Just a few years back, SEO was heavily touted as the way to reach your customers — or rather, the way to bring them to you. And now it seems that Content Marketing has taken over as the most talked about strategy for attracting prospective customers. But in the quest to keep up with the latest marketing trends, its critical not to ditch yesterday’s buzzword for today’s shiny new penny. The fact is, both SEO and Content Marketing are necessary components of a successful property management marketing plan and they need to work together in order to produce the best possible results.

On the content marketing side, Google, the current reigning king of the search engines, states that “your content should be created primarily to give visitors a good user experience, not to rank well in search engines.” (Source: Create Valuable Content)

The theory is that if you create good content, high ranking with search engines will naturally follow. That’s because the people who come across your website or blog will find the content useful; seek additional content from you; return in the future and share your content with friends and colleagues through social media. All of these activities will contribute to higher search engine rankings. However, the key to setting this marketing dream in motion is that your target audience has to find you first. That’s where SEO makes its defiant comeback.

The Property Manager’s Guide to Extraordinary Marketing has all the inspiration and resources you need to make the right message heard by the right people.

Choose Your Keywords Wisely

Currently the best keyword strategy is to think as your target audience does. Try to anticipate what search phrases they might enter online, in order to solve a problem or to find a service such as yours. For instance, if your business primarily serves New York properties, a few good keyword phrases to target would be “property managers in New York” or “New York property management companies”.

Put Keywords in Their Proper Place

Keywords are believed to be most effective in terms of SEO, when they are placed within page titles, headings, and even image alt tags. Keywords can also be effective when sprinkled within naturally written and informative content. Just be careful not to overdo it. Keyword stuffing or using too many keywords in any given area of your website can actually have the opposite effect and hurt your search ranking. Aim for a keyword density of 1-2%, which means that on a page containing 400 words, your targeted keyword should appear 4-8 times.

Make the Most of Title Tags

The title tag is what appears at the very top of your web browser and is also used as the headline preview that appears in the search engine results. Try to place keywords close to the beginning of your title tags for best search ranking results and include geographical modifiers and your organization’s name whenever possible. It’s also important to keep title tags limited to 70 characters or less, otherwise not all the content will appear in the search results.

Optimize Your Images

The Google Images component of the search engine giant also plays an important role in getting a website noticed on the web. Property management organizations are at a unique advantage here because of the number of photos found on their websites to promote vacancies. To increase the chances of your website images coming up in search results, be sure to include targeted keywords in your image file names using dashes [i.e., property-management-new-york].

Cultivate Backlinks

One of the most effective ways to increase your site’s ranking is through backlinks. Getting others to link back to your website helps to establish your authority and expertise as a property manager, something Google places a very strong emphasis on. Check out Tips for Getting More Quality Backlinks to Your Property Management Website. 

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