In this blog, we’ll review some of the key strategies that you can use to improve the real estate content on your website. Although these ideas can be applied to many different types of real estate pages, they will be especially helpful when used on a WordPress site. We will begin with broad concepts and then go into more specific details to ensure that you will know exactly what you should be doing from this point forward!
What is Real Estate SEO?
If you owned a real estate company in the 1990s and wanted to generate leads to your listings, your first port of call would have been newspaper ads. Today, a large majority of prospective home buyers are online and looking for information and guidance about their home purchases.
You need to ask yourself if your website or business content is appearing on search engine results pages for searches made by potential home buyers. If not, you need real estate SEO (Search Engine Optimization)!
Real estate SEO is a way to get your business listings in front of people who are interested in them. It can be used to increase the number of people selling their home and it can be used to find more interested buyers.
Let’s explore ways you can get started with making your real estate business more visible on Google.
What Does SEO Mean in Real Estate?
The main goal of SEO is to improve your ranking in search engines for relevant keywords through keyword research.
A prospective home buyer who wants to sell their house quickly in Colorado can search Google for advice on how to do so. People who are searching for this are likely to be good leads for your business if you are based in Colorado. Wouldn’t it be great to capture their contact information?
Well, with targeted real estate SEO you can. You need to make sure your website is optimized for the keyword associated with real estate searches in your area. Once you have completed a thorough SEO campaign, your website should appear near the top of the search results.
How Does Real Estate SEO Work?
Contrary to popular belief, the internet is not as complicated as it seems. Search engines can be thought of as libraries. This is helpful because it allows you to understand how search engines organize information and how they can be used to find the information you need.
When you ask Google something, it searches its databases for the answer. You can find the most relevant information for your search by running a quick search through its index.
It is difficult to search billions of pages and only return the best and most relevant content to the searcher in a couple of seconds. This means that every day, Google will answer approximately 2 trillion questions.
Multiple search engines are constantly active, looking for new real estate listings. They are always searching for content that will be valuable to their audience so that they will keep coming back. The search engines archive pages that it deems to be high-quality and files them under a category. In this case, the category is real estate.
There are lots of things that help the search engine figure out what your website is about, not just keywords. These include: how recent your content is, how trustworthy it is, what screen size people are using, how fast your website loads, and whether your business is local.
What we mean is that Search Engine Optimization is not just about increasing the amount of people who visit your website. It is about increasing the amount of people from your target audience who visit your website and take an action, such as buying something or subscribing to a service. Having a successful real estate career is what you should aim for.
SEO is a good marketing and lead generation strategy because it is organic, cheap, and sustainable.
Fundamentals
1) Provide Value
You should always think about how you can provide value to your readers when adding new content to blog posts or content to pages to your website. Once you have determined this, the keywords will come naturally.
2) Easy to Navigate
When creating a website, you should have a clean menu, plenty of whitespace, and clear calls to action. This will make your site more user-friendly and help guide your visitors to take the actions you want them to. When creating a page or post, you should ensure that all the content is arranged in an organized manner. This will ensure that your reader can easily follow your train of thought. Use sub-headings to break up your text and make it easier for your reader to follow your train of thought. If you want your images to be aligned, make sure to put them on either the left or right side, and don’t just put them anywhere.
3) Responsive
Many people will be viewing your site from a non-desktop device, such as an iPad, smartphone, or tablet. It is important to make sure that your site is responsive, so that the content is well-displayed on any device.
4) Keyword Targeting
Having a keyword focus is important, even if you don’t know what specific keywords you want to target. You want to provide value and make sure your content sounds genuine, but you also need to understand which keywords to use to make your content rank well.
On-Page Elements
1) Header Tags
When it comes to WordPress, your title will automatically be in an H1 tag when you add a post or page. Subheading tags, like H2 or H3, can be added to content in the visual editor for extra organization.
If you’re creating a page, the title should consist of your keywords and summarize the singular focus of the page. The title and heading tags are important places to include your keywords if you want your website to be successful.
In an ideal piece of content, you would have additional heading tags and additional sections. This would help to break up the text and make it easier to read. The title of the page may be something like ‘School Information for the WordPress Real Estate Market’. Your sub-heading should accurately describe the paragraph that follows it.
Keep your writing style consistent throughout your post or page. To ensure your sub-heading is relevant to the paragraph it accompanies, make sure the keywords you use relate to the topic of the paragraph.
2) Page URL
The URL of your page will typically just be the title of your post in WordPress. What we want to focus on is the part that comes after ‘yourdomain.com’ When creating a website, it is important to have keywords in the Page URL so that the page comes up in a search engine. Having keywords in the title will help ensure that this happens. If you have a long page title, you may want to consider shortening the URL. For example, if our page title was ‘Overview of the WordPress Real Estate Market’, we could shorten the URL to ‘/wordpress-real-estate/’ or ‘/wordpress-real-estate-market/’. You want a shorter URL.
3) Organic Copy
This is original content that provides value. Many agents stuff as many keywords into their content as possible instead of writing for readers. Your content should be easy to read, and sound like it was written naturally. There is a way to use keywords effectively, and there is a way to not use them at all.
To use keywords effectively, integrate them into your content in a way that sounds natural. If you stuff your website with too many keywords, Google will remove it from its search engine. If someone visits your site and it works, they’ll still leave quickly if your writing is bad. You should use keywords throughout your content, but don’t overdo it. You want to avoid having the same keyword appear in your text too frequently. Flags will be set off again and nobody will read it.
4) Optimized Photos
With WordPress, this is very easy. When you add a photo to your website, you can also add a title and alt description. It’s important to include keywords in these descriptions, but make sure that the photo is relevant to the keywords.
Captions are also a great way to get keywords into your content.
5) Social Share
If you have high-quality content, people will want to share it, and you’ll want to make sure your website has Facebook Like, Twitter Tweet This, and Google +1 buttons. It is not only important to share your content on social media, but it is also seen as a vote of confidence by search engines. If you get a lot of people liking your site or your content, it will help your site rank higher in search engines. It is generally seen as a good thing to have likes on your social media content.
6) Inter-linking
Do you ever notice when you’re reading a blog post or someone’s page and there are certain words that are hyperlinked and those hyperlinks go to another page on their site that has content that is relevant to what was linked?
External linking to other sites is considered a good signal by search engines because it shows that your site is connected to others. It’s important to include links to other content in your text so readers can easily find related information. This is not only good for search engines, but also from a usability standpoint.
Internal linking to other pages or blog posts on your website is excellent for SEO also, and provides additional value to the reader. The link between pages on a website is not only beneficial to search engines but also to users.
For all links, ensure they are set to open in a separate tab, so as not to replace the existing page they are on, or to take them away from your website!
7) Meta Data
We recommend using the WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast to help improve your website’s search engine optimization. Some people think that the meta title and meta description have some impact on SEO, but this is not the case. Google definitely used to count keywords in the title tag for rankings, but they don’t anymore. Although keywords in the title tag are still somewhat important for SERPS (search engine results pages) from a clickability perspective.
If a meta title and description are not set, Google will use the post title and a summary of the content to create a description. So if the first paragraph doesn’t accurately represent the rest of the post, the reader may choose to read another paragraph instead. From a standpoint of making the page more likely to be clicked on in a search, it may make sense to change the title tag and description for a page or post, so it comes up when someone searches for that keyword.
You can improve your website’s clickability by tweaking the meta title and meta description.
8) Google Authorship
If you have a Google+ profile, you may have noticed that your photo and name appear under search results occasionally.
Google authorship is great – not only is it considered a social indicator, so it’s another reason for Google to trust your content, but it also improves click-thru rates. So if people see 5 articles in their search results, and they see one of them was written by someone where they see their photo and their name, it’s going to catch their attention and be much more likely clicked on.
