The following are tips to improve your real estate SEO and create brand visibility. By improving SEO, it will increase the chances of favorable search rankings for real estate agents to find new clients.
Why Is SEO Critical for Real Estate Agents, Anyway?
The real estate industry is extremely competitive, with many different options available. There are many different types of real estate agents, from those who work for themselves to those who work for large companies with a lot of market share.
An agent’s credibility and authority is solidified when they have a visible online presence. It’s easier for an agent to have a lot of qualified leads than to spend a lot of time looking for new business.
A large majority of people looking for real estate use the internet, and over half of home buyers found their property online.
A Real Estate SEO Strategy Drives & Filters Leads
It is important to add value to your target audience and share educational insights related to your industry as part of any SEO strategy. Your goal is to create content that will improve your search ranking and increase the amount of traffic your website receives.
Some content ideas for real estate agents include videos, live Q&As, or interactive polls. If you share key insights and educational tips, you will answer questions from prospects who are in the awareness and consideration phases. Making that connection early can make all the difference.
The two-fold effect of this is that it establishes brand authority while also increasing the likelihood of qualified leads reaching out. This filters out people who are just casually browsing.
Consider including content that helps filter out people who are not ready to buy, such as these examples of blog posts to write, or website content:
- A blog that provides some questions to help people decide whether they are ready to buy a home or if they should continue renting.
- Content that outlines why it is important to get pre-qualified for a mortgage before contacting a purchasing agent so that they know how much they can afford to spend.
- A blog about, ‘7 Things To Do Before Contacting a Realtor’ that explains getting the pre-work done before a real estate agent gets involved.
This content filters out people who are not interested yet, so that your lead pipeline is not filled with unqualified leads.
Local SEO Helps Prospects to Find Real Estate Agents
It would not be advisable to choose a real estate agent based in Los Angeles if you are looking for property in New York. Probably not.
When people are looking for a real estate agent, they want someone who is qualified, friendly, and has a lot of information about the area they are interested in. A local SEO strategy can have a big impact on a person’s decision-making process, especially when it comes to location-based searches.
It is important to consider what sort of things users are looking for when optimizing a real estate website for search engines. People who are looking for a place to live will often search for a specific type of property in a specific location. It is extremely important for real estate websites to use local SEO tactics.
Google Business Profiles are useful as they allow users to find businesses on demand, which is especially useful when looking for businesses within a close radius.
According to Google, local businesses show up based on:
- A business’s relevance is how well its products or services match a user’s search keywords.
- The distance a business is from the user is important in determining how likely the user is to visit the business.
- Prominence: How well-known a business is. Google uses a number of factors to determine the credibility of a business, one of which is scanning webpages, directories, and other related content. Online reviews are an important part of establishing prominence.
There is no sure way to guarantee that your Google My Business profile will be given a good ranking, but you can make sure that their profile is as complete as possible. If you want to improve your chances of appearing higher in search results, you should focus on this.
Real Estate SEO Increases Awareness and Brand Authority
If you are unknown, it won’t matter how much of an expert you are in the real estate industry.
Real Estate SEO Strategies You Should Know
1. Start With an SEO Audit
Before you start working on an SEO strategy, it’s a good idea to do an SEO audit to find out where your website currently stands. If it is difficult for search engines to access your site, it will be difficult to achieve a high ranking.
An SEO audit is a website assessment that looks for broken links, outdated content, or slow-loading web pages. It’s frustrating for a prospective buyer to go to a real estate website, find a property they’re interested in, and then get an error message.
Other tactics to measure site health include evaluating:
- Webpage loading times
- Mobile-friendliness and user experience
- or is simply outdated (e.g., no longer accurate). It is essential to periodically review the website content.
In order to improve your local SEO, you should make sure that your Google My Business profile is up-to-date and accurate, including their name, address, and phone number.
If you have property listings on your website, it’s a good idea to set things up so that the listings are pulled from a database or other source, rather than being hard-coded into the site. That way, if the listings change (for example, if the price or availability changes), the changes will be reflected on your website automatically. This will ensure accuracy and up-to-date content.
Adding your own personal touch to property listings can help your clients feel more invested in the process. If you want to win the SEO race, don’t just post the same content about a house that’s already available on multiple other websites.
2. Use Analytics to Assess Performance
This data will help you understand what is happening with your real estate SEO. If you want to get a better understanding of which pages and content on your real estate website are performing the best, you should set up a Google Analytics account.
Especially look at information about your local, and target market. This will help you understand what is most important to their potential customers.
It might be a good idea to send a monthly task of looking at your Google Analytics to keep an eye on any major changes that could require an adjustment to your SEO strategy.
3. Provide Online Real Estate Tools
Although these tools cannot replace human interaction, they give users a fairly accurate idea of what to expect during their home-buying journey.
This allows you to sort leads more efficiently while also getting useful information from them. The app also provides users with suggested property options and a more defined budget, which can save time for both the user and your client.
Here are 3 examples of online real estate tools that add value to a real estate website:
Mortgage Calculator
This tool calculates how much you will need for a down payment and the interest rate on a given property price. Remember that this is just a rough estimate, and the actual rate you get from a lender could be different. You will occasionally need to check lending rates for any significant changes or updates.
Property Valuation Tool
This tool can be useful for a real estate website that wants to provide value to clients who are selling their properties. It provides an on-demand estimate and streams the prospective client closer to the conversion stage.
You’ll want to do an occasional check for any changes in valuation estimates, similar to how you would with a mortgage calculator.
Virtual Neighborhood Tours
People often move to different cities or states when they relocate. A virtual tour of your client services area can give them useful information on local shopping, attractions, schools, neighborhood features, and more.
4. Optimize Your Website for Mobile Use
It is not surprising that 76% of homebuyers used a mobile or tablet search device in their home search given the abundance of online real estate listings.
This means that you should make sure your real estate client’s website can be easily viewed on a mobile device, since many potential clients are out and about and want to be able to look up property information whenever they want.
Make sure your website’s images don’t take too long to load, especially for contact forms. This can be a dealbreaker for someone who’s interested in your site.
5. Make Hyper-local Neighborhood, Condo and Subdivision Real Estate Website Pages
The primary goal of most real estate agents’ and brokers’ websites is to be found by people living in the same area who are interested in buying property. Typically, you are not trying to rank nationally.
It is important to create pages for all neighborhoods, condos, and subdivisions that you want to have a good ranking for.
National real estate websites rank highly for the very competitive keywords such as real estate, homes for sale, real estate agent, realtor, and condos for sale. It is not effective for local real estate agents and brokers to compete for the same big keywords.
If you have intimate knowledge about your local real estate market and neighborhoods, you can use that to your advantage when writing about the area. Develop yourself as the local real estate expert.
6. Don’t Forget About Social Media for Good SEO
While it’s important to focus on one area, remember that SEO encompasses more than that. To get more people to visit your site, you need to promote it through social media. The best part is free.
The majority of real estate agents and brokers have pages on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and YouTube. If you do not have Web pages showcasing your work, you need to create them as soon as you can.
Google does not include all social media sites in its search engine, but people still visit these sites.
Social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram are becoming increasingly popular places for people to search for homes for sale and for realtors to find new clients.
Real estate professionals should be using Instagram to advertise their businesses to millennials. Instagram users aged 35 and over are more likely to purchase homes and condos than any other age group.
Realtors are also using Snapchat as a fast up-and-coming social media network. This is a platform that is mainly used by millennials.
Posting Homes for Sale on Facebook
There is more to Facebook than just posting your listings or recent blog posts on your personal page or business page. You can also use Facebook to create targeted ads, boost posts, and even create a Facebook group.
A lot of realtors don’t know about a great technique for marketing their listings: posting them on Facebook groups. This technique is executed by participating in community events like garage sales, local real estate groups, and forming your own neighborhood groups.
The best part about creating a group is that you’ll be in control. You choose what gets posted and what doesn’t.
Your Facebook Business Page should have a good mixture of local events, photos, and interesting stories, and general real estate news. Plus, your blog posts and any testimonials from happy clients.
