Running a business in real estate is not for the faint of heart due to the fierce competition over listings. Everyone, from solo initiatives with limited funding to huge multinational enterprises, share a common goal, i.e., to boost their visibility and acquire the best real estate listings.
Your competitors are the businesses operating in the same area as you, and depending on your hyper-local region, the competition can be intense, even among smaller businesses. However, adopting SEO strategies can significantly improve your chances of success, assuming you know what you are getting yourself into!
Why SEO?
About 84% of all real estate customers use the internet to look for properties, which perfectly illustrates the importance of SEO for any real estate business. The goal is to increase exposure for your business over the search engine. You can leverage the power of real estate SEO strategies to discover countless new leads and optimize conversions.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most effective means of gaining online visibility. After all, why wouldn’t you want your business to rank well on the search results whenever potential buyers do localized property searches? However, you can forget about getting anything near that kind of exposure for your real estate website without investing in search engine optimization.
SEO for Real Estate Websites
Optimizing your website for search engines can increase its visibility in organic search results, bringing in more visitors and potential customers. Investing in effective SEO may enhance your business’s visibility across many channels, raise brand awareness, generate organic leads, and boost ROI and conversion rates.
Today we’ll be looking at SEO tips and tricks you can employ to boost your search engine rankings and gain an edge over your competitors – continue reading to find out.
Tips for Local and Organic SEO
For real estate websites, location is everything. And with SEO, your goal is to rank well in local searches and search results for other geographic locations. Real estate SEO employs various SEO strategies, predominantly local SEO, to optimize websites for relevant queries.
Effective SEO requires familiarity with user search behavior, Google’s query processing, and implementing best website design practices that enhance user experience. The following tips can help you achieve the best results without over-complicating stuff.
1. Conduct SEO audit
Identifying the pain points of your current website is fundamental to implementing effective SEO. An SEO audit does exactly that by pinpointing areas you need to improve. Even though the audit can be time-consuming, it can help you measure progress and define a strategy.
Your site ranking, organic traffic, and conversion rates can help you understand what areas to target. Generally, you need to focus on optimizing the site and page structure, content, links, and usability to boost online exposure and get more traffic.
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2. Define a strategy
Once you have completed the audit, it’s time to define a strategy to handle all the issues identified in the audit. Adopting a systematic planning approach ensures nothing is missed. After you’ve resolved the issues, it’s time to focus on overall website optimization.
Focus on keyword research, implement SEO-friendly URLs, and optimize the page title, images, page load speed, content, meta descriptions, click-through-rates, and bounce rate. Work on internal and external links, site redirects, and site structure, and replace any broken links.
3. Ensure site-wide ADA compliance
Make sure your website is accessible to everyone, regardless of disability. For example, even though visually impaired individuals may benefit from screen readers, it won’t do much for the overall site experience. If the website is designed without consideration for accessibility, the overall user experience is bound to suffer.
Since the ADA was enacted before the internet was widely accessible, many people don’t consider how it pertains to online content. Businesses across the board need to ensure ADA compliance, but real estate brokers are particularly vulnerable because of the nature of their work.
4. Mobile optimization
Mobile devices account for almost 60% of worldwide internet traffic. Hence, your website must work well on mobile devices and tablets to satisfy Google and prospective customers. The most crucial elements of mobile optimization include ensuring a responsive design, simple navigation, and optimum page load speed.
Responsive design improves site usability by adapting your website to match any device screen. Furthermore, fast website performance is vital for ensuring a good user experience because a long site load time may disinterest a user, and they may leave to locate a site with a better user experience.
Keep things simple as user engagement drops down precipitously the more user must browse to get to their goal. Minify code, optimize site images, and use an emulator to test how your website looks on various devices.
5. List your website on relevant directories
Local SEO thrives on local listings. Having your site listed in as many locations as possible with consistent business information ensures better visibility and engagement. For starters, complete or update your Google My Business profile. Fill out as much information as possible, and don’t forget to add relevant images, videos, and data. Doing the same to other local directories can help you maximize exposure and rank well on the search results.
6. Publish a website blog
You may increase your website’s visibility in search results by including a blog on it and optimizing it for specific keywords.
For a small business, producing the same amount of content as larger corporations requires some careful prioritization. A well-rounded blog will include informational articles about the neighborhoods you handle, such as lifestyles, social spaces, cost of living, etc., and visual content, such as house tours, live streams, infographics, etc.
7. Adopt a well-structured schema
The use of structured data markup, also known as schema, enables Google and other search engines to get further insight into the nature of the content present on your website.
If you want your website to show rich snippets in search results, you will need to integrate this functionality wherever it is feasible. Your site’s architecture will decide the approach you choose. Consult an SEO expert if you don’t know what to do.
Actionable Techniques For Effective On-Page And Off-Page SEO
On-Page SEO
To optimize your site’s search engine rankings, you need to focus on onsite SEO, which includes everything within your control. An essential part of on-site SEO is addressing the site’s technical credentials, such as load time, mobile friendliness, encryption, and other aspects of technical SEO.
1. Keyword research and analysis
Real estate SEO relies heavily on location-specific keywords. Get your website to the top of search engine results for your desired audience by optimizing it for real estate via a proper set of relevant keywords. Therefore, it is essential to choose relevant target keywords for your website.
Enter the primary keyword to receive long-tail keywords. Next, choose the keywords most relevant to your real estate firm and audience. Check keyword competition and query volumes. Whether you know how well these keywords compete, you’ll know if they’ll produce enough organic traffic to be lucrative.
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Once you’ve chosen the proper keywords, integrate them into your website content. The objective is to provide context for search engines on the nature of your website and its contents. Also, incorporate these keywords into your page’s title, Meta description, and URL. Google penalizes websites that misuse keywords to increase SEO. A tip: write for readers, not keywords.
2. Segment your keywords
Simply choosing your keywords is insufficient. To utilize them effectively to improve real estate SEO, it is necessary to divide them up into the appropriate categories.
Segmenting your keywords can help you better satisfy the search intent of your users, who have a specific goal in mind when they perform an online search.
Real estate businesses who wish to increase SEO must understand consumer search intent as it helps you create relevant, helpful content. You can use your keywords more effectively if you separate them according to user interests.
3. Create a well-structured website
Website structure is vital for on-page real estate SEO. Search engine crawlers will have trouble discovering newer updates on websites with convoluted structures, resulting in lower visibility.
Moreover, it will impact the site experience of both search engine bots and human visitors, making it challenging to find the information they desire. Lastly, page structure is just as important as the website’s overall structure.
5. Enhance page load speed
Website page load speed significantly affects real estate search engine optimization. After all, SEO for real estate is optimizing the site’s usability and experience. Internet search engines put considerable effort into directing visitors to be authoritative and useful websites.
Furthermore, Google gives more weight to websites that offer useful content and create a positive user experience. Hence, poor load speed translates to a poor site experience for the user and Google crawler, so Google never ranks a website with a slow load speed.
6. Ensure website responsiveness
Google encourages mobile-friendly websites and ranks them higher even for desktop search results. Adapting to mobile devices is crucial for better site ranking and visibility.
Furthermore, when building a mobile-friendly website, it is essential to pick a suitable hosting provider, website design, theme, and content structure that work together cohesively.
7. Add Internal Links
Any real estate SEO strategy should prioritize building strong internal links. They make your site easier to navigate and increase users’ time there. You can deter bounce rates by making users spend more time on your website via easy navigation between various site sections with internal links.
However, it isn’t the only benefit internal links bring to the table regarding real estate SEO. They improve page discovery. Including internal links helps search engine crawlers discover fresh content on your site. This expedites the process by which search engines index your content.
Off-Page SEO
Link-building, the foundation of off-site SEO, is all factors that affect your site’s visibility but cannot be changed directly on the site itself. These include social media channels, high-authority websites, external blogs with links to your website, guest posts, brand mentions, etc.
Off-site SEO involves more effort and commitment, including developing social media posts and collaborating with other content creators to promote your website.
1. Creating valuable backlinks
The cornerstone of off site SEO strategy is the generation of high-quality inbound links that adhere to the standards set by Google and other major search engines. In Google’s algorithm, the quality and quantity of backlinks play the most crucial role in determining a site’s average rating. A site with more backlinks will be ranked higher than one with fewer or no backlinks.
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If the linking site has a high domain authority (DA), that link will carry more weight than if you link with a site with lower domain authority. Google’s algorithm also examines link relevance to your domain. Your site’s credibility as a source of information will increase because of quality link building, which offers a higher ranking.
2. Invest in social media marketing
Using social networking sites is a powerful off-page SEO strategy. You can significantly increase your exposure by building an online presence on social media and sharing relevant content on your social profiles. Social networking could be an essential source of sourcing quality backlinks from high-authority sites, which can drive organic traffic to your newest post.
3. Guest posts
You can also reap the advantages of an Off-site SEO strategy via another successful internet marketing strategy: providing guest content to other websites. You should carefully seek out other websites, including specialized online trade journals that share your target demographic. By doing so, you will be able to reach a broader audience and also have a better chance of generating referral traffic from their site. Naturally, you’ll get a boost in traffic and rankings from the backlink.
4. Create local listings
Local search engine optimization, or directory listings, has long been a reliable off-page SEO strategy. Local listing filings can significantly impact your company’s income, credibility, and search engine rankings, especially at a hyper-local level for location-specific searches. Localized search results are specific to the user’s geographic location or IP address.
SEO Tools and Resources
1. Keyword research tools
Keyword research is crucial for any SEO strategy as it indicates how well you rank for specific search terms, which keywords are the easiest to rank for, and the keywords currently used by your competitors. Instead of relying on blind estimates about what your target audience may be searching for on the web, use keyword research tools to get that information with surety.
You can utilize tools like Semrush, Google Keyword Planner, and KWFinder for keyword analysis and research.
2. Google Analytics
It’s a handy tool that you can use to find out which pages on your website aren’t performing well. Google Analytics (GA) provides various metrics you can use to track and improve your website performance. For example, you can track your Return on Investments and learn more about your customer base via GA.
3. Yoast
The best SEO plugin for WordPress. It controls technical SEO, helps you enhance essential on-page features, examines the readability of your content, generates personalized site structures, and checks for broken links
4. Structured data testing tool
It mirrors how Google perceives the schema of your webpage. It’s a validator for all Google services that rely on structured data. It provides markup support for the JSON-LD syntax, especially for dynamic websites. Once you have defined a schema, you can use this tool to validate its correctness.
5. Google Search Console
It verifies exactly how Google interprets your content, gets information about links, analyzes link data, and gives insight regarding website performance in Google search results.
Using its handy reports, you can keep tabs on your site’s search engine performance, errors, crawling issues, and warnings.
6. Mobile-friendly test tool
Your website host, design, and structure should work for all mobile devices. The test tool verifies your website is optimized for responsive navigation and scrolling on mobile and tablets. It helps you ensure the mobile-friendliness of your website and provides a list of all the issues that require fixing.
7. PageSpeed Insights (PSI)
PSI gives information on how well a website renders on different devices and suggests ways to enhance the user experience. It offers both laboratory and field information on a given page. Since lab data is obtained under stringent conditions, it is easier to pinpoint the source of performance difficulties.
8. Lighthouse
Lighthouse is a comprehensive set of testing tools integrated with Google Chrome and offers insight regarding technical SEO features for mobile devices and usability. You can get instant access to this feature by adding a simple extension to Chrome.
9. Yext
With Yext, you get easy and seamless access to the largest data aggregators. You can now upload or update company details and have them automatically sent to any missing directories and update information in the most relevant ones.
Conclusion
Even though the real estate industry is highly competitive, you still have a chance to catch up and surpass your competitors. With these SEO strategies in place, you can easily outrank your competition in the area.
Investing in the right SEO technique can allow you to even go against the big players within the industry. To avoid making rookie mistakes, getting advice from or employing a professional SEO service might be a better option.