An increasing number of consumers use the internet as their primary source of information before making any serious real estate investment. According to the national association of realtors research department, 44% of people look for properties online first, which makes real estate search engine optimization (SEO) a must-have strategy for realtors. SEO for realtors is becoming a dire necessity after the COVID crises. SEO is a crucial part of any digital strategy for real estate agents if you’re unfamiliar with online marketing. If you are serious about attracting leads and business online but don’t actively do SEO on your site, it’s time to start SEO for real estate.
What is SEO for Real Estate Agents
SEO is how you get found online. It’s using the right search terms and strategies on your site to gain more web traffic. Considering that most internet users rely on search engines to direct them to websites, it’s important that search engines like google not only list your site but rank it higher in the results. With effective real estate SEO, this is possible.
6 Awesome Realtor Marketing Ideas
- Offer Home valuations to capture seller leads.
- Make an explainer video about your real estate agency
- Run a buyer/seller questions blog article
- Make videos to highlight amenities around your targeted areas
- Add lifestyle pictures of pets in your real estate listing pictures
- Use social media, primarily engaging features like Instagram stories, Tik Toks, and Pinterest Pins, to advertise and share your achievements as a realtor
How does SEO for Real Estate work?
SEO for realtors involves improving several factors associated with your website to improve its ranking in search engines. How well your website ranks for specific search terms or keywords depends on factors like:
- When, where, and how often those keywords are used
- How many links point to your website from another trustworthy website.
- How quickly your website loads
- Whether or not your site is optimized for mobile devices
You may think it’s too much work to try to get the top listing on google. Look at it this way, though—you know how important it is to use the right words to sell a property. SEO works the same way. Plus, like a good property listing, SEO can be a real boon to your business.
The 7 Best Real Estate Websites of 2020
Real Estate SEO Tips to drive more traffic, leads, and sales
Optimize your local google my business page
Local businesses must get listed in google’s 3-pack. When potential customers search for a local business or service provider, they’ll likely see a map pack featuring different google my business pages. Users pay more attention to search results that feature snapshots, ratings, reviews, and google maps directions taking up half the screen space.
Clean and consistent citations
Despite the importance of having up-to-date citations – name, address, phone number, and website (nap) – across industry directories and local publications, constant contact found over 50% of local businesses have inaccurate contact information across those sites. This is one of the first steps any local business should take to improving rankings in the map pack.
Add schema markup
Schema markup is a way to structure your site’s code to indicate to google what kind of format it takes. For example, you might have a table that describes a property, which has fields for the property’s price, bedrooms, etc.
Perform targeted keyword research
Keyword research may be the most overlooked aspect of SEO. It’s crucial to understanding consumer intent. While most real estate marketers will happily spend countless hours on their social media strategy and content marketing, very few spend the time needed to learn effective keyword research.
Optimize on-page elements
On-site SEO for local real estate requires some slightly different tactics than national SEO. First, you want to make sure your business nap (name, address, and phone number) is used throughout your website and that it’s the same nap that you used for your local listing and citations (discussed above). You want to use state, city, and town names in title tags, meta descriptions, and body copy.
How does SEO for realtors work?
Create localized content
The real estate industry has a reputation for producing some fairly lame content, which is why there aren’t a ton of examples of beautiful, inspiring content marketing in our industry. But, it doesn’t have to be that way. Consumers are in the driver’s seat and have grown to expect value-added experiences. Creating awesome content that educates, informs, and engages consumers through the entire customer life cycle will require any business looking to survive the decades to come.
Optimized images
According to a study, 78% of websites’ on-page issues stem from one source: images. Adding listing, neighborhood photos, and stock images to your site may seem like a simple task, but there’s actually a lot that goes into optimizing them appropriately.
Optimize for mobile discovery
According to NAR, “89% of new home shoppers use a mobile search engine at the onset and throughout their research”. For almost half of these shoppers, mobile search is the first step.
Focus on page load speed (and avoid losing website visitors); google does not like slow sites. Think about it: if you’re curating a list of the best resources, would you be inclined to include one that took forever to load? Google measures page speed as a ranking factor, but it also looks at how users interact with your site. According to Google, any page that takes over 3 seconds to load loses 53% of visitors who leave before the page is fully loaded.
Create a sitemap
Sitemaps are files where you provide information about pages, posts, videos, and other content on your site. Google and other search engines use sitemaps to identify the most important content and more efficiently crawl your website.
Hire professional SEO Services for Realtors
As you consider the many tips in SEO for real estate out there, be sure to keep one thing in mind: effective SEO takes time. You won’t see success overnight, but you can get started right away. Be patient, and your efforts will pay off. Provide potential clients with useful information before anything else, and in turn, they will turn to you when they’re ready to buy. Need help getting started with SEO for realtors? We are more than happy to help, so don’t hesitate to contact us!
