7 SEO Tips to Dominate Your Local Real Estate Industry

This is a definitive Real Estate SEO guide. In this guide, you’ll learn:

What is Real Estate SEO?

Real Estate Search Engine Optimization (SEO) involves strategies, techniques, and analysis that help attract higher potential clients to a realtor website by obtaining first-page ranking positions in search engines (such as Google, Bing, or Yahoo).

The message is pretty clear, people use online search to find a local real estate agent. Yes, a good word from previous clients does make a difference however the use of search engines always dominates.

The power of search engine optimization lasts for a long time if done the right way. A well-optimized website along with powerful interlinked web pages holding valuable content will certainly boost your online rankings. Finally backed by authoritative link building strategies the scope of growth is limitless.

Why is Realtor SEO Important?

Real Estate SEO is not a new concept, in fact, it appears that almost 72% of the American realtors are using Real Estate SEO 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.

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.

7 Actionable Real Estate SEO Tips

Realtors need SEO as the way the world find a real estate agent has changed.

In the early days we had the big yellow book to find a realtor but now even the yellow pages has moved online and so has millions of your potential home buyers and sellers for their search for an qualified professional real estate agent.

Every business including a real estate agency needs marketing plan in order to succeed.

Your website is the life line of your business, search engine optimization strategies is what will keep that life line healthy and run for a long time. This would brand your business and grow your authority.

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. Here is a good resource on how to sign up & verify your business on Google.

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 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:

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 its real estate marketing mix.

This void offers a unique business opportunity for someone or a company to help develop and maximize real estate agent’s ability to essentially generate more leads and close more business.

Check out an informative article on educational blogging and the business of blogging.

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:

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

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.

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 that Google bots can read and know what your website is all about.

I recommend reading about on-page SEO and how to perform an audit resource.

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:

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.

4. Link Building for Realtors

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 website’s 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:

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 for introducing him to real estate SEO.

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.

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:

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:

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.