Real Estate SEO Guide
Your real estate website is a huge source of potential traffic for your services, and it should therefore be prioritized.
But having an attractive and helpful website that lays out your services and what makes you unique is not enough to be found online. Just because you have a website does not mean that potential buyers and sellers can find it.
Search engines have the ultimate power when it comes to deciding what websites are easier to find through organic search results. If you want to be competitive, investing resources into SEO will help you get in front of more potential customers.
This marketing channel is key to maintaining a successful real estate website that drives more business your way.
What is Real Estate Search Engine Optimization?
Search engine optimization, or SEO, refers to the process of improving a website’s level of authority to improve its ranking in organic searches. As a business owner or marketer, it is important that your brand can be found online when people search for certain terms associated with the real estate industry.
Effective SEO strategy uses various methods to improve the level of expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness of a website. Together, these three measuring standards will determine how well a certain webpage is ranked. If a page is seen as very authoritative, then it is more likely to show up earlier in search engine results.
At Stellar SEO, we understand the importance of building an effective SEO strategy that will boost organic traffic for your business. When it comes to real estate, a highly competitive industry, you need to be at the top of your game to bring in clients. A strong real estate website can do much of the legwork of obtaining clients for you, especially if paired with the SEO experts on our team.
How Does SEO Benefit Your Real Estate Website?
Real estate SEO matters because it will dictate how easily your website can be found through search engines. The main goal in every SEO campaign should be to rank highly on the first page of results.
Research shows that the percentage of clicks on a website drops dramatically after the first page of results, with the top three getting the bulk of the traffic most of the time. That means that the further down the page your website falls, the less likely it is to see a lot of traffic. This means fewer potential customers are finding your website via organic searches.
A strong SEO campaign can be a game-changer for real estate businesses. Not only will it increase your chance of being found by potential clients, it will also make sure your website is set up to convert them once they do find and visit your site.
Real estate SEO can be used to improve the position of all your web pages, whether that is an agent bio, business listings, property listings, an ongoing blog series about the real estate industry, and so on. If you are serious about growing your online presence, then implementing a real estate SEO campaign should be your priority for marketing because of the many benefits.
Increases Brand Awareness and Trust
In real estate, trust is incredibly important. Buyers and sellers are putting their concerns and needs into your hands as they make huge financial decisions. To give them peace of mind, showing them that you have their best interests in mind is critical to bringing them on as a client.
Real estate SEO helps to build that trust, showing that you are an expert in your field and have worked hard enough to earn a high position in search rankings. When potential clients see your name or business pop up in the top results, they will trust that you have lots of experience.
Attracts a Highly Targeted Audience
You are not just looking for anyone to find your real estate business online, you want the RIGHT people to find the website. People who are starting to enter the buying or selling process, or are in the consideration phase, are a key target for real estate websites.
You also want to be seen by people in the local real estate market that could realistically work with you. It does no good to rank highly in search results that are geographically far from your community – except for keywords that could produce high-quality, natural inbound links.
Enables You to Gain More Clients
When internet browsers search for real estate businesses or agents, or even just general topics relating to the industry, a highly ranked website will lead more visitors to your pages. This increases the likelihood of visitors becoming clients when they see that your real estate brokerage has a high level of authority and an optimized website that is easy to navigate. Remember that the number of clicks drops significantly after the first page of results, so a better ranking means far more traffic, especially for the top three websites.
Allows You to Target Specific Service Offerings
For real estate SEO, it is all about ranking for the right searches. Keyword research can help determine the best topics for your website to cover, to address the needs and desires of buyers and sellers.
When they perform a search query like “what is the process for buying a home,” having content on your web pages that addresses that question can lead to them finding your business.
Since real estate is so competitive, you want to make sure your services stand out from the rest with powerful content that provides the solutions that clients are looking for. Real estate SEO can help you achieve that.
What Would an Effective SEO Campaign Include?
There are right ways to implement SEO and there are wrong ways. Real estate SEO services are incredibly important and require a high level of specialization. Your business needs an effective strategy that will improve your online presence with a particular audience that is unique in the consumer space.
A poorly planned campaign will just end up being a waste of money for a business owner, so working with a company like Stellar SEO ensures that you are using your budget and resources in the most effective and efficient manner possible.
Intake Meeting and Onboarding
It all starts with getting to know your business first. How much experience do you have in real estate and what has that experience looked like? Getting to know your target audience and niche is also critical to forming the right strategy.
Where do you want to target potential buyers and sellers geographically? What kind of communication will be required in the implementation of a real estate SEO plan? These questions and more will get everyone started in the right direction.
Technical Audit
This is a key step in the process as it will reveal how optimized your real estate website currently is. Is the structure easy for search engine bots to crawl and index? Are there meta descriptions for each page that will assist Google, Bing, and other search engines as they determine a site’s trustworthiness? Can a mobile device have the same quality of experience on your site as a desktop computer? Does any part of your website have low page speed that could hurt the chances of higher rankings, and what is the overall site speed? A website audit will help determine what changes need to be made.
Content Audit
A check of your real estate website’s current content will also help guide the SEO campaign moving forward. Is there quality content that answers the questions your target audience is asking? Is there a blog or landing page that came about due to keyword research and wanting to rank for that term? Do you have content that could rank highly for long-tail keywords that your business can specifically answer? Having a content plan will significantly boost your real estate SEO efforts and increase your chance of being found online.
GMB Audit
When it comes to local SEO and increasing your online presence within a geographic location, Google My Business becomes extremely important. This feature of Google allows businesses to show up in searches performed in specific locations.
For a real estate business, that means showing up as a top priority result in the community that you serve. Real estate is an industry that is highly dependent on geographic location, so make the most of your GMB.
SEO Competitor Analysis
Every marketing campaign has to take competition into account. After all, to achieve page one rankings, your brand will have to beat out other real estate agencies.
Keyword research can help determine what your competitors are ranking for and then create content to address those weak points. Or, conversely, it can reveal where your competitors are missing out on potential clients and allow you to take advantage of the gap.
SEO Backlink Analysis
Backlinks are extremely important for a website’s SEO. The level of domain authority that your website has is significantly affected by the backlink profile, meaning other websites that link back to your own. Low-quality backlinks, or not enough, will show search engines that your web pages are not very authoritative, leading to lower rankings.
Real Estate SEO Strategy Creation
Once we have performed these audits and have a good sense of your current real estate SEO status, we will start to build a strategy for improvement.
The goal, of course, is to implement all these methods to grow your online presence through higher search rankings. Your real estate marketing plan will be tailored to grow your particular business effectively to help you gain more website visitors online.
On-Page Optimization
Now that we know where the weaknesses are in your website, we can get started with on-page SEO. Does your website work on both desktops and mobile devices? Are the internal links between pages working as they should? Is there a meta description and meta tags for each page of your website that allows them to be properly indexed and summarized in search results?
There are many things to consider when doing on-page real estate SEO, and we will help ensure that your web pages are optimized to perform well and be technically proficient.
GMB Optimization
Showing up in local searches is huge for real estate SEO. Search queries will often display geographically relevant web pages, and having an optimized GMB profile can elevate your website in this type of result.
Since real estate agents post tons of local listings to show potential buyers, local SEO plays an even more important role within the industry. These real estate listings are more likely to show up in front of the right audiences with an optimized GMB profile.
Content Strategy and Creation
Content is king in the SEO world. Whether you are hoping to rank for certain real estate keywords by creating new blog content or hope to address questions with your homepage, strong content is a necessity for real estate SEO.
Building out a content plan can lead to more organic traffic when people perform search queries that lead them to relevant content that brings them to your real estate website.
Keyword research will help guide this content plan to ensure that you are ranking for the right terms, whether that means short tail or long-tail keywords. Real estate SEO can greatly benefit from consistently fresh content as it is an industry that is constantly shifting with fluctuating markets and changing trends.
Link and Citation Building
Link building will directly affect the authority of your real estate website, and a strong backlink profile that combines quantity with quality will be the priority.
We will help your earn links from other authoritative websites to demonstrate your expertise and trustworthiness to both search engines and internet browsers.
Additionally, citation building is important because it is a direct reference to your business on another webpage. Usually, a citation will include the name of your business, a phone number, and an address so that people can contact you directly. Local citations are especially beneficial for real estate SEO purposes.
People who trust one local brand may be more likely to visit a web page that mentions another local brand like your own business. These real estate SEO tips are very important for any marketing campaign.
Tracking and Reporting
No real estate SEO campaign is complete without a way to measure the effectiveness of the process. We will lay out KPIs that are relevant to demonstrate what changes are working and which areas need improvement. This enables you to spend your resources on the most fruitful avenues for your brokerage.
- Are Google searches resulting in more clicks to your page?
- Is the mobile version of your website seeing higher bounce rates but generating more leads?
- Have any Google ads been effective at generating clicks to complement the focus on organic traffic?
SEO for real estate brands can encompass many strategies, so knowing ahead of time how to track and report the success of each method will help guide the campaign going forward.
What Are Some Common SEO Mistakes?
As stated before, there are effective methods for improving real estate SEO and there are ineffective ones. You need to make the best decision for your business to ensure a successful growth campaign that improves your online presence.
If you choose to move forward without the partnership of real estate SEO experts, then you will have to be wary of certain mistakes that will waste your time and money. Here are some real estate SEO tips on what NOT to do.
Focusing on the Wrong Locations
Your target audience may be located in one specific geography, or they could be spread out among multiple areas. Understanding where the bulk of your clientele is physically located is important when deciding on your real estate SEO strategy, especially as it relates to local searches.
Spending your resources in the wrong places will dilute the effectiveness of the campaign, causing you to miss out on potential home buyers and sellers. Real estate is extremely location-dependent as an industry, so focusing your efforts on the ideal locations is key.
Lack of Unique Landing Pages
Landing pages are important for your clickthrough rates from various marketing channels, be it organic searches, social media ads, or emails.
Real estate websites that have all of their traffic directed to the same few pages may see their search rankings suffer, as there is a smaller library of relevant content on their site for visitors to see – and a lower number of pages for Google to consider and possibly rank.
Search engines like to see that your website is full of relevant landing pages that answer specific user queries.
Lack of Local SEO Content
Producing regular content is important, especially for improving local SEO. Your local connections via social media and your GMB profile should be taking advantage of sharing content and link building opportunities that boost your online presence in the local real estate community.
If you are a real estate agent, this becomes incredibly important to put your name in front of potential local clients. Be sure to check out our local SEO link building guide and our real estate link building guide for some great ideas if you plan to run your own campaign.
Ignoring Your GMB Listing
Your Google My Business profile is so important in terms of SEO for real estate. An optimized listing will increase the likelihood of getting local organic traffic from people who are browsing the internet for answers to various real estate-related questions.
If your real estate agency is not listed in GMB, you will miss out on the opportunity to show up on page one in the map pack results, which generate a lot of clicks and calls for local businesses.
Skipping Location-Based Landing Pages
Real estate SEO tips like this one are all about creating a customized experience for website visitors. If you have dedicated landing pages for different towns or geographical areas that you serve, it will demonstrate your involvement in the community and your commitment to serving local clients, which can lead to more conversions.
Avoiding Link Building
If you are hoping to rank highly for both short-tail and long-tail keywords, then link building needs to be a part of your real estate marketing plan.
High-quality links will increase the authority of your site, moving you up the search results for pages that incorporate real estate keywords. These keyword phrases are critical to demonstrating your expertise as well since popping up as a top result for a certain real estate question will likely lead to higher traffic.
Focusing Only on the Appearance of Your Real Estate Website
Real estate websites are numerous, and plenty of them look professional. While it is important to have a nice website, it is far more critical that you have a clear strategy in place to drive relevant traffic to it.
SEO, along with many other inbound marketing channels can provide traffic that converts – SEO traffic just tends to convert about 5 times more often than traffic from other channels.
Looking for Help with Your Real Estate SEO Plan?
Stellar SEO has teams of search engine optimization experts that understand the best practices of SEO for real estate websites.
Our team will work to get your brand to develop a custom SEO strategy that will help you meet and exceed your real estate SEO goals.
If you do decide to go it alone, be sure to keep the real estate SEO tips we shared here today in mind to make the process as painless as possible.
