If you’re a real estate agent, you probably dream of having lots of high-quality leads from your local area coming in automatically, without you having to do any cold-calling or meeting with unqualified prospects. And of course, more revenue would be nice too. So how can you make this dream a reality? The answer is to make sure you have real estate SEO (Search Engine Optimization) sorted out. This means making sure you appear high up in the results on Google when people search for the types of services you offer. Today, around 90% of home buyers use the internet to search for properties, so if you can master real estate SEO and learn how to work well with the search engine, you’ll be in a great position to succeed in the real estate business.
The best thing about real estate SEO is that it’s always working, even when you’re not. You don’t need to make calls, buy ads, or go door to door to generate leads; real estate SEO does it all for you, day and night. If you’re ready to get off the lead generation hamster wheel, this guide will show you exactly what you need to do to rank highly in your local market.
Let’s jump in.
What Is Real Estate SEO?
Search engine optimization for real estate boils down to users searching online for properties, and you showing up in their search results. A strong search presence could be the reason your real estate agency is the most in-demand in town, or lack of investment in SEO could leave you in obscurity.
If your customers are looking for a property, they will probably search on Google using their budget and location criteria to find the perfect fit.
If you are one of the first three searches, you will get traffic, leads, and sales.
Having a website is no longer enough to be successful. With more businesses moving online, the competition is higher than ever. Not only do you have to worry about your organic SERP results, but you also have to compete with your competitor’s paid advertisements. If you want to be a real estate SEO expert, you have your work cut out for you.
Why Is Real Estate Seo Important For Agents, Realtors, And Investors
If you optimize your real estate business for SEO, you will find that potential customers are more likely to come to you instead of you having to go out and find them. Having people come to your website and leave their personal information is incredibly valuable, and can lead to lasting partnerships.
Effective real estate SEO brings huge benefits to businesses that come down to:
Brand Awareness
If you can get your real estate firm’s website to show up in the top three search results on Google, you will get a lot more business. People tend to click on the first three results when they use Google, and if your firm is visible there, you will get more brand awareness and new and recurring customers.
More Traffic
People know that the first results on their search queries are paid ads. They have been trained over time to avoid ads and look for organic pages that guarantee quality content. Today, SEO organic results exceed paid ads by 25%. That is why SEO is your best option for generating more clicks. More traffic leads to more valuable actions, such as users following you on social media or sharing your content with friends.
More Leads
If people have a good experience on your landing page and they see that you have valuable information to offer, they will want to stay in touch. So they might fill out a contact form with their personal information and wait for you to call them. Maybe they’ll subscribe to your newsletter and wait for your tips and insights. Or maybe they’ll find your phone number on your website and give you a call.
More conversions
SEO is the best way to get people to buy your product. With users avoiding paid ads, organic SEO outperforms other marketing tactics and brings excellent conversion rates that work passively.
Higher ROI
The ROI, or return on investment, is an important metric to use in order to measure the performance of your SEO campaigns. Without ROI data, it is difficult to estimate how much revenue your SEO efforts are generating. Generally speaking, ROI is high for SEO campaigns that focus on organic traffic, as these are the types of campaigns where customers are actively searching for your services online.
Market Authority
The last, and arguably most important, reason that websites appearing in the first search results on Google are important is that they are perceived as market leaders and authorities. This means that you need to create content – be it blog posts, product descriptions, or media – that users will want to consult, and that other websites will want to link to. It might take some time and effort to achieve these rankings and this level of authority, but it will be worth it in the end.
Is SEO good for Realtors?
Since there are so many businesses vying for a limited amount of space on search engine results pages, it has become very competitive for brokers and agents who want to optimize their website for better search engine ranking.
It is no longer sufficient to merely create a real estate website and publish quality content. If you want your website to rank for important keywords that will generate leads, you need to have a realtor SEO strategy.
What Are The Different Methods Of Applying Real Estate SEO Marketing? A Four-Step Process.
We think that real estate SEO is definitely worth it. And as far as methods go, there are quite a few that you can use to improve your real estate business’s SEO. You can start by Optimizing your website for SEO, which includes things like making sure your website’s content is keyword-rich and informative. You can also create backlinks to your website from other reputable websites. Lastly, you can use social media to promote your website and its content. All of these methods will help improve your website’s SEO and, in turn, help you attract more clients.
If you want to be ahead of your competition in the SEO world, pay attention to the three facets below. Along with some tips and best practices, you can become the next real estate SEO expert.
Step 1: Real Estate Keyword Research
Tools for keyword research and competition analysis
According to real estate SEO experts, keyword research is essential for high rankings. Keywords are the words or phrases that users type into search engines when they are looking for something. Therefore, a keyword list should be your priority.
You need to find out what terms potential customers use to search for your business, and then use that same vocabulary in your content and on your website. This will bring in higher-quality leads.
To improve your property’s SEO, use a free tool like Google Keyword Planner to find out which keywords are most commonly searched and have the highest ranking.
A search for “buy villa in Greece” reveals a number of potential keywords to target, as well as some trends that may be worth investing in. For example, it appears that people are interested in buying villas in Crete and Mykonos, so a real estate firm that focuses on those areas could get high rankings and meet high demand.
There are many other real estate SEO tools available if you want more advanced results, such as Search Console (free), Ahrefs, Ubersuggest, SEMrush, or SEO Scout. Most of these tools have free versions as well. Be sure to write down all the keywords you identify on a spreadsheet or export them through the tools so everything is in one place.
Tools that you have to pay for provide more detailed information about profitable keywords, like how often they are searched and how difficult it is to get them to show up in search results. It’s important to use different versions of the keyword, like “NY apartments for rent” and “NY apartments.”
SEO Scout is an example of a company that uses machine learning to provide keyword suggestions based on a core topic. For example, if you were to search for “Brooklyn apartments”, some of the suggested keywords that SEO Scout might provide would be “affordable Brooklyn apartments” or “luxury Brooklyn apartments”.
A goldmine of keywords. Beautiful, right?
Search Intent
Depending on your business, you could be targeting one or more of these categories. You should also consider search intent when doing your real estate SEO keyword research. There are four main types of search intent: informational, navigational, commercial, and transactional. People use informational searches when they want to learn something; navigational searches are used when people are looking for a specific website; commercial searches are used when people are comparing products or services; and transactional searches are used when people are ready to buy something. Depending on your business, you may want to target one or more of these categories.
A user who types “buy a villa in California” is looking to buy a property in California, while a user who types “how to buy a villa” is looking for information on buying a property. You can use local SEO to create localized content to rank for relevant queries in that area.
The type of content you serve to your prospects should be based on what they are searching for. If you are trying to rank for an informational search, you will find that it is very difficult to rank for a term like “how to buy a villa”. You will be competing against the big companies for this term.
Use this keyword for an extensive blog post that offers the information users are looking for. However, when buyers are searching for buying a villa in California, you want to serve the relevant landing pages of your website that’ll lead to transactions.
Types of keywords
As we move from hyperlocal (very broad) to local (very specific location-based), the buying intent becomes stronger.
Some examples of hyperlocal keywords that could be used in real estate listings are “luxury,” “2 bed,” and “pool.”
Some common types of keywords used in real estate are “for sale,” “cheap,” “buy,” “sell home,” and “find real estate agent.” Another type of keyword is a location, such as a city, island, or region.
The idea of the keyword pyramid is to target all these kinds of keywords to improve your website ranking. There are three types of keywords mentioned in the text, which are primary keywords, secondary keywords, and longtail keywords. Primary keywords are more generic, while secondary keywords are more specific. Longtail keywords are the most detailed and make up 70% of global traffic. The keyword pyramid is a way to target all these keywords to improve your website ranking.
Step 2: Local SEO
The temperature is rising! Now, let’s talk about local SEO for real estate agents.
More and more real estate agencies are focusing their business locally, so it’s important to improve your local visibility through local SEO. This will help you better compete for rankings against other websites, by focusing on specific locations rather than trying to rank above the entire web.
This increase in searches is likely due to the fact that, since 2016, the real estate industry has seen a sharp rise in popularity. Google has seen a 92% increase in searches related to “best real estate agent” and a 61% increase to “homes for sale near me” since 2016. This is likely because the real estate industry has seen a sharp rise in popularity in recent years.
At first, this may not seem like a violation of your privacy, but keep in mind that this information is being stored by Google. Imagine you are looking for a donut shop near your house and you type “donuts near me” into Google. Google will immediately ask for your exact GPS location and adjust its results to your search query accordingly. This may not seem like a privacy violation at first, but keep in mind that this information is being stored by Google.
Local SEO is about optimizing your website for Google searchers who are looking for businesses in their area. You can do this by including location keywords on your website and in your content. When searchers use terms like “near me” or “for sale in (location),” it tells Google that they’re interested in finding results that are close to them, so it will deliver results based on the searcher’s location.
Google My Business
GMB is a free tool provided by Google that lets you list your business online with local directories. This lets you get found in both Google Search and Google Maps.
If you’ve ever searched for a business on Google, you’ve probably seen some information about that business displayed in a small box on your screen. This box is called a Google My Business profile. It usually shows the business’s name, location, contact information, and images.
Step 3: Content Optimization
You have created your website and listed it in local directories. You have done your keyword research. Now you need to fill your website with content that will attract your ideal customers!
The optimization of content can be achieved by focusing on pages, blogging, and content leadership. By improving these areas, the overall quality of the content will be increased.
You can optimize your website’s content by using relevant, well-researched keywords on all your pages. For example, if you want to rank for the keyword phrase “flats to rent in Shoreditch,” you can optimize your landing page by using the keywords “flat” and “Shoreditch” throughout the page.
Step 4: Backlinks
Keywords, internal links, and external links are what makes blog posts special for SEO. Great content that customers will love to read is important, but there are some basic SEO techniques that are essential to keeping customers engaged. We’ve already discussed keywords and internal linking, so now it’s time to talk about external links.
There are two types of external links: backlinks and outbound links. Backlinks are links from other websites to yours, while outbound links are links from your website to other websites. External links are part of off-site SEO and are used to create a network of websites in the same industry that link to each other.
The quality of a backlink is based on factors such as the authority of the site linking to you, the amount of traffic that site gets, and how relevant the two sites are to each other. So if a well-known and popular real estate site links to yours, it will not only bring its own authority with it, but also a lot of high-quality traffic. On the other hand, if you link to a less relevant site, such as one about accounting, it may not have the same positive effect. Additionally, you may be worried that if you link to another real estate site, users will leave your site to go to your competitor’s. However, this is not usually the case. It’s more beneficial to create a web of relevance by linking to other relevant sites, which will help search engines place you higher in the search results.
Are you wondering how you can build backlinks for real estate? The first step is to find out what your competitors are doing. You can use a tool like Ahrefs to see what kinds of content are earning the most backlinks and where your competitors are getting their links.
Ready To Act On Your Real Estate Seo Strategy?
You made it till the end. Congrats!
You will now have a complete view of real estate SEO services and how to implement them in your business. In today’s competitive online world, there is no room for websites that are neglected and have mediocre content. If you want to be successful, you need to take action!
Now is the time to refocus your attention from wasted hours spent on cold calls to potential clients who are not interested, to creating the assets that will drive users to your business. Unfortunately, due to a lack of understanding around SEO and keyword research, over 90% of websites are lost in Google search results.
Although SEO can be time-consuming, it is worth it because good content and strong relationships will last longer than changes in the algorithms.
