Real Estate SEO Strategy- Leveraging Search Engines For Faster Sales
Learn how your real estate business can benefit from search engine optimization (SEO). By boosting your search engine rankings, you can make your real estate website appear at the top of the results when sellers and buyers in your area are seeking your services.
We’ll review a few of the most important elements of an SEO strategy and how you can integrate them into your website to reach potential clients. We will also provide a few real estate SEO tips to help you generate more leads.
Why Is SEO Crucial for a Real Estate Website?
Real estate SEO is a must for bringing relevant traffic to your website. SEO aims to display your website to sellers and buyers who are looking for real estate information and who could benefit from the services of licensed real estate agents. By appearing in the search engine results pages, you can generate more traffic and bring more potential clients to your website.
In addition to faster sales, SEO offers many benefits to real estate professionals, including the following:
- Brand awareness: The right real estate SEO strategies have the potential to boost your brand awareness and make you a trusted real estate professional in your area.
- Industry leader: Better brand awareness and an authoritative voice in the market means even casual browsers will be more likely to contact you when they’re ready to buy or sell, helping nurture the client throughout the buying cycle.
- Increased traffic: The first page of the search results gets up to 99% of search traffic, making SEO a must for any real estate agent who wants to dominate their local market.
- More leads: Bringing additional traffic to your real estate website means access to more leads. Additionally, SEO leads are more qualified and likely include those already interested in buying or selling, or hoping to do so soon.
Real Estate SEO Strategy that Works
Are you a real estate professional interested in becoming a top seller in your market area? If the answer is yes, you need a real estate SEO strategy catering to your unique goals and target market.
Here are a few of the most important components of an effective SEO strategy.
Dominate Local Searches With Local SEO
Local SEO is especially important when working in real estate. Unlike traditional SEO, which focuses on capturing national or international market share, you only need to rank high in your market. Here are a few great tips for local optimization:
Optimize Your Google Business Profile
A Google business listing is a great way to reach local buyers and sellers. Reach your local target audience using Google’s built-in SEO tools. Specifically, pinpoint the markets you want to reach and upload important business information to your profile, like hours and contact information.
Optimizing your Google business profile also helps your business appear on local maps or Google maps. This can help you target more local clients in your area, and even appear higher in search engines.
Submit Your Real Estate Business to Online Directories
Submitting your realtor business to online directories is a form of free advertising that also helps you target keywords and establish trust with Google. These real estate websites also sometimes link back to your website, helping to build backlinks.
A few great online directories in the real estate industry to consider include Zillow, Realtor, Homes, and Trulia.
Partner With Other Area Professionals
Partnering with other local-area professionals expands your audience and generates more backlinks. Work with industry mortgage lenders, inspectors, or appraisers to cross-post to each other’s web pages, helping to create more brand awareness and backlinks. Create valuable local area guides or video content that other industry professionals share.
Leverage Social Media to Your Advantage
Social media can also be beneficial to a local digital marketing strategy. Nurture your followers, answer their most prominent questions, and encourage them to visit your real estate website.
Keyword Research
Keyword research is an important SEO task that involves identifying the most searched phrases in the real estate industry. Before optimizing your website for real estate-related keywords, it’s necessary to find out what the buyers and sellers in your area are searching for.
A great start to keyword research includes the following steps:
- Analyze your current search traffic.
- Compare your keyword usage with your competitors.
- Use online research tools to identify keyword gaps.
- Make a list of potential keywords. (Include both short and long-tail keywords.)
- Review the search volume and keyword difficulty for each keyword.
- Narrow down your options and choose a few keywords to focus on initially.
- Create a content and backlink strategy that implements these keywords.
Identifying the best real estate SEO keywords isn’t always easy. You want to choose a good mix of easy versus more difficult keywords for the best results. Of course, selecting keywords with good search volume also ensures your SEO efforts pay off.
Many professionals may outsource this task to an experienced real estate SEO agency. Opting for a professional ensures you choose the best real estate keywords that are likely to generate qualified traffic.
Start A Blog
A blog is an excellent way to add optimization techniques to your website and offer value to your traffic at the same time. A website blog provides website traffic with valuable real estate information while helping you earn potential clients’ trust.
Creating content that adds value to the buyer or seller’s experience has the potential to drive thousands of website traffic visitors to your website with excellent conversion rates.
Establish Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness with Your Content
Relevant content isn’t enough when you want to rank in real estate. Google frequently updates its algorithms, but one factor that has stayed consistent is a priority toward content that establishes experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (EEAT.)
Google aims to provide its users with the most relevant and valuable search results. Make sure your SEO efforts have a focus on EEAT by publishing content that’s authoritative, valuable, and trustworthy for your website traffic.
Share your credentials, publish new industry research, collaborate with experts, and focus on high-quality link building.
Ensure On-Page SEO Best Practices
On-page real estate SEO involves optimizing your website through:
- Headers: Headers make your website easier to browse, offering users a better user experience.
- Title tags: Title tags help search bots better understand your website’s purpose and intent.
- Meta descriptions: Meta descriptions offer users a brief glimpse into your website’s purpose before clicking on it.
- Optimized images: Optimizing your images describes photos to search engine bots.
- Anchor links: Anchor links tell search engines and users where a link leads them.
- Internal/external links: The use of internal/external links helps transfer organic search results among multiple pages or real estate listings.
- Keywords: The use of relevant keywords ensures search engine algorithms can pick up on the general theme of your website.
Get Quality Backlinks
Backlinks are links leading traffic from other websites back to your own. Backlinks tell Google that your website is trustworthy. They also help increase organic traffic by putting your content and business in front of a new audience.
Backlinks can help real estate agents generate more organic traffic via helpful blogs or referral traffic.
Focus on Technical SEO
Technical SEO covers off-page elements of a website, ensuring that it’s user-friendly, secure, error-free, and easy to navigate. A few of the most important technical factors to integrate into your real estate SEO strategy include:
- Page speed
- XML Sitemap
- Broken links
- Mobile-friendly
- Secure HTTPS
Potential buyers and sellers expect a good website experience. Failing to provide them with this can lead to Google penalties. Penalties result in lower rankings on the search engines.
Make Sure Your Site is Mobile Friendly
Over 70% of homebuyers in 2022 used a mobile phone or tablet to search for properties. This number continues to increase year over year, making a mobile-friendly website important to rank. To generate leads from mobile online traffic, your website should load fast and be easy to navigate on smaller devices.
Local search, on-page, and off-page elements are all important in an SEO strategy. The right SEO strategy has the potential to rank your website at the top of Google search, helping boost your lead generation efforts. Make sure you keep these real estate SEO best practices in mind:
- Complete an SEO audit before beginning any strategy.
- Avoid keyword stuffing.
- Help search engine crawlers access and understand your website through meta descriptions, headers, and title tags.
- Focus on high-quality, valuable content.
- Prioritize a compelling, keyword-driven meta description with each page.
- Optimize images.
- Create a comprehensive linking structure that includes internal and external links, plus backlinks.
- Make local SEO optimization a priority.
- Take advantage of free SEO tools, like Google Search Console or Keyword Planner.
- Optimize your website for both desktop and mobile devices.
- Monitor rankings for each target keyword and adjust as necessary.
From Clicks To Sales
SEO significantly increases the number of clicks on your website. Because SEO generates qualified traffic, those clicks can also easily convert into sales. Google searches continue to be one of the most common ways today’s buyers and sellers find real estate services to represent them.
When you want to be the first real estate agent buyers and sellers in your area come across, SEO is a requirement. A well-optimized website can complement your overall digital marketing strategy, bringing in leads from multiple destinations. Use the increase in traffic to sign more listings, attract buyers, or generate a solid customer base that keeps you in business for many years.
FAQ
What Are the Four Basic Elements of an SEO Strategy?
The four basic elements of a real estate SEO strategy include on-site, off-site, content, and technical. The best-optimized real estate websites include each of these components, including a user-focused website that’s also easy for Google and other search engines to crawl/index.
What Are Some SEO Best Practices for a Real Estate Business?
Some of the best SEO practices for real estate businesses include competitive analysis, keyword research, high-quality content, and a full technical audit.
Real estate workers can also benefit from implementing local practices, such as optimized Google business pages and keyword-focused content based on expected search queries.
Is SEO for Real Estate Expensive?
SEO for real estate is well worth the investment, especially when compared to other marketing methods. SEO is a more long-term strategy, unlike direct mailers or print ads. Even compared to pay-per-click (PPC) or Google ads, an effective SEO strategy continues generating traffic for months and years, making it a cost that continues paying off.
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