Notice we made a point to date this post. That's because it's very possible that six months from now some of these tips are going to be outdated--the world of Google and SEO really does move that fast. SEO can seem way too technical and difficult to grasp, but with these pointers you'll have the power to understand if your website could benefit from a few tweaks or a major overhaul. What's the benefit, you ask? More homebuyers being able to find your website when they're searching for homes. That's a benefit worth pursuing! Go ahead and open up your website. We'll show you a few things you can look at right on your home page that will give you a ton of insight into any major SEO barriers.  

1. Identify the slow stuff
   • Video (one you can play without leaving the page)
   • "Share This" button (look for  at the bottom or top corner of the page)
   • Google Map (a working one you can zoom in/out and move around on)

Here's a fact: slow websites don't rank well; fast ones do. You want your website home page to load in less than two seconds--to be clear, two seconds is the worst it should get. If you can get it to load in less than a second, that's what you really want. You can use a tool to quickly see how fast on average your website loads. Here's a tool from Pingdom, but there are lots of others out there to use. If your website is more than three years old, you might have a slow load time due to how your site was built. There are newer, faster ways of building a website today that can speed up your load time considerably. However, if you're not ready for an overhaul, getting rid of the three things we mentioned above could help shave a precious second off your load time.   2. See if there's a page for each area you build in. If you don't have these "area landing pages," you should get them! One of the best strategies for showing up in search is having a page for each area you build in. So for instance, if you want to show up for "home builders in Olathe, KS," you will want one page of your website that has all your Olathe stuff on it--all the communities you build in, the floor plans you offer, the homes for sale--everything. That's going to keep your other Olathe-related pages from competing with each other and ruining your chances. You want one all-encompassing, best Olathe page to give your site the best opportunity to rank for that keyword.   3. Check the Navigation  Click or hover on the menu items at the top of your home page. Are there a lot of dropdown items? As in, can you get directly to every area and every community from the dropdown? If so, this is a signal for SEO opportunity in reorganizing your website. Your home page should only link to the main page for each section of your website in the top navigation, and then any other page you consider really important that you want people to find in a search result (like your area pages!).   4. Look at what the home page says. Is there any text on the home page? We hope so! Check and see if you can find the words "home builder," "new homes," your company name, and the main area you build in. This is an easy SEO update you can make if you find any of the information is missing. Bonus: The biggest text on the page is probably your main header. This is the perfect place to put an important keyword phrase. Update it to something like "(City)'s Leading Home Builder" to get even more SEO value from your home page keywords.   5. Click a few pages into the website.  Ok we lied, you do have to leave the home page for this one. Go to one of your community pages. When you're there, look at what the website address (URL) says in the top of your browser. Does it look like mywebsite.com/community? If so, you have another SEO opportunity! High-ranking home builder websites usually have what's called a "foldered structure." It just means when you look at the website address, you can see the path you took to get to that page. You want your community page to look something like this: mywebsite.com/find-your-home/KS/Olathe/community.   If you're seeing opportunities in most or all of these categories, that's a good indication that a new website would be a much better investment for you in the long run than fixes to your current site. Some of these updates require quite a bit of programming and may end up costing just as much as a new site. It's recommended that websites be redone about every three years to keep up with changes in technology. If you're not where you want to be SEO-wise and your site is at least three years old, you know you have lots of opportunities to improve your SEO just by building a new website!