A High "SEO Score" Isn't the Goal

I don't know if the real estate website platforms offer this, but if you have a WordPress site, you probably have an SEO plugin. And your SEO plugin probably has some kind of "SEO score" for your content.

In the RankMath plugin, it looks like this:

That's from one of the blog posts on my wife's site. Not just one of them, it's the score the plugin gives us on the blog post that has driven the most leads and closings over the past five years. (And yet the score is only an 87 -- what's that, a B or maybe a B+?? It should be an A++++!)

My point: You're not beholden to those SEO scores from your WordPress plugin or any other tool you use.

With RankMath, for example, we'd get a slightly higher score if we used the primary keyword phrase word-for-word in several places throughout the post. But doing that would make the post less readable. It would also prevent us from using slight variations of the primary keyword, which is an SEO best practice.

So while those SEO scores are fun and perhaps directionally accurate, don't kill your content in the name of getting a perfect score. Your goal is to create great content for users, not great content for a plugin.

If you liked this article, you'll love my weekly newsletter. Marketing Unlocked arrives in your inbox every Sunday morning at 6:00 a.m. ET. You can unsubscribe anytime, but 600+ of your industry peers are reading it and raving about it. Click here to learn why and subscribe.