considering they’re valuable for driving significant amounts of traffic but most often do not generate an equivalent increase in qualified leads.
- Long-tail keywords are precise, longer search phrases that are more specific and targeted than broad keyword phrases (e.g., “multi-family unit management Denver CO”). Long-tail keywords typically have less search volume than broader terms, but the searchers have very specific intent and are generally closer to the purchasing/hiring phase of the process. In other words, the traffic for such terms may be lower in quantity, but it’s usually highly qualified.
- Localized keywords include the name of the city, county, or state in which your business services are offered. This search behavior is extremely common, as searchers often want to work with local companies. This practice is especially relevant for property management companies as they service specific areas around their office and often have multiple office locations. “Property management in Orange County, CA” is an example of a localized search term.
- Blog-soliciting keywords are search terms with an informational intent behind them. They can be searched in the form of a question (e.g., is hiring a property management company worth it) or simply as a topic (e.g., hiring a property manager). Searchers who submit queries like these are looking for information about a specific topic as opposed to searching for a service provider to hire or a product to purchase. Blog-soliciting keywords are typically not localized (although there are certainly exceptions to this), meaning that the content you produce to address these topics will be read across the country and potentially internationally. Because of this, the copy in question will drive significant increases in website traffic, but you very likely will not see the same uptick in qualified leads. Nevertheless, the increased traffic is a good signal to Google and may help your more conversion-oriented pages rank better. We generally see our clients receive more qualified leads following the publication of a successful blog post, but not at the same rate as the increase in traffic we experience.
Long-tail and localized search phrases will enhance your ability to reach your primary demographic online. Once you’ve crafted a comprehensive list of keyword phrases, you’ll need to target these terms on relevant pages of your property management site. As mentioned, this can be in the form of blogs, service or location pages, guides, and more.
- Create state, county, and city pages for your property management company’s service areas and offices.
A tried and true local SEO practice for property management companies involves creating state, county, and city pages for each of your service areas and offices. On each location page, you want to include unique copy about the area relevant to residents in the region seeking property management services. Here are a few SEO practices to optimize your location pages for search engines:
- Average Rent Prices in the Area & Benefits of Owning Rental Properties: Include information about the average rental prices in the area, showcasing to property owners the immense profit they can earn from real estate investment in this specific area. Additionally, listing the benefits of owning rental properties on each location page is helpful, including information about how your property management company can help online viewers quickly generate wealth.
- Local Businesses, Universities, and Recreational Activities: Mention local companies, universities, events, and recreational activities on each location page, revealing to property owners that the area is consistently growing in population and demand for rentals. Additionally, including these regional landmarks helps readers orient themselves to your location, builds their trust in you as a knowledgeable local company, and contributes to the reliability and authority of your site, improving its ranking position on search engines.
- Address, Phone Number, and (potentially) Email for the Local Office: Include basic business information for the office(s) that services the state, county, or city. This will make it easy for online searchers to find and contact your property management company and ensure they understand what services are available in their specific area. Outline your preferred methods for potential clients to contact you.
- Link to your Google Business Profile(s) (GBP) & An Embedded Google Map: Add an embedded Google Map that is connected to your Google Business Profile (not just a map with the address or city) to each location page. An embedded Google Business Map saves searchers the steps of opening a new browser window, leaving your site, and finding directions to your property management office. It can also help Google associate your website with your Google Business Profile and help both digital assets rank more favorably (Note: this is an observation from our experience and is not unanimously accepted among professional SEOs).
- Internal Links to the Sub-Areas Nested Under the Page: On each location page, include links to the sub-areas nested under the page (e.g., California > Orange County > Irvine). Not only does this ensure easy navigation for users, but it also enhances Google’s ability to crawl and index your site and improves your site’s credibility.
- A Section Detailing the Property Management Services You Offer in the Area: Implement a “Property Management Services Offered” section on each location page, helping online visitors know exactly what types of services you offer in their region. Examples of management services you may want to include are property marketing, tenant screening and placement, prompt rent collection, legal and eviction guidance, commercial property management, vacation rental management, and more.
- Optimize your Google Business Profile and other local business citations.
Another critical property management SEO practice is to optimize your Google Business Profile and other local business citations. We recommend this local SEO strategy for numerous reasons, especially for multi-location property management companies. A well-optimized GBP can give your property management company a leg up on your competition and help it appear at the top of local search and Google Maps results. Moreover, consistent and accurate business information across multiple local citation platforms (e.g., Bing Places, Apple Maps, Waze, Yelp, and hundreds of others) establishes the legitimacy of your basic business information, proving your company’s site is reliable and credible to search engines. Search engines reward businesses with optimized GBPs and accurate and complete local business citations, leading to higher local search results and making it easier for your target market to find you.
Here are a few tips to craft SEO-friendly GBPs and additional local business citations for your property management company:
- Ensure you complete your GBP by selecting all relevant categories so that users searching for property managers can easily find you online.
- Include up-to-date hours and the (same) correct business name, address, and phone number (NAP) consistently across all online business listings. This will give you a competitive edge in local search results and attract more online users to your property management company.
- Write an engaging description for your GBP and local citations, including keywords (e.g., property management company, property manager), service areas (e.g., Utah County, Weber County), and a call-to-action (e.g., learn more, give us a call, book a demo). The SEO community debates whether descriptions impact search rankings; nonetheless, it’s a best practice that never hurts to implement.
- Include various high-quality photos on your GBP and local business citations. Research shows that businesses with 100+ images on their GBP get 520% more calls and 2,717% more direction requests than the average company.
- Positively respond to all reviews, whether the reviews are favorable or critical of your services. While positive reviews can boost your local reputation, responding to negative feedback shows that your property management company cares about customer satisfaction and retention.
Optimizing your GBP and other local business citations can be a massive undertaking, especially considering that your property management company may have up to hundreds of local citations across the web for each of your offices. Hiring SEO experts to optimize your GBP and local citations for search engines can yield a massive payoff, saving you time and allowing you to focus on your property management operations.
- Write blog posts on property management-related topics that answer searchers’ questions.
Blog posts drive significant traffic to your property management company’s site. While this SEO strategy may not have a high conversion rate compared to other tactics, blog posts build brand awareness, increase your site’s authority, and help the conversion-driving pages (e.g., service pages, location pages) rank better on search engines. Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines regularly look for websites that consistently post new, engaging, and relevant content for online visitors. Helpful blog content is also much more likely to generate natural backlinks from satisfied readers than some of your website’s core pages are.
When creating blog articles, it can be helpful to create a content calendar or strategy based on the results from your exhaustive keyword research as opposed to creating a content calendar with interesting topics first and conducting keyword research around those topics second. The highest-quality SEO copy is the result of responding to highly-searched queries more comprehensively than your competitors are addressing the topics. Numerous property managers make the common mistake of brainstorming blog topics before conducting keyword research, leading to content creation that doesn’t adequately answer searchers’ most burning questions or generate as much qualified online traffic as is available. SEO-focused blog posts that perform well involve comprehensive keyword research and writing high-quality, relevant articles around those phrases or queries users search for online.
After you’ve performed keyword research, sift through the queries and find the terms with high search volume that you’re qualified to answer or explore in depth in a blog format. Plan content centered around property management-related topics such as multi-family real estate investing, tenant conflicts, legalities for rental property owners, landlord/tenant responsibilities, and more. Make sure to include internal links in the blog posts not only to other articles from your site but also to your property management company’s core pages that are likely to drive qualified leads to your business.
- Drive backlinks to your property management website.
Generating backlinks—or links from other websites to your site—is an SEO strategy that proves to search engines that your property management company’s website is trustworthy and authoritative, thus increasing its rankings. The most natural and preferable way to earn backlinks is by publishing helpful content that users naturally want to cite. You can also conduct an outreach campaign to request backlinks from relevant sites or publish guest posts on other sites with links back to your site. Ideally, you want to earn backlinks from sites related to your niche (e.g., property management, real estate) that have high Domain Authority (DA; a metric from Moz) or Authority Score (AS; Semrush’s equivalent to DA). We recommend paying attention to how many keywords the host site is ranking for, which is a good indication as to whether or not Google favors the website. A link’s anchor text—or the text that becomes clickable when you add a hyperlink to it—can also send important signals to Google. For example, if the anchor text of a link pointing to your home page says, “a trustworthy property management company in Corpus Christi, TX,” Google is more likely to associate your home page with that service and service area. When it comes to backlinks, quality is more important than quantity. Search engines are primarily interested in content that is genuinely helpful in answering searchers’ questions, so building links within such content is key to successful backlinking.
- Keep track of the technical performance of your property management company’s website and ensure it’s healthy.
A crucial technical SEO practice for property managers is to track your website’s performance and ensure its competitiveness for your industry and region. This involves optimizing your site’s load speed through caching, lazy loading, image compression, and JavaScript and CSS minification, among other things. Focus on other Core Web Vitals, including reducing cumulative layout shift, improving first input delay, and enhancing contentful paint. If online users visit your site and quickly leave (called “bouncing”), it can signal to search engines that your site isn’t useful or relevant, potentially harming your rankings (this long-held understanding has been confirmed by a recent leak outlining key components of Google’s algorithm). With a user-friendly, well-performing, and SEO-friendly website, people will stay on longer, clicking around and checking out pages, resulting in an authoritative domain and higher search visibility.
- Track leads.
Tracking leads is crucial for property management SEO strategies, helping you understand which keywords and online traffic sources attract qualified clients. Property managers can use Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, and call tracking tools such as CallRail to track qualified leads (usually in the form of phone calls or form submissions). Google Analytics helps you monitor your site’s traffic, understand online visitor behavior, and identify which keywords drive users to your website. On the other hand, call tracking tools like CallRail capture data on phone or contact form interactions, tracing them back to specific keywords and online traffic sources. As you implement SEO practices, tracking tools like Google Analytics and CallRail help you pinpoint which efforts and keywords generate the highest number of qualified leads, helping you refine your SEO strategy and more effectively reach the right audience online.
Before You Go: Final Thoughts on SEO for Property Managers
Here are a few things to keep in mind as you implement an SEO strategy for your property management company:
SEO Takes Time
Improving your property management site’s SEO takes time, commitment, and patience. While there are practices you can implement right away, a crucial factor in successful SEO execution is time. It can take months to see the results of the SEO strategies you’ve labored over. Remember that SEO is a constant process instead of a final destination. The search landscape is everchanging, as is the competitive environment of the property management industry and your specific service area(s). SEO is the consistent strategic response to those changes with your organic digital assets. Pairing SEO with other digital marketing channels like PPC advertising can be beneficial and efficient if you want quicker results while waiting for the impacts of SEO to bring you the organic results you’re working for.
Hire Expert SEO Help for Your Property Management Company
SEO is a time-consuming process requiring continual monitoring, pivoting, and strategization. Hiring an SEO agency to support your property management company’s digital marketing efforts is generally the most efficient way to go. If you decide to hire in-house, remember that digital marketers usually excel in only one or two marketing channels, so ensure the individual is truly an expert at search engine optimization.
Based out of Salt Lake City, Utah, Rock Salt Marketing is a dependable marketing agency with unmatched experience in SEO strategy for property management companies and various other industries. When you partner with Rock Salt’s SEO team, you’ll undoubtedly experience positive results. We provide comprehensive SEO services for property managers, which include exhaustive keyword research, content creation, business profile management, link building, performance tracking, in-depth reporting, and more. We’re dedicated to exceeding your expectations, driving online traffic, and generating qualified leads for your business. If you’re looking for top-notch property management SEO expertise, get in touch with Utah’s leading digital marketing specialists and experience your online visibility skyrocket with the help of Rock Salt Marketing Cooperative.
