by threshold | Dec 29, 2022 | Digital Marketing, General, Marketing, Tech/Web
 Ava Page
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What is SEO?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of utilizing optimized content in order to improve your ranking on search engines and increase traffic to your website. The best ways to ensure this practice is completed at maximum success are to create high-quality content, ensure quick load time for your website, and create a user-friendly website across all platforms.
Why should I focus on SEO?
The bottom line is that SEO is what will make your website visible, and will in turn ensure long-term equity for your business or brand. Higher visibility will result in higher organic traffic for your site, all without spending a dime on advertising.
Improving your SEO rankings is one of the easiest and most cost-effective ways to drive traffic to your site. 65% of users who search on Google say they will choose organic results over ads, proving that securing a solid SEO campaign can be more effective than paid ads in this arena.
What SEO content should be included on my website?
At Threshold, we happen to know a thing or two about SEO. In fact, it’s pretty much our specialty. So much so, that we’re offering some insight on the top ways to ensure SEO success for your business or brand and how we provide for our clients on custom websites, social media management, and other digital marketing services.
Alt-text
First things first, it’s worth noting that 22.6% of Google searches come from image searches, hence the importance of your website images’ SEO.
Alt-text – sometimes referred to as alt tags or alt attributes – is an included written description of an image within the website. This helps in giving your site and its images a higher search engine ranking, as it enhances the accessibility of your site.
Meta descriptions
Meta descriptions allow you to provide a snippet or summary of your website and all its pages to be shown in the SERP (search engine results page).
A good meta description will entice viewers to click on your page in search engines, increasing your CTR (click-through rate), organic traffic, and lead generation.
Without effective meta descriptions, search engines will rank your website lower, and those potential viewers who do make it down to your listing will turn away from site descriptions that don’t interest them.
Page titles
We’ve all heard not to judge a book by its cover, but in most cases, it’s inevitable.
Page titles on a website are no different! When creating your page titles, you must be sure to let your clients know what they’re searching for, while also drawing their interest.
As far as page titles go for SEO, it’s a pretty similar idea. Search engines are never going to prioritize a website without clear page titles to indicate where they are sending their users.
Keywords
Keywords are where things can get tricky in SEO, and why we recommend you leave it to the professionals – like us!
However, for the sake of giving you a better understanding of why we do what we do when choosing keywords, we’ll let you in on some tricks of the trade.
Keywords are what most often will attract users to your website in search engines. Think about what clients will be plugging into their search engines when looking for a business such as your own – these are the starting points for choosing your keywords.
Another tricky part of keywords is knowing how many to include per page, per site. Include too little, and search engines won’t recognize your site. Include too many, and search engines will avoid promoting your sites due to spam triggers.
Lucky for you, keyword research and implementation are a huge part of our premium SEO services when creating our custom websites.
Linking
Whether it’s to provide examples, deeper dives into the information you’re promoting, or simply linking to other locations within your own website, this is a step you’ll want to pay attention to. Both internal and external links let search engines know that your information is relatable, and oftentimes, verified.
Mobile-friendly
Creating a website that is user-friendly across all devices is something that will contribute largely to your SEO rankings, and it’s because of one simple fact: nearly 60% of online users access the web using a mobile device.
Gone are the days of simply using laptops and desktops to access the internet, and mobile-friendly websites are here to stay. Google and other search engines are simply not going to prioritize a website that isn’t designed with the majority of online users in mind.
This is why creating a mobile-friendly website isn’t something that can be pushed to the back burner to be resolved later – it’s something to look at now, or else your SEO rankings will suffer exponentially as a result.
Before you go
Don’t forget, we’re experts when it comes to crafting high ranking SEO friendly custom websites, and we are here to help! Reach out to a CSM or any of our team members to get started on taking your website’s SEO to the next level, and see an increase in traffic, and watch the leads roll in.
For more tips and information about digital and real estate marketing, take a look at the rest of our blogs, right here on our website! You can also subscribe to our email newsletter, or follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter!
by threshold | Jan 18, 2017 | All, Marketing, Tech/Web
If Threshold’s skilled residential marketing designers only cared about getting the most information to the customer, our websites would look a lot like this blog post. We’d see a whole lot of text and the sites would have very little visual appeal.
That approach works well for blog posts and articles, but websites are a sensory experience; a virtual market where people spend their time enlarging floor plans, scrolling down lists of amenities and clicking through gallery images.
Of course, many prospective residents don’t spend much time on websites at all. Marketing to Millennials is all about keeping their attention, but plenty of lost customers see the homepage and immediately click away after deciding the property isn’t for them. In today’s post, we’re going to take a look at the most important elements to keep residents interested in your property, and get them to click on those important action buttons.
Animation
Animation helps communicate messages with style, drawing the user’s eye towards moving images instead without them having to load a video or click a “play” button. Animation can be as simple as rotating sliders on a homepage or as complex as animated water in a resort-style pool. Even the most simple movement can be the difference between grabbing and losing a customer’s interest.
Material Design and Beyond
As anyone in the digital marketing industry knows, when Google makes changes, the rest of the web follows suit. Google was the first big company to take “Flat Design” and turn it into something with depth and layers. Material Design pairs geometric shapes with shadows, movement and overlays to create visually appealing websites and web apps. That’s not the say that Material Design is the only way to make websites, but it’s certainly a look that internet users are familiar with and understand intuitively, which is always a positive. Speaking of making sure users can understand your website…
Navigation
Most property sites need the same standard pages in the navigation bar: About Us, Floor Plans, Amenities, Gallery, and Apply Now. Obviously, there are some exceptions, but every property website needs to cover those basic pages before moving on to anything else. Navigation doesn’t have to only happen via Navigation Bar though. In fact, more and more websites are using the “long-scroll” look, where all pages are accessible when the user simply scrolls down from the top of the homepage.
The whole point of a website is to get the prospect to take action, so keeping the complex navigation to a minimum helps steer prospective residents toward the “Schedule a Tour” button or the “Apply Now” button without too much extra fluff. Most properties sell a lifestyle just as much as they sell an apartment, so it’s important to convey that lifestyle with big, bold images and impactful design. People will locate the amenities and floor plans if they are interested in learning more, but they won’t be interested in learning more without a simple, impactful message on the home page.
Customized Google Maps
Most of your website’s visitors will be familiar with the look, feel and functionality of a Google Maps plug-in, it’s very common in residential marketing. So much so, that they may just glaze right over it. Customizing your Google Map, however, offers prospective residents a totally new experience with a tool that they’re already familiar with. At Threshold, we often highlight certain locations around the property, such as restaurants, shopping centers, gyms and coffee shops. This gives residents an idea of what life will be like living in the neighborhood.
The best website designers know how to quickly — and beautifully—convey the lifestyle promised at every property. This is where animation, navigation tools, and customization come into play. Each element helps create a feeling within the website visitor that (hopefully) convinces them to explore the website and property further.
Is your property’s website up to date? Let Threshold’s designers come up with some creative marketing ideas for apartments in your portfolio. Our website development team will then create a responsive websites that drive traffic to your front door.
by threshold | Jan 13, 2015 | All, Tech/Web
Writing a blog is tough work. Not the actual writing part of the blog, nor the creation of the content calendar. The tough part is sticking to it. Sometimes I wish there was a “blog trainer,” you know, someone to tell me to write 15 more words or to get off my lazy butt and get to work. Surely if it works to get folks into shape, it could also work to get businesses into better shape.
A blog, or any piece of content for a website, is a critical part of the website’s success. The old adage “build it and they will come” definitely does not apply to a website. With the growing level of competition in residential housing, owning a website that is found in search results is critical to NOI. Your digital marketing strategies are now the top priorities in any marketing plan. So, why is it that content will help you maintain a successful website?
Every year, Searchmetrics, the global leader in SEO marketing and analytics for enterprise level companies, releases their SEO ranking factors analysis. Here’s what they found in 2014:
- Create robust site architecture
- Do include good internal links
- Do aim for short loading times
- Do keep sites up to date
- Don’t lose focus or just focus on technical aspects of the site
- Pay attention to keywords in titles and descriptions
- Relevant content reigns supreme. Keyword is “relevant content”
- Include semantically comprehensive wording
- Implement higher word counts using relevant topic terms
- Use multiple media types (pictures, video)
- Don’t follow spammy onpage advertising techniques
- Use quality backlinks. If you have a large portfolio you should be linking to all of your properties on each website. And they should each have their own website.
- Social signals are a bonus. Facebook, Google+, Twitter and Pinterest.
- User signals are critical. What folks do on your site and how they find your site are becoming more relevant with each passing year.
Combining the above into a clear SEO strategy is critical to the success of your website. Having a well-structured site technically is nice, but if you’re only focused on that than your competitors will leave you in the dust. Content is King for your SEO Strategy. And luckily there are some good SEO strategists out there to help get you on the right path.
And they may even help write those blogs that seem so difficult to maintain.
Happy Marketing!
by threshold | Dec 15, 2014 | All, Tech/Web
We just returned from an invigorating Dallas Digital Summit where approximately 1,500 digital marketing experts from around the world convened to discuss trends and the future of how we, as marketers, can be more effective. Hat’s off to the organizers of this event for packing an incredible amount of information coming from knowledgeable, prepared speakers into a 2-day event, complete with great accommodations and hospitality. We’re already looking forward to next year.
Above all the buzzwords, a common theme seemed to resonate loudly.
Digital Marketing must simplify, clear the clutter and focus on providing value to the end user (ie – the Human).
It’s not about IoT, Big Data, Omnichannel or other buzzwords and it’s not about the latest software. It’s not about how to trick Google or how to get a bazillion social followers. It’s about the humans we’re trying to connect with and help. It’s about delivering the right message at the right time, and in a way that helps the end user (ie – prospective residents) understand how you can help them. It’s about creating a website, mobile app or other product that’s built based on an understanding of how the end user is going to gain value from it.
Highlights From DDS:
Email Marketing Is Not Dead
We’ve said this for years, and were excited to see two sessions devoted to email marketing. In our marketing efforts, we continue to see outstanding results for our clients through email marketing. So what were our take-aways from DDS? You guessed it – treat your subscribers as individuals, not as one big list. Personalize and deliver more relevant and useful content by using their name, understanding their location, their birthday, their purchase history and more. Further, keep your emails simple, brief and make sure your CTA’s (Call To Action’s) are finger-ready because more than 50% of all emails, on average, are opened on mobile devices.
Mobile Usage
Mobile usage continues to go up and up, and will probably reach 50% of all traffic at some point in the next year or two. Any marketing campaign or digital property must absolutely consider the mobile experience.
The new SEO… It’s Real and Local
The most recent change by Google, “Penguin 3.0” and “Pigeon”, have continued their trend toward rewarding websites that are genuinely trying to provide a good user experience and relevant content to its users. True to it’s origins, Penguin continues to push SEO marketers to focus on expanding websites with content that is relative to the brand/company, and useful toward helping their customers (or potential residents) do things better.
The Pigeon update, which went live earlier this year, has changed the local search game drastically. An outstanding presentation by renowned SEO expert Greg Gifford taught us a lot about how to prepare a website for optimal local search results.
by threshold | Jan 24, 2014 | All, Tech/Web
I posted an article a few months back about my desire to build an unbeatable fantasy football team (a la 1972 Miami Dolphins). I wanted to crush my cousins’ teams into oblivion, so I turned to the internet to do my research. Create my game plan, if you will, for global fantasy football domination. What I found along the way were enormous amounts of marketing – video clips, paid ads, great content – pulling me further and further along my path. I found it so intriguing that for something as niche-related as fantasy football, there were folks like me – the Don Draper wanna-be’s of the world – building that digital strategy.
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