Real Estate SEO Consultant: 7 Ways to Build Traffic & Leads

Real Estate SEO Consultant
Spread the love

A Powerful Guide by Real Estate SEO Consultant: 7 Ways to Build Traffic & Leads 🏡 #SEO

Real Estate SEO is not a new concept, in fact, it appears that almost 72% of the American realtors are using Real Estate SEO consultant to promote themselves online and to attract more clients. It has also been seen that when searching for a house 2017 data shows 99% of Millennials search on online real estate websites compared to 89% of Older Boomers and 77% of the Silent Generation  This shows that as the competition is stiff in the real estate industry thus strategies to capture the online market has also grown widely.

[Tweet “When searching for a house, the 2017 data shows 80% of Millennials search on online real estate websites #realestate #seo”]

Why?

You have an MLS listing and now want to sell it off as quickly as possible, the best way to do so is to use the below-mentioned internet marketing methods. I have recorded a detailed video on Real Estate SEO for you explaining every step in this article further.

Let’s look at the Real Estate SEO steps involved in internet marketing:

1. Register on Google My Business

First and the most essential step is to set an identity for your local real estate website, as most realtors target a specific local area thus your website needs to be listed to show search engines that you deal in this specific region.

This can easily be done by registering on Google My Business and ensuring all categories are filled in accurately such as the business name, address, phone number, business description, category, photos, and business timings.

by doing so,

You will ensure that potential customers are able to find you on Google maps when they search for a local realtor.

Build citations for your real estate business

In order to enhance the GMB listing, you should also build citation links on popular directories and local directories such as Yelp, Yellowpages etc.

When building citations stick to creating local and niche specific citations, some examples of niche specific citations for real estate agents would be:


When doing so ensure that your business name, address & phone number is entered in the same way and format on all citation websites.

Once you have your business registered on the multiple platforms ensure that your map code is also added/embedded to your contact page.

Here are the top suggestions to follow when registering on GMB:

  • Add business name
  • Add correct address
  • Input phone number
  • Write a unique description
  • Upload images & videos
  • Enter business timings
  • List your properties using posts
  • Add posts every week
  • Enter your website URL

  • Get reviews for your IDX /MLS business on Google

    If you have completed these steps, then you just need to place the cherry on the cake, by this I mean you need to get reviews for your GMB listing. So, reach out to your customers and ask them to submit a review on Google.

    Reviews really help you connect with your clients faster, the secret about reviews is to never stop getting reviews and always aim for a 5-star review.

    and that’s all to LOCAL Real Estate SEO.

    To grow your local website rankings with SEO follow these top tips Local SEO for Small Business: 7 Brilliant Local SEO Tips.

    2. Start blogging for your business

    Blogging is rapidly developing into a tool whose purpose is to establish an online presence, improve visibility, build a sense of community, maintain an open dialogue for clients and prospects, and offer valuable information — all of which is accomplished in an unfiltered direct way.

    Just for those reasons alone, blogging has a huge potential for real estate agents and is one of the crucial steps when we talk about Real Estate SEO. What strikes me odd is the fact that most real estate agents or real estate websites I’ve visited don’t have a blog and are losing out on such a powerful median. A blog should definitely be added to their real estate marketing mix.

    This void offers a unique business opportunity for someone or a company to help develop and maximize a real estate agents ability to essentially generate more leads and close more business. Being an entrepreneur, I’ve actually thought about doing this myself since I’m very experienced in blogging, internet marketing, and real estate but I just don’t have the time with all the other projects I am working on.

    When blogging use relevant keywords in every article, some examples would be:

  • [city] real estate broker
  • [city] real estate agent
  • [city] realtor
  • [city] finding a realtor
  • [city] estate agent

  • So let’s get down to the 5 key reasons real estate agents should have a blog.

    Direct Communications – Most real estate websites seem to contain static content which is usually more about the business and properties on the MLS the real estate agent is looking to sell. The beautiful thing about a blog is that they provide a way for realtors to speak directly and honestly with potential customers and prospects in an open way. Visitors to your blog can actually comment and reply to your posts which only adds value and creates a community-type environment. Here’s a great example of Luba, a real estate agent in San Francisco who started her own blog.

    Positioning Yourself As The Expert – Blogs give you a way to express your viewpoints, demonstrate your knowledge, and provide your expertise on issues and topics pertaining to your industry or community. If you’re the only real estate agent in your city or coverage area that actually blogs, prospects and potential customers that find your website are going to view you as the expert in that area.

    Lead Generation – You will find that having a blog is a low-cost method of highly visible real estate marketing. It will provide you a consistent flow of leads at almost no cost. Search engines such as Google and Bing highly favor blog content in their search results so once you start publishing content you will be surprised to see the amount of traffic increasing to your website. You just have to make sure to capture these leads once they visit your site.

    Competitive Differentiation – How is your business different from the dozens of other real estate agents in your area? How can you make a prospective customer understand that you have something better to offer or that you have the expertise and experience to make the home buying and selling process easier and to their financial benefit? Having a blog gives your readers insight into who you are and what your business is all about.

    Relationship Marketing – The beautiful thing about a blog is that it allows you to build personal relationships with your readers and customers that eventually creates trust. All real estate agents are familiar with the importance of “farming” as a way of generating activity. Blogs allow you to create a tight niche of potential customers who you can deliver messages to on a daily basis.

    These 5 key reasons alone should be enough justification for you as a real estate agent to start a blog tomorrow. Now your next question is probably going to be, “How do I start a blog?” and “How much will it cost?”. The good news is most blogging software is free and depending on your skill set and depth of features, I would recommend wordpress.com, typepad.com, or blogger.com. All are great platforms and each has their positives and negatives.

    For me, I use wordpress.com for all my blogs and would never use anything else. WordPress.com is by far the best if you’re looking for something extremely flexible and you have some technical knowledge and experience with the internet. There is a learning curve and all blogs require some time to configure and setup, but that’s where someone with technical and business experience comes in.

    I recommend reading SEO tips for blog recognition



    3. Optimize your website with technical SEO

    Technical SEO is also known as on-page SEO, it is a method where you internally optimize the website with key indicators which Google bots can read and know what your website is all about.

    I recommend reading about on-page SEO on one of my favorite websites Backlinko

    You will be able to get a DIY guide to performing technical Real Estate SEO, but I recommend hiring an SEO pro in order to save time and get quality results.

    The basics of technical SEO for realtors would be to ensure that your site has factors like:

  • Meta Tags
  • Meta Description
  • Schema Markup
  • SSL License
  • Robots.txt
  • Sitemap
  • Page Speed Optimized
  • Quality Content Check
  • ALT Texts for Images
  • Crawlable pages
  • Integration of Analytics
  • Call to Action

  • Once you have completed these 3 steps only then move one to the 4th step.

    The most important step of them all is to ensure every property listed on your website has a Schema markup attached to it. Use the product schema markup in order to get the website link indexed faster by search engines.

    Here is an example of the product schema markup used on Trulia:

    <script type=”application/ld+json”>{“@context”:”http:\/\/schema.org”,”@type”:”Product”,”name”:”160 Central Park S 1120, New York, NY, 10019″,”offers”:{“@type”:”Offer”,”price”:”1228000″,”priceCurrency”:”USD”},”image”:”\/\/thumbs.trulia-cdn.com\/pictures\/thumbs_big\/ps.94\/3\/5\/3\/d\/picture-uh=f6e601c98473b32a57907afa671d90-ps=353d36ae7d3555535d56b11fe1c0ea.jpg”}</script>

    In simple terms, all you have to do is edit the above code with your property information and image links and then paste it in the HTML section of that specific property listing page and do this for every property.

    We did a technical SEO audit for a Downtown Madison Realtor, which would increase their website traffic and rankings. If you are looking for a technical SEO consultancy and an audit then get in touch with us.

    This is part of the off-page SEO process where you want other authority websites in your niche to link to your own website, this would grow your websites online reputation and also grow your rankings online.

    How to get quality backlinks?

    One of the effective ways to build backlinks is through guest posting.

    Guest posting for realtors is a method where you would contact other realtors who have a blog on their site and offer them a good article around an interesting topic and in return, you would get the permission to add your websites URL into the article, which will be posted on their website.

    This method is really helpful as search engines would see your website as an authority site with a good amount of quality websites linking to it and provide relevant authority to boost its online rankings.

    Just imagine that your website’s URL is on 10 influential real estate websites this in terms of Real Estate SEO means that 10 powerful businesses love what you are doing and admire your website.

    Search engines love this and would boost your website rankings.

    Here are some of the industries top link building strategies:

  • Start guest posting.
  • Use HARO to get media links.
  • Sumit blog comments
  • Write testimonials to get links
  • Target social links
  • Finding broken links on third party sites
  • Getting competitors to link to you.
  • Ask influencers to connect with your website.

  • There is more to link building, however, I do not want you to stress out about this further as this is a really critical step, if you create a series of unnatural links that could lead to a penalty by Google.

    So, keep it simple and just create links through guest posting for the first few months and then move on to more link building methods like competitor link research.

    You can do a competitor link research using a very useful SEO tool called Ahrefs, Ahrefs tool provides a lot of features however for finding out the common links for our competitors, I would use Ahrefs Link Intersect feature, I will simply enter my real estate competitors website URL into the link intersect tool and within seconds will get a list of the common links between my competitors.

    All I have to do now is to get in touch with these common links as if they link to my competitors they will definitely link to me too.

    Link building of realtors is a vast and enormous segment hence take it slow and you will definitely succeed.

    5. Create a YouTube Channel

    Are you posting videos yet?

    If not, then start doing so, as this is the most effective way to show off your MLS listing to potential customers looking to invest in real estate.

    Let me explain further with an example,

    One of my realtor clients started a youtube channel under their company name and started posting videos on it, these videos were about him giving a simple tour of the property he wanted to sell.

    In the beginning, he got a few views and then my team ran a video advertisement campaign where we spent some money to spread the videos across the entire country.

    Boom!

    The YouTube videos started getting a lot of views and the channel got a decent number of subscribers.

    In a few days, my client started getting phone calls about the properties being shown on the YouTube channel.

    He sang me praises and applauded me as a real estate SEO consultant.

    We have now stopped the advertisement as now the channel is growing by itself with a huge number of subscribers and potential customers just pouring in with each new property video posted on the channel.

  • Do an online showing where you can record a video of the property you want to sell and talk about the benefits and your view on the property.
  • Talk about ways to sell a house fast and ways to get a good deal in a tough market.
  • Ask for people to subscribe to your podcast in every video either in the beginning or at the end of the video.
  • Upload one video every week.
  • Write an awesome video title that appeals to the audience.
  • Share the latest news about the real estate industry along with the latest trends.
  • Be consistent and share knowledge to help your clients.

  • I hope you get the big picture behind this strategy under real estate marketing as it would help you further create a connection between you and your visitors.

    When you create videos, try to give out helpful information to the viewers, this is the only way you can grow your YouTube authority, you need to give something of value in order to get the ball rolling.

    6. Make sure you are active on social media

    Are you sharing useful information about your business on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Google+ etc.?

    If not, then start now.

    There is a huge market of potential customers on social media, therefore, you need to be here, however, make sure you do it right.

    You just cannot post buy now pictures of your MLS listings instead mix it up, the very first thing you need to do is to give something to the community and build a relationship.

    Once you crack this, there will be no stopping you.

    The best way to do so is to provide guidance to the social media community and teach them the pros and cons of getting things done. Example: you can post about how to smartly do real estate investment or talk about things to do before you buy a property.

    By posting things like these you will create a trustable real estate portfolio for your business and be being a real estate agent you would know that trust is everything.

    If your investor starts trusting you that’s when they will buy anything.

    The second part of being active on social media is to ensure you post at the right place and use the right format when posting your content.

    Example,

    When posting on Twitter ensure you use hashtags, like **your message** **website link** #realestate #realtor.

    What we did here was wrote an attractive message and added a link to the relevant page from the business website (This could be the homepage or a blog page as well) and then used relevant hashtags matching our tweet.

    When you post stuff on Facebook, make sure you are posting on your business page and just not on the private profile, also make sure you join real estate Facebook groups and post in the groups as well. Here is one of the popular groups on FB for realtors.

    Here are some pro tips when dealing with social media:

  • Always create a business page on social media and avoid personal profile pages.
  • Post every day within an interval of 3 hours for at least 8–10 times a day.
  • Try to add videos and images to every post.
  • Use Hashtags on every post like #realestate #realtor #city name etc.
  • Tag people to your posts and encourage them to share it with their audience.
  • Share new and entertaining content or content that can emotionally connect with your audience.

  • The same concept applies to Google+ the only difference is instead of groups you will have communities on Google+.

    Check out the trending tweets for #RealEstate on the very bottom of the page, you will be able to see how your competitors using Twitter to promote their business.

    7. Your website needs to be perfect

    What is a perfect real estate website?

    It would be the one that delivers the right information the website visitor is looking for and does it in a faster way regardless of which device they use.

    Sounds easy right!

    In order to do so, you need to ensure your website is compatible with every device such as mobile, tablets also ensure it is compatible with every browser.

    Therefore, when designing a website ensure your web designer creates a responsive website.

    The second step would be to speed up your website if a website does not load faster your website visitor would simply hit the back button and go to the next website. This is something that definitely needs to be avoided therefore ensure your website loads as quickly as possible.

    Some ways to speed up your website and reduce your bounce rate would be to compress your images, cache your pages and ensure your website is hosted on a faster hosting server.

    If you are using a WordPress site then all this can be done using plugins.

    Example:

    In order to compress images, you can use the Imagify plugin.

    The fastest cache plugin is best to cache your pages and I think a dedicated server by Fast comet or Siteground would be perfect for a faster website.

    Important factors to consider for a perfect website experience:

  • Make sure the website is mobile friendly.
  • Choose a readable font and size for the content.
  • Make sure the site loads faster on desktop and also on mobile.
  • Install SSL certification to secure the visitors.
  • Add social sharing buttons to the website blog section.
  • Provide an option to sign up for your newsletter to get repeated visitors.
  • Create a unique logo that can be remembered and adds value to your brand.
  • Add important pages to the menu section of the website.
  • Show a call-to-action button or option on your homepage and on important pages.
  • Lastly, I would also recommend installing an SSL certificate on your website, once you do this, you will be able to see https:// in front of your domain name instead of HTTP://.

    Google is now marking domains with no SSL as nonsecure so it is always better to be a secure website as this builds confidence in the eyes of every visitor.

    Conclusion,

    There is more to “Real Estate SEO” however if you just follow the above-mentioned internet marketing strategies you will definitely succeed as a realtor and will be able to beat the competition.

    Search engines constantly evolve their algorithm to ensure they deliver relevant content to their users and we ensure your website evolves with the evolving technology.

    Lastly, I hope you got some quality information out of the “Real Estate SEO” article and have a clear understanding of how to grow your real estate business and if you are stuck somewhere or have questions about SEO then feel free to comment below or simply get in touch.


    Leave Comments Below for "A Powerful Guide by Real Estate SEO Consultant: 7 Ways to Build Traffic & Leads 🏡 #SEO"


    Spread the love

    Posted on June 30, 2018 in Search Engine Optimization

    Meet The Author

    Jobin John
    Jobin is a digital marketing professional with over 10 years of experience in the industry. He has a passion for driving business growth in the online realm. With an extensive background spanning SEO, web design, PPC campaigns, and social media marketing, Jobin masterfully crafts strategies that resonate with target audiences and achieve measurable outcomes.
    Back to Top
    Top