Let’s think about a situation. Imagine! You are on holiday on a quiet weekend when you hear a loud noise.
BOOM!!!
“What’s that?” you start thinking.
You get up from your couch and find that a kitchen pipe has burst and it’s leaking water.
Now, you need to fix it asap. So, if you can’t do it yourself – you’ll need a plumber to fix it immediately!
How would you fix your leakage if you don’t know a plumber and have no recommendation from someone you trust?
In that case, you would pull out your phone or laptop and start searching online for plumbers near you or contractors in your local area.
You are not alone in using this approach.
Data shows that 97% of all consumers start with an online search when looking for a local business.
This is how a local company or experts can drive customers into their business or sell their services digitally.
This online money-making opportunity isn’t limited to plumbers only. This digital business opportunity is available for anyone selling their products or service online.
Similarly, if you own a Real Estate Agency or property. In that case, your customers are people in your local area who’ve rented their property or looking to sell their property.
Nowadays, people turn to search engines instead of newspapers to see the available options when they need a real-estate service.
They are searching on Google, which now gets 75% of all search engine traffic globally and 90% of all mobile search engine traffic.
That means your real estate business or services need to show up online even to be considered an option.
I bet you want to be showing up in the “organic searches” instead of paid ones. Out of all the online searches, organic searches get 70% of all the visitors, while paid ones get 30% of traffic only.
If you’re not showing up in top results, you miss out on your place and give money away to your competitors. That’s a fact!
Let’s stop leaving your money on the table, and that’s why I designed this real estate SEO guide for you.
With digital real estates marketplaces like Redfin and Zillow, now more and more businesses are moving online. But having a social presence or website is not enough on its own.
Make sure your listings are on the top of search engine results when potential customers start their online search. For that purpose, you need a solid SEO strategy.
So, let’s dive into real estate SEO is and how you can leverage SEO for your real estate agency.
What is real estate SEO?
Real estate SEO is a way to optimize your online content to attract potential customers through organic reach. It is not like paid online advertising, for example, Google Ads. Instead, you can optimize content for search engines, including website content, social media posts, and mobile apps.
Keep in mind that search engine optimization is a long-term or slow strategy, so never expect overnight results.
Instead, look at real estate SEO as a way to improve your business targets in the future.
Many companies pour their SEO efforts into Google rankings only, ignoring the fact that Google is not the only search engine tool.
Yahoo and Microsoft Bing are well-known search engines with 3% and 5% market share, respectively. Both of these search engines mean less traffic than Google, but the biggest advantage is less competition. Furthermore, it means you have more chances of being on the top at ranking on Yahoo and Bing.
Real Estate SEO Benefits
More and more real estate owners invest in SEO because digital ranking is critical for the success of a real estate business. Here are 3 main benefits to start building your SEO strategy.
- Increase traffic and revenue
- Boost brand awareness
- Improve brand protection
11 Real estate SEO tips
With so much information out there, let me help you build your real estate SEO strategy.
Here are 11 actionable SEO tips.
SEO Competitors Analysis
Once you know your industry competitors, you will need to run a competitor analysis to determine who you are competing with. When you find out your SEO competitors, analyze what kind of content they are publishing and how it is going so far? What’s the structure of their web pages? Learn and study from their mistakes and wins; now build your strong SEO strategy.
Keyword research
To rank your real estate business on the top of search engines, you need to find out the keywords your potential customers are typing in when they start their property search. Conducting the keyword research is the most important step, and the success of your entire SEO campaign depends on conducting effective keyword research. And it starts with brainstroming and putting yourself in your customers shoes. During your search need to analyze which of these keywords are reachable, depending on competition and search volume.
Long-tail keywords
A good SEO keyword does not always mean low competition or a high search volume. A long-tail keyword is specific and contains 3 or more words with low search volume. Although long-tail keywords are much less competitive. So, if you find a relevant real estate long-tail keyword, you can more easily dominate search engine rankings.
Craft Quality Content
Being a real estate owner, your main goal of SEO should be to help customers find relevant information on your website. We all know content is king in SEO. To optimize, target a specific keyword for each web page, but avoid stuffing and fluffing the content with this keyword.
Technical Audit of Your Website
To start a successful real estate SEO, first of all, perform a technical audit of your website. Look for the following elements on your website;
- Response codes 404, 401, 410, 503, 505
- Internal linking, orphan pages, and Website structure
- Hreflang and canonical tags issues
- Duplicate content and duplicate URLs issues
- txt file setup and XML sitemaps
- SSL certification (Web security)
- Harmful backlinks (Negative SEO)
Prioritize solving crawling and indexing issues
After your audit your website, fix the problems that affect crawling and indexing. You can have the best Real-estate agency in the world, but if it’s not getting crawled and indexed by Google or other search engines, it will never bring you revenue.
Following issues can affect the crawlability of your site;
- Broken links,
- Outdated URLs,
- A missing or inaccurate sitemap,
- Duplicate pages
- Slow load speed
Local SEO (Google My Business Listings)
Locals must know where to find you online and how to get in touch with you. To do this, never miss out Google My Business listings and optimize them to appear in search engines for the right locations.
Real Estate Agents Schema Markup
Structured data or Schema markup is code you add to HTML of your website. This code helps search engines read the information more accurately on your website and help potential customers find the info they’re looking for.
Local Backlinks/Referrals to Your Real Estate Site
In the non-digital world, referrals play the best part in scaling up your business. Just like referrals, local backlinks help validate your local authority. It is a link from another local website or online source to your website. A local backlink will help drive referral traffic with relevant leads and conversions to your site.
KPIs for Real Estate SEO
To check the success of your real estate SEO plan, you need to set clear KPIs and goals that are relevant to your business needs.
Here are the following KPIs you can potentially track:
- Increased Google rankings for your real estate business
- Increased Google traffic
- Increased Google impressions
- Increased number of page views per user session
- Improved click-through rate (CTR)
- Improved time on page
- Increased interactions with your Google My Business Listings
- Improved conversion rate
- Reduced bounce rate
- Soft conversions and leads
Optimize to make your Real Estate Website Mobile Friendly
People nowadays prefer searching from their mobile phones, therefore, it is important that your website is mobile-friendly and optimized for users. If the mobile bots cannot easily crawl your website, rankings of your site will badly suffer.
Here are some ways to improve the mobile experience of your customers;
- Improve page speed
- Ensure your website’s design adapts well to phone screen sizes and tablets.
Bottom Line
A recent study by Outbrain showed that organic search drives 300% more traffic than social media.
Moreover, a Twitter poll conducted by Search Engine Journal showed that 49% of marketers said that organic search brings the highest ROI out of any digital marketing channel.
This data proves that SEO works to increase traffic and bring more revenues. But, remember! SEO is a bit slow and long-term game. To show your desired results, it can take months.
So, fasten your seat belts as you won’t get an instant return on investment. But, with time and consistency, you can reach millions of visitors across the globe.
Please let us know how you are planning for your real estate SEO?
Focus Keyword: Real Estate SEO
