Most people don’t give a second thought to search engine optimization (SEO), but if you’re a property management company looking to bring in new business, SEO should be your three favorite letters from now on.

Why does SEO matter? Because there are an awful lot of property management companies out there, and if you’re going to compete with them, you’re going to have to find ways to set yourself apart. It’s an immutable fact: if your property management company is similar to the next guy’s, but the next guy is employing effective SEO, he’s going to get all the hits and all the business, and you’re going to be doomed to be a second-pager. (A company that comes up on the second page of a Google search, which people rarely check.)

One common reason property managers give for not utilizing SEO is that they don’t understand it, or if they do understand it, they don’t know how to execute it. There are SEO companies that can do it for you, but they can cost an arm and a leg, and really, there’s no reason you can’t at least do some of it yourself.

Here are a few tips to make your property management site more SEO-friendly:

Use TLTBR: It sounds intimidating, but all it means is “top left to bottom right.” In other words, when you’re creating the copy for your website, put all of the meaningful stuff in the top left corner (the logical start point), and then let the less-important stuff fill in the rest. The upper left corner should ideally have your company name, location, what you do, and an image, so that Google and other search engines see that first.

Break out the bullets: Google is crazy about lists. No one knows exactly why, but pages with bulleted or numbered lists achieve a higher rank, so take a look at the copy on your website and look for places where you can break up chunks of copy into lists. This also helps with readability.

Pictures and videos: Another favorite of Google, the use of images and videos shows search engines that your website is less, shall we say, fly-by-night and more serious, and also, you can use keywords when you insert them. Remember that search engines will be unimpressed with an image named “Pic” and much happier with one called “Property Management Company.” Naming the image after your actual company is even better.

Podcasts and transcriptions: These are the hot new item in the SEO world, and you should assume that your competitors will know that and exploit it. But podcasting is amazingly cheap these days -- you can even record a phone call -- and companies that do the transcription of the spoken words are cheap too. Posting both the podcast and the transcription allows you to double up on keywords (naming the podcast itself and then the transcribed copy), and ensures that anyone who doesn’t have the capability to listen to the podcast can still enjoy it.

These are just a few tips that can spruce up your SEO right away. Remember that good content is still king, and if you can’t write some or don’t want to, there are great companies out there that will.