Overview

It's possible, with most Content Management Systems (CMS), to index your property pages to be searchable on Google. This article will walk you through the steps to configure your Buildout inventory plugin to get your property pages indexed.

Please note that the following CMS do not support indexing:

• GoDaddy (this is just the CMS, if you host your domain on GoDaddy it is possible to index your pages)
• Wix

Walkthrough

1. Before you begin, please email our Support team to notify them that you will be working on setting up SEO for your plugin. They have a key administrative task to complete that allows your properties to be indexed.
2. You will need to set up a Google Search Console account. Fortunately, Google has created a comprehensive walkthrough of setting up an account and adding your site.
3. Once you have created your Search Console account and verified ownership of your website, you will need to configure a URL parameter.
4. Expand the "Legacy tools and reports" menu and click "URL parameters"
   
5. Click on Add parameter
6. Configure the URL parameter as seen in the screenshot below exactly
   1. Parameter = "propertyId" (letter case matters for this field)
   2. Does this parameter change page content seen by the user? = Yes
   3. How does this parameter affect page content? = Specifies
   4. Which URLs with this parameter should Googlebot crawl? = Every URL
7. Click save

This completes the setup for indexing your property websites! Please note that it can take anywhere between 1-4 weeks before we see Google crawl these pages and index them. In the meantime, you can follow some of our best practices below.

Best Practices

Buildout will automatically pull information about your property from the database and create metadata when Google crawls the page, therefore we take much of the SEO work out of your hands, but there are some things you can do to increase your SEO.

Update the URL Slug

The website tab of any published property page allows you to update the URL: 

As pictured above, we recommend replacing the default value with either the address or property name separated by dashes (this is important to indicate separate keywords in the string).

Be creative

The sale and lease description field in the property edit form are added to each property page as metadata. While we don't recommend spamming keywords into this field, it best serves the SEO of the page to have a clear and well-written description of the property and opportunity.