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Real Estate SEO: A complete guide in 2021

Muskan Verma

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Real Estate SEO: A complete guide in 2021

 

real-estate-seo-complete-guide-google-my-business-listing

 

The real estate marketing niche is competitive. However, 90% of home buyers use the internet to search for homes, and the agents who could master realtor SEO wins. The ultimate purpose is to show up in the search engine when people look for someone to help them buy or sell a property. Real estate is competitive, but you have local SEO as the life savior that helps you rank for keywords in a hyper-local area. The competition could be fierce depending on the area, but you have a good chance to fight up and close quality deals if you take the right steps.

We are the leading New York City SEO Agency.

You would be amazed to know the report of ColorWhistle that around 44% of buyers looked online for properties for sale and 30% of them contacted a real estate agent. When most qualified prospects search online, it becomes more important than ever to optimize the website for local searches and connect with the potential buyers through SERP results. The HubSpot report confirms that around 14.6% of leads convert when they connect with the seller on SERP results.

 

Why should I focus on real estate SEO?

 

Here are the reasons:

 

1. Quality lead generation

SEO is the most promising digital marketing channel to bring quality leads as most consumers take the top-ranking companies or websites as the authority in the given niche

79% of leads never convert into sales because of the lack of lead nurturing, resulting in poor performance. Nurturing the leads is critical for your business’s success as proper touchpoints and adding values to the lead impact the customer decisions about considering you or not. With a focused content marketing and SEO strategy, you could inform the audience about every query they might have. Once you successfully add value to your prospect, they develop an unrealized liking for your brand.

If you have a website, then it is necessary to have a tailor-made SEO strategy to appeal to your target audience and be visible to them when they are searching for services related to you. If you look at the competition in the market, you would realize that every contender is taking a step to connect and appease the audience. Hence, if you don’t take that extra step with content marketing and SEO, you are letting your competition win. 

Once you take the right steps and implement a proper SEO strategy, you will realize that your ranking on the search engine results page has increased, bringing more exposure to your brand. This result will bring more website traffic, increase brand awareness, and eventually get you more sales.

 

 

2. Organic traffic means low-cost and guaranteed business growth.

The best thing about an SEO strategy is that it could bring you organic traffic from Google without much spending. Paid campaigns could help, but you only get sales for the amount spent. However, with SEO, you could expect long-term success for your business with more exposure and brand awareness. SEO would surely not bring you immediate results. However, people tend to trust you once you position yourself as an authority in your niche and rank higher in SERP results. Then, you get to have constant traffic and qualified leads. 

Social media advertising could be seen as renting leads from social media websites. However, when you invest in SEO, you would see top search engines sending you free traffic for your target keyword if you implement the strategies properly. If you understand keyword research and SEO well, you would realize how easily some keywords could get you the right traffic to boost your business and convert leads to customers.

 

 

How do I optimize my real estate business for ranking higher in SERP results with a dedicated SEO strategy?

 

Get an SEO and content audit done.

 

To understand the present state of your website, you need a content and SEO audit to determine which pages are ranking well and which are the areas to make immediate improvements. A proper content strategy could help. It is rightly said, “To improve, you need to understand where you stand at present.” A content audit helps you know which content is already published and where they are currently ranking. Once you realize that there is potential to connect with early-stage prospects with a particular kind of content, you could easily strategize that way.

For example, if you have a property listing in Los Angeles, California, you could create content on crime rates in Los Angeles, living costs in Los Angeles, etc., that your prospect may be searching for. 

After the content audit, it is time to look for an SEO audit.

An SEO audit serves as a benchmark for your progress and gives you the right information to improve and help pages rank well in SERP results.

You can start with the page structure and look for 

-titles 

-meta descriptions

-ALT tags

-link placement

-duplicates

-redirects

-canonical tags

-heading tags

-URL etc.

For more technical aspects, you must look and optimize the following:

-Mobile responsiveness

-Site loading speed

-XML sitemap

-robots.txt, etc.

As part of off-page SEO, look for all the websites linking to your competition and the top pages that bring them traffic. Then, you could create more detailed content and infographics and hit those websites if they would like to link to you. Also, make sure that you are listed on all possible directories with consistent NAP(Name, Address, Phone) to get qualified local leads. Learn more about e-commerce SEO.

 

 

Keyword Research is an integral part of real estate SEO.

 

Getting any traffic from SERP results is not important. Instead, getting relevant traffic for your real estate business matters. Therefore, it is important to do keyword research for your SEO campaign to make sure that you connect with your prospects at every touchpoint to increase your authority and credibility. 

If your website is not yet authoritative, meaning you don’t have a high domain authority score, or your website is comparatively new. It would help if you targeted medium-difficulty keywords as they are the most appropriate to try for. Also, it would help if you started with low-difficulty keywords with decent volume and move further with more competitive ones with time.

You could also develop a customer persona that would help you realize the keywords and type of content to produce to lure your potentials.

1. As your business is hyperlocal, you must build a list of localized keywords and phrases to target the local audience and communicate with them.

2. Competitive analysis could also help you understand the keywords that bring the most traffic to your competition. It is like outsmarting your competition and focusing on the keywords relevant to you and your competition.

3. Google keyword planner and “People also ask” sections are yet other excellent options to find out your customers’ queries.

4. Tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, Keyword Planner, Ubersuggest, Moz, etc., could also be a part of your keyword research strategy.

 

 

On-Page SEO

 

On-page SEO is the process of optimizing individual web pages for search engines and users. User experience, dwell time, search intent, CTR, etc., are some of the additional factors to keep in mind while optimizing a page for on-page SEO.

 

 

On-Page Optimization Tips:

 

-Keep your focused keyword close to the beginning of the title tag.

-Have a descriptive meta description that could help readers analyze what they could expect on the page. The meta description is significant for the click-through rate, and you must also add your focused keyword atleast once.

-Have a content analysis of all the top pages ranking for your target keyword. Then, analyze what all extra information could be added and create a unique and descriptive guide. For example, you could add relevant images, videos, and infographics to give the best experience to the users.

-There are generally four types of search intent:

-informational

-Transactional

-Comparison

-Navigational

Hence you should be crystal clear on what’s the intent and create content accordingly.

-Adding FAQ schema could help to get more clicks.

-Inter-linking to other blogs is super important to boost the under-performing pages. It also helps spiders to navigate easily in your site architect.

– “Latent Semantic Indexing” or LSI keywords are the synonyms that help crawlers understand the relevancy of your page.

-Use descriptive image-file names and make sure that you put the right information about the image in ALT tags.

 

 

Local SEO

Local SEO is the method by which you optimize your website for local search results. You would be amazed to know that around 46% of Google searches are meant for local queries, as per a report by HubSpot. Also, from a real estate marketing perspective, local SEO plays the most important role in the local results when a particular person is interested in a property of a given location.

 

 

Get your account set on Google My Business, Bing Local, and other local listing websites. 

 

By taking this step, you ensured that Google knows about your business name, location, and phone number to show to the relevant people.

After listing your business on Google My Business, you must complete every section and be consistent with the contact information. In addition, you should upload relevant photos and videos and Google posts regularly and set up messaging. Also, positive reviews are more important than ever for your local listing and appearance in front of the local audience.

 

 

Ensure that you have your presence on every possible online business directory:

 

A business marketplace list out the businesses based on their activity, niche, location, etc. When you put correct information like NAP consistently across all directories, Google recognizes your authority more. Thus it would help if you got your website listed on the following directories and more.

Zillow

Realtor.com 

Trulia

LoopNet 

HotPads 

Homes.com 

Movoto 

LandWatch

 

 

Focus on local keywords:

 

As you optimize your website for local SEO, you need more local traffic leads and conversions. If the local traffic is relevant for your business, you must target the trending keywords in a particular location. Google Keyword Planner could be an excellent option to filter out the most popular keywords in your target region. This particular approach of communicating with the local audience with local keywords increases your relevancy and authority in the eyes of search engines.

After listing out the most important keywords, you must create content around it and follow all the factors like optimizing title tag, meta tag, right URL, and other factors mentioned above.

 

 

Off-Page SEO

Of page, SEO is the practice of gaining websites from other websites to yours. Backlinks are still relevant criteria if you want to rank higher on SERP results. You could create high-quality content that is link-worthy. 

-Get backlinks from online directories

-Outreach to websites linking to your competition

-Guest blog on relevant real-estate websites

-Use HARO to get editorial links

-Inter linkings are a major factor for ranking.

 

 

How can FinEndorse help your real state business with SEO?

 

FinEndorse has a team of SEO industry experts who could create a custom SEO strategy for your business. We at first perform the SEO and content audit and improve the errors if any. Then, we help real-estate websites with on-page, off-page, local SEO and create high-quality content that is link-worthy and valuable to your audience. Finally, we do keyword research with customer persona and mind and create content for the prospects at every stage in the customer journey.

Our proven SEO strategies could help you get relevant traffic from your specific target location, thereby bringing more qualified leads for your business from search engines and establishing you as an authority, and connecting you with your prospect at every stage to power you to close more deals and sales.

Muskan Verma

Muskan Verma have always had a passion for writing and as a result, she is currently enrolled in a Masters program in English.