Improving your apartment SEO can feel like trying to follow a non-existent path to the end of the rainbow where a pot of gold sits — the pot of gold being a mix of higher Google search result rankings, increased web traffic, and more high-quality leads.

The task of improving your apartment SEO can feel overwhelming, especially when you’ve already put significant effort into your website. This is why we recommend making small adjustments to published webpages; this will both maximize your time and the outcome of your efforts. 

To kickstart your process and provide you with effective changes you can implement today, here are four easy updates to make across all of your webpages: 

1. Optimize Webpage Titles

It’s likely no secret that your apartment webpage title, or H1 tag, is important. However, are you familiar with the specifics for SEO-friendly headlines? 

 Here is a quick overview: 

 The optimal length for webpage headlines that rank higher in search results is 8 to 14 words.

• For example, an optimized headline for an apartment website’s homepage would be: “LVL 29 is the Most Luxurious High-Rise Apartment in Plano, Texas.” 
• Headlines should include the main long-tail keyword the webpage is targeting.
• As you can see in the example above, the long-tail keyword “apartment in Plano, Texas” is clearly in the headline.
• An H1 tag should be assigned to the headline.
• Each webpage should only have one H1 tag.

 If you have a lengthy webpage headline that can’t be shortened, the next step is to make sure that your long-tail keyword is placed at the front of the headline to ensure that it is not cut off by search engines. 

 Here are the general apartment website pages most properties have that need an optimized headline: 

 Homepage

• Amenities
• Floorplans
• Gallery
• Community
• Neighborhood 
• Contact Us 

 Recently, marketing guru Neil Patel ran an experiment to find if webpage headings actually had an impact on search rankings. In his podcast episode, Patel revealed that it wasn’t the number of H1s, H2s, and H3s that made an impact on apartment SEO; it was only if those titles had bigger font sizes. Based on this data, we recommend that not only do you optimize the words in your headline, but physically emphasize it with font size as well. 

2. Add a Title Tag, Meta Description, and Focus Keywords to Each Webpage

More behind the scenes SEO components of getting your apartment website to rank higher are title tags, meta descriptions, and focus keywords. These three items are more for the search engine to understand your content rather than the potential renter. 

 Here’s the breakdown: 

• Meta Description: The HTML element that specifies the title of a webpage, in other words, a more targeted version of your webpage’s headline that search engine algorithms pay more attention to.
• Meta Description: A short description of the content on the specific webpage that both communicates to search engines what your webpage is about and appears underneath the page title in search results for potential renters to read before clicking on your page.
• Focus Keywords: What you enter on the backend to tell search engines the main keywords your page is optimized for.
• For example, if you enter “apartments in Dallas” as your focus keyword and your webpage is optimized for that word, then Google is more likely to pull up your webpage higher in search results when a user types that phrase into a search bar.

 This is why adding these items to each webpage is so critical for improving apartment SEO. If your webpages don’t outline what they’re about, search engines won’t know where to rank them or will rank them lower than they should be.

 To help you craft your own, here are highly optimized pieces of text based on the example of the homepage title listed above: 

• Meta Description: Title Tag: Luxury Apartment in Plano, Texas
• Meta Description: Discover the most luxurious high-rise apartment in Plano, Texas with spacious floorplans and in-demand resident amenities. 
• Focus Keyword: Apartment in Plano Texas

 Taking the time to add these three portions of text to your apartment website pages can really boost your overall optimization. Recently, our team added these pieces of text to over 73 of our webpages and it effectively boosted us up three slots in search results for specific keywords.

3. Target Two Long-Tail Keywords for Each Webpage

For ultimate optimization, each of your webpages should target two long-tail keywords and by target, I simply mean that the chosen keywords appear on the webpage text a good amount of times. 

Long-tail keywords are focused search queries that have the ability to drive high-quality lease traffic due to their specificity. When a potential renter types in a long search query, there is a higher chance of leasing intent.

For example, the long-tail version of the keyword “apartments near me” is “affordable apartments in Dallas, Texas.” Users who search the latter are clearly on the hunt for a specific type of apartment that you can have your website appear for.

There’s a common apartment SEO misconception that shorter search queries have higher search volumes, but often that is not the case. Sometimes, even one additional word can target a higher volume of searches.

Here are a few statistics to back up my statements in support of the strength of long-tail keywords: 

• 50 percent of search queries contain four or more words
• Over 29 percent of keywords with more than 10,000 monthly searches consist of three or more words
• Over 8 percent of searches are phrased as a question
  
  

When it comes to the number of times you use a keyword in a blog, 0.5 to 2.5 percent of keyword density is considered safe and standard. You can check your keyword density by taking the number of times the keyword is used and divide it by the total word count. 

4. Increase Word Count of Each Webpage

While we all know that once you get your website up, you don’t want to write any more copy or text for it, but biting the bullet and expanding the number of words on each webpage can really improve your apartment SEO. 

When it comes to ranking above your competition, or simply one spot higher in a search result list, it’s all about the balance between word count and keyword usage. 

Let’s say you want to rank one slot higher for the search query, “apartments in Dallas, Texas.” To achieve this, you just need to use the keyword one more time throughout the page than the result above you. 

However, simply increasing the keyword usage alone won’t be successful. To avoid “keyword stuffing,” which Google will penalize you for, you need to increase the word count in relative measure to keyword usage. 

I recommend a word count of at least 1,000 words for each apartment webpage. 

Increasing Apartment SEO in Small Increments

Unsurprisingly, these four steps are just the tip of the iceberg, or the beginning to the path of the pot of gold, when it comes to improving your apartment SEO. 

This big task is much easier to implement when you break it down into smaller, actionable steps like the ones listed above. This is truly the perfect place to start. 

For a more detailed and comprehensive breakdown of apartment SEO, check out this helpful resource!