House hunting has undergone a huge transformation over the years as people have resorted to the internet to solve their queries. Studies have shown that 44% of home buyers start their buying journey online through a google search.
Thus, your real estate website must top the search results. A strategic SEO can help you succeed in this. The most successful real estate agent is no longer looking for prospects but leaves hints for the customer to trace him.
Nailing SEO is difficult, but the rewards are huge.
Here are the top 10 SEO tips for Real Estate Agents and Realtors
Tip #1: Prioritize Crawling and Indexing Issues
Once your audit is done, you should focus on fixing the issues that hinder crawling and indexing. This directly impacts how a search engine finds relevant content on your website. Having the best content in the world will yield no results if your site is not crawled and indexed effectively. Thus, it has no SEO value.
Therefore, prioritize solving broken links, outdated URLs, inaccurate sitemaps, and duplicate pages.
Bonus tip: Choosing a website platform that uses Schema markup is recommended. This makes search engine crawlers understand your online presence. Alternatively, you can get your web developer to add schema plugins to your existing website.
Tip #2: Do Effective Keyword Analysis & Selection
To secure the top ranks of SERPs, you need to accurately estimate the keywords up and running in the real estate market. This will shoot up your rankings and make your search results sustainable.
- Analyze the search intent – Knowing the ‘why’ behind a search, whether navigational, informational, or transactional, will help you filter the relevant keywords.
- Determine the type of keywords – A keyword is crucial because a successful SEO keyword does not necessarily have a high search volume or popularity. Specific niche keywords, i.e., the long-tail keywords, are lesser in volume and much less competitive, so if you find one that is very relevant to your audience, you can dominate rankings.
You can use tools like Google’s Keyword Planner, Moz Explorer, Ahrefs, Ubersuggest, etc., to find keyword ideas, analyze competition, track rankings and obtain detailed SERP analysis.
Bonus Tip: You can also refine your keywords using Latent Semantic Indexing, which helps Google understand what you mean by the keywords, hence boosting the ranking.
Tip #3: Optimize Keyword Positioning
The optimal positioning of keywords is what makes or breaks your SEO. You should work on the organic positioning of keywords. It is recommended to place the keyword in five areas: URL, Page Title, Body, Title of Images, and Image Alt Tag.
Here’s an example for a keyword, “Austin Real Estate.” The elements above would look as follows:
- URL – https://www.yourfriendrealtor.com/austin-real-estate
- Page Title – The Best Austin Real Estate In The Market
- Body – a recommended usage of keywords is around 1-2% of the entire content body. If you have 1000 words on your webpage, you should use the keyword 10-20 times.
- Title of Images – austin_real_estate.jpg
- Image Alt Tag – Upload images with alternative text having some version of the keyword
You should pay special attention to the frequency of appearance, as unplanned stuffing of keywords can spiral your SEO down south.
Tip #4: Optimize Local SEO Through Relevant Listings
When looking for properties, most customers have a particular location, city, or neighborhood in their minds.
Therefore, optimizing your local search is very important, and this can be done by getting listed on directories such as Google My Business (GMB), Redfin, realtor.com, Zillow, etc.
A higher number of registrations in these listings makes your case a genuine business in that area; thus, Google’s algorithm favors you in search rankings.
Below is an example of the search results of companies that have GMB listings.
You also stand a chance to appear in the top map search results. Ensure that you provide authentic information about your business, address and contact details, good quality images, videos, etc., to establish credibility and visibility in the local area.
Tip #5: Optimize On-page SEO Elements
- Title tag – Should be close to the keywords, maintained at an optimum length between 40 to 60 characters to avoid getting truncated in search results.
- Page URL – This should be concise and descriptive of the page’s purpose. Try to eliminate numbers and special characters clumped in the URL, making the user experience uneasy.
- Meta descriptions – Keep them within an optimum length of 120 to 150 characters, with mentions of your services. This is important to improve your page’s click-through rate (CTR) and client retention.
- Images – It is evident that images have a higher CTR as the tendency of users to scroll down the page of image results is greater than that with traditional text results. Therefore, it is necessary to use appropriate labels, the image’s filename, and ALT tags. Additionally, the image size should be optimized to maintain the page load speed.
Tip #6: Deliver High-Quality, Unique Content
While a keyword can direct the customer to your page, retention and conversion depend on the quality of content you serve. Customer satisfaction on your website is directly proportional to your search rankings.
You should focus on delivering valuable content that will answer your customers’ queries and provide them with action-oriented information says Keon Hoffman of Haitna.
High-quality content is a well-spun package establishing the EAT factors (Expertise, Trust, and Authority). To ensure this, you should avoid duplicate content and include the following:
- Your company’s overview
- Property descriptions
- Relevant industry reports
- Company updates and recent transactions
- Accreditations or awards, if any
You should also include client reviews and testimonials that make your services unique. Over 50% of users prefer checking reviews before making decisions.
Tip #7: Do Internal and external linking
Internal links are a crucial part of SEO as they redirect users to relevant content sources within your website and retain the search engine bots on your site longer, thus increasing the indexing of your pages.
Getting external backlinks for your website from other authoritative websites is imperative for SEO success. Just like the power of traditional word-of-mouth referral, backlinks can act as credibility builders from other established websites.
For this, make sure you:
- Deliver quality content and meaningful engagement that can compel the star performers to link to your website
- Post guest blogs on high-domain authority sites and include backlinks to your website.
- Research for proper contact information for your target media sources and pursue them to get your publications
You can use tools like Backlink Analytics, Traffic Analytics, Backlink Gap, etc., to collect insights on the quality of your backlinks and thus filter potentially harmful links.
Tip #8: Optimize for Mobile Devices
60% of all online searches these days are carried out on mobile devices. Thus, you should focus on your website’s responsiveness to cater to mobile displays. Some of the key considerations are,
- Page speed
- Hosting speed
- Site navigation
To check your web responsiveness for mobile devices, you can use some popular tools like Google’s mobile-friendly test, responsivetestool.com, Browser Stack, etc.
See how well we have optimized our website for a variety of devices.
Tip #9: Provide Handy Online Tools
Your website will rank higher if your customer spends more time on your page. To uplift your user experience a notch higher and attract traffic, you can offer online tools such as mortgage calculators, FHA loan calculators, Live Chat, Walk Score, etc.
For eg. Take a look at this mortgage calculator from bankrate.
You can also integrate a well-functioning internal search bar for users to search for internal queries. You should ensure that they do not have broken links or redirected pages.
These value-added services can go a long way in your SEO and customer satisfaction, which circles back to increased search appearances.
Tip #10: Conduct SEO Audit
The first step should be an SEO audit to understand your website’s past performance and do a gap analysis. This provides a benchmark for your brand’s progress and provides you with the necessary information to create a roadmap to success.
You need to know how optimized your site is. The prime focus of the audit should be:
- Site structure – Response codes 404, orphan pages, XML sitemaps, robots.txt file setup, web security (SSL certification), UX
- Page structure – Title, meta descriptions, duplicate URLs, internal linking, negative SEO
- Content – Duplicate content, canonical and heading tags issues, relevance
You can use tools like Neil Patel’s free SEO checker or Google Search Console to discover the hindrances blocking your site from securing top ranks.
Key Takeaways
- Conduct SEO audit to identify pain points
- Resolve crawling & indexing issues for easy traceability by search engines
- Analyze and select relevant keywords to rank high in search results
- Optimize keyword positioning and frequency to dominate in SERPs
- Optimize local SEO to ensure visibility in the local area
- Improve On-Page SEO elements
- Deliver high-quality, engaging content to attract more traffic
- Optimize internal and external linking to improve organic ranking and widen your reach
- Improve web responsiveness for mobile devices to increase customer retention
Provide handy online tools to increase dwell time