Technical SEO for real estate websites is one of the most critical steps in any complete SEO strategy. Ensuring that your website is in top shape helps grow organic traffic, ranking keywords, and leads. As we’ve talked about in many other places on our blog, SEO (or evergreen marketing) has the potential to become a powerhouse of lead-generation for real estate businesses.  Both for investors and agents.  We’ve even discussed how you can make that happen in articles like… A beginner’s guide to SEO for real estate investors Top SEO for Real Estate Strategies, Tips, and Examples [2022 Edition] What Is Real Estate SEO? Learn the Basics of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) But there’s a foundation for all of those tips that we haven’t spent much time talking about: namely, technical SEO for real estate websites.  We’re talking about the parts of SEO that depend on how well your website is built — how fast it loads, how clean the coding is, and whether it’s mobile friendly or not.  We haven’t spent much time talking about this because Carrot members don’t have to worry about it. All Carrot real estate sites have a search-engine-optimized tech stack baked right into their back-end. But we thought it was time to pull back the curtain.  What are the factors involved in the technical SEO? Here’s your checklist! Technical SEO for Real Estate Websites Checklist 1. Page Experience In 2021, Google updated their page experience signals. Core Web Vitals combined with existing search signals, including mobile-friendliness, safe-browsing, HTTPS security, and intrusive interstitial guidelines. If you need a refresher, we covered Core Web Vitals extensively in these posts: Google Core Web Vitals Update Coming Summer 2021 Core Web Vitals & Page Speed – What To Do (and Not Do) With Your Website [Data] Carrot Websites Now 69.8% Faster Thank Custom Websites on Mobile CWVs is comprised of three factors: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – LCP measures the loading performance of the largest contentful element on screen. This should happen within 2.5 seconds to provide a good user experience. First Input Delay (FID) – FID measures when someone can first interact with the page. To ensure a good user experience, the page should have an FID of less than 100 ms. Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – This measures the visual stability of elements on screen. Sites should strive for their pages to maintain a CLS of less than .1 seconds. These ranking factors can be measured in a report found in Google Search Console, which shows you which URLs have potential issues: There are of tools to help you improve your site speed and Core Web Vitals, including Google PageSpeed Insights (more on this below), Lighthouse, and Webpagetest.org. 2. Improve Your Site’s Load Speed This is SEO 101: if your site doesn’t load quickly, people won’t stay on it.  In fact, 40% of visitors will leave a site that takes longer than 3 seconds to load. And a 1-second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions! The moral of the story: if you want people to stick around (AND if you want to improve your SEO), you need a fast website. Test your website using Google’s PageSpeed Insights. In fact, there’s a clear correlation between sites that load fast and sites that rank well… If you’re a Carrot member, than out of the box your site will be faster than pretty much all your competitors.  If fact, our websites are 69.8% faster than custom websites. *Faster load speed means better rankings 😎* How do you make your site load fast if you’re not a … Continued