In November 2015, Google released an update on how its search engine algorithms work.    Clocking in at a huge 160 pages in PDF form, I feel pretty safe in betting that you haven’t read it, and you’re not going to.

But if you want your agency to come up in web results, this is a document you need to understand, because Google has drastically changed the way it ranks searches.  Long gone are the days where you could put up a website with the words ‘real estate’ in the title and hope for the best – these days, it’s all about expert advice and original, content-heavy content.  That’s not discounting the other factors, of course – Backlinko enumerates a huge 200 factors taken into account to determine Google rankings, which you can read here if you’re so inclined.

You’re not?  That’s fine. Luckily for all of us, we here at The Property Writers love this kind of stuff.  So here’s a summary:

Clear, concise writing is favoured over duplicate, ‘scraped’ or badly written content.  The stuff that’s generated through high volume content mills by writers working well below minimum wage tends to be careless and come across as lazy.  The writers themselves aren’t lazy, of course – they’re writing as fast as they can just to buy groceries.  But that means they don’t have time to stop and revise their copy, much less to research their content and interview experts.  Which brings us to our next point.

E-A-T.  That’s the new acronym for the pages Google looks for to rank as high quality.  It stands for Expertise, Authority and Trustworthiness.  Complex topics such as finance, health and legal requires expert opinion.  Relevantly for real estate agents, advice pages that “may affect a person’s finances or well being”, a category that ranges from financial advice to home remodeling and parenting, should also be written by an expert.  The writer should be an authority on the topic, providing content that is useful and can be trusted for accuracy.

That means that agents who are using content management strategies to establish themselves as trusted authorities in the field need to make sure that their content is authoritative and correct.  A real estate agent is an expert in the property field, and can give advice on a range of topics from preparing your home for sale to renovating for profit.  But if you don’t want to write it yourself, you need a professional copywriter who can use your authority to present crisp, authoritative prose that Google will rank highly.

Here’s another acronym: YMYL.  Your Money/Your Life.  That refers to pages where bad advice can cost people dearly, and includes e-commerce, detailed health advice and financial how-tos.  If your content includes advice on how to finance a home purchase, for example, Google is likely to put your page under extra scrutiny to make sure that it contained qualified expert advice.

If any of this sounds daunting, don’t worry.  The algorithm changes are excellent news, because they represent another step towards favouring real experts offering real quality services.  And that’s what you are, after all.  You don’t have to compete with the hacks and the content mills: just make sure your content is written by someone who can do justice to your knowledge of the industry, and you’ll find your business goes straight to the top of the page.