Real Estate Agent Home Page

The Challenge

In 2022, I was asked by a former VP of Marketing Technology (no longer at the real estate brokerage I still work with) to spend some time at one of their offices in the northern part of Georgia. During the day, I was approached by a real estate agent who expressed she was having trouble with her website and that she wasn’t able to “get found on Google”. As every experienced SEOer and marketer knows, this type of statement can mean a bunch of things. In this case, she was concerned that when she searched her name on Google, her website was not appearing.

At this point, I made the executive decision to offer her a brand new home page, designed and built by me, that would target a handful of keywords and would provide a better chance at ranking on search engines. I made the decision to offer her this solution because I knew the agent wanted to increase her site traffic and simply working off of the templated site was not going to cut it.

The Goal

The goal for this project was simple: when users type in the agent’s name, she needs to appear at the very least in the top 6 results in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). I also wanted to provide her new home page with some targeted keywords that could give her a chance to rank on Google.

The Approach

I spent some time working on the overall design of her new home page. Once I had the design down and received her approval to begin development, I needed to investigate what was happening with her site and why she wasn’t appearing in the SERPs. The first thing I did was cross check Google Search Console to verify if her site was even being indexed. To my surprise, the site was being indexed and was being served on Google.

The next thing I did was look at the title and meta description of her home page. When we’re dealing with Search Engine Optimization (SEO), we need to be sure that targeted keywords are found in our titles and meta descriptions. The default title being served to her site was “Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Georgia Properties” and nothing else. Her home pages’ meta description was blank. I’ve now detected what the first issue to resolve was.

Next, I needed to review the front-end content, or on-page SEO elements. When it comes to on-page content, I like to ensure the page has information organized with hierarchy and I achieve this using HTML “h” tags. Over the years of working on building pages but also optimizing them for SEO, “h” tags are a crucial HTML element I use to incorporate my keywords. The templated website did use “h” tags where applicable, but none of them contained keyword-specific content. Now I found the second issue and have a good place to start the work.

Since this case study is about the development side of this project, I won’t get too in-depth about the SEO work I conducted, but I used SEM Rush to quickly research keywords that I believed could benefit her website and provide a bit of a boost in traffic. After I put together my list of target keywords, I then set up the page outline that defined the overall structure of the page. The outline was then handed over to the real estate agent to fill in with content so that I can begin building the page and integrate the key elements needed to rank better.

After the home page was built, I then went into Google Search Console and manually submitted the home page for priority crawl to let Google know that the page has been updated and needs to be quickly indexed.

What's The End Result?

At the beginning of this project, the client was concerned that when she searches for her name in Google, her website was nowhere to be found. Now, not only is her Google Business Profile appearing, but her website is now in position #1 when she searches her name. Feel free to give it a shot and search Azza Barhoma on Google.

Not only is her site ranking for the query she was most interested in, but she also got a new home page design. Overall, it was a win and the real estate agent was very happy with the outcome.