If you want people to find your website online, you will need to know about your IDX SEO settings. There are some key elements to take note of. Your SEO settings can be found in your IDX Control panel, under the Settings tab > SEO.
XML Sitemaps (Premium Feature)
Premium Plan customers get access to an XML Sitemap that allows Google to crawl and index the listings on your website. Be sure to turn the toggle on to initiate requests from our server to Google.
Your XML Sitemap is automatically generated upon the plugin installation! If you decide to install the plugin on a staging URL, this URL will display as your staging URL. When you migrate to your live domain (see how to do that here), this URL will then update to reflect your live domain.
You will be submitting* two sitemaps to your Google Search Console:
- The 1st sitemap will be the one for your actual website, for Google can crawl your WordPress built pages. So be sure to submit your sitemap to Google Search Console
- The 2nd sitemap will be the one found in your SEO section, for Google to crawl all your listing pages
*We suggest waiting to submit your XML sitemap until you've finalized your IDX set up and you're ready to go live with your IDX. Changing your default search URL would require that you resubmit your XML sitemap, so we suggest not changing your default search URL often.
Showcase IDX helps your search rankings by creating a sitemap for all IDX listing pages. If you’re using a plugin such as Yoast for SEO on your website, that plugin will create separate sitemaps for the regular non-IDX pages on your website.
Google Analytics
We highly suggest you add your Google Analytics Tracking ID* to:
- Allow you to track the events we send to Google when you have a new lead or a new message
- Ensure that traffic from your IDX pages is included in your Google Analytics reports. If you have added your GA tracking code to your theme, this step may not be necessary, but you can still add it
- Place your Google Analytics Tracking ID* in this section and save your settings.
- You'll also want to install your Global Site Tag on your default search page. This will ensure that the Showcase IDX tracking events are sent properly to your Google Analytics dashboard.
*Not sure where to find your Tracking ID? Visit this Google article for a step-by-step guide.
Meta Data Content Templates
We've already provided a very solid, standard structure for you so you don't have to change these settings, but they are here if you would prefer to.
Keep in mind that if you are using an SEO plugin like Yoast SEO, RankMath, etc, that these settings could be overridden by their settings. If you see any issues, the first place you will want to check is your SEO settings in your WordPress SEO plugin.
Search Page Title
You can edit your Search Page Title, which a page title (also known as a 'title tag') is a short description of a webpage and appears at the top of a browser window.
It is an important element of an optimized SEO page. It should be something that is relevant to your business and/or market. Here is an example of a few tabs open in Chrome, one of which is a Showcase IDX default search page:
Listing Detail Page URL Structure
URL Structure (aka Permalinks) are an important part of your website as both visitors and search engines use these URLs to visit and index your site. The type of URL structure you pick influences the way these two types of visitors see and experience your site.
WordPress has Permalink settings within its main settings that manage the pages and posts created within WordPress. Showcase IDX has a similar section in its settings that allow you to control the URL structure if the IDX pages on your website. These pages are dynamically generated by the plugin.
Every listing URL will have a URL structure that starts with their domain, default search slug, the word 'listing', the MLS name, and the MLS listing ID. (Example: janedoe.com/real-estate/listing/crmls/123456) You will notice that by default, we have added the city and address to the URL. We do offer some additional dynamic fields if you want to further customize the URL, which you can find by clicking on the {{...}}.
These are the only available fields that we have at this time:
Warning: If you add a field that is not in the provided list of fields, your URLs will break and your pages will 404 when trying to load them. It is not recommended to change your URLs often. Google doesn't like that.
Listing Detail Page Title
Similar to the Search Page Title, this will appear at the top of each listing detail page, in the browser tab. You may add additional text or dynamic fields to boost your SEO. For example, you may want to add your company's name or something relevant to your business or market.
Listing Detail Page Meta Description
We've configured by default to use the description (or public remarks) of the property that we pull from the MLS. You may add additional text or dynamic fields.