What is Real Estate SO?
The SEO for Real Estate companies involves the application of search engine optimization techniques for the websites of individual real estate agents or agencies to boost their website ranking to the first page of Google, ideally top rank. Although generic SEO techniques are fully applicable to the real estate sector, there are specific strategies that one must utilize to achieve the best results due to the peculiarities of this sector.
SEO Challenges faced by Real Estate businesses:
The online market of the real estate sector is dominated by either large corporations or Real estate listing aggregator websites, which gives the small businesses little room to grow. Without a very well-designed real estate SEO strategy, it is tough for a small agency to compete and outrank large websites to Attract traffic to its real estate website.
That said, few real estate agents and agencies have devoted significant effort and resources to improve on the search engine optimization of their websites, which have opened up new opportunities for them. By implementing the right strategies, they have managed to transform their real estate website into an asset that continually brings in new customers. You can achieve that kind of result for your business too. It’s all about finding and implementing the right strategies.
REAL ESTATE SEO: HOW DOES IT WORK?
SEO strategies for real estate businesses involve creating long term marketing plan (6 months or more) that aims to bring targeted traffic to the website. A successful campaign requires creating quality content that provides useful information to the website visitors and generates leads. Optimizing the technical aspect of website and SEO is very important, which involves developing a responsive website, optimizing HTML, CSS, and images to improve the site speed and provide the visitors with the best user experience.
Given the unpredictable nature of Search engine algorithms and digital media in general, it’s quite difficult to assert how long the SEO campaign will take to bring results. However, a well-planned campaign using the best strategies leads to increased chances of success in the shortest possible time. At the Social SEO team, we’ve obtained excellent results for hundreds of real estate businesses in the USA, Canada, UK, and Australia for the last seven years.
Here are the steps for creating a successful SEO campaign for a real estate business.
Phase 1: Organize and configure the real estate website.
The first step of any real estate SEO project knows the starting point. Analyze and check if the website is functional and user-friendly. Create fluid navigation and fix any usability errors.
It is necessary to set concrete objectives to plan the architecture of your real estate website. Conduct keyword research to find the best keywords by which your potential clients will find your site. Implement analytics tools like Google Analytics to monitor the behaviour of the visitors of the website.
Phase 2: Build a solid foundation with high-quality content.
Content in the king. And to become a real estate magnet, you must create a website with high-quality content.
Create a content-rich website by following these steps. The main pages should contain information about the company and its services. Create a real estate blog section on your website to offer your visitors with the latest real estate news, and updates. You must ensure to update your content regularly with the best information to convert visitors into customers. High-quality content is essential to increase the positioning of your real estate website.
In addition to the creation of content, you must structure and optimize the content in your real estate to improve its performance in search engines.
Phase 3: Content marketing and link building for business growth.
Once you’ve created and optimized the main parts of the real estate website are developed, it is time to create a strategy to promote the site on the internet. The creation of content must follow a specific plan and frequency, as well as opportunities to increase traffic through social networks. Further, you must create a niche-focused link building campaign to boost the authority of your website.
Phase 4: Maintain the lead and set new goals.
Once you’ve achieved the initial goal of bringing in new clients, it is necessary to continue working on updating the content of your website. You must use content marketing and link building to bring even more clients to your business and to establish yourself as an authority on real estate buying and selling in your area. Real estate SEO is a continuous work that involves the setting of new objectives, finding new keywords, more traffic, and more customers.
Organic Traffic vs paid traffic for real estate websites
SEO is one of those terms that everyone knows, but very few understand. It is essential to understand what organic traffic means: Organic Traffic is the traffic your website receives through Google and other search engines for which you are not paying anything. Your real estate website appears in the top positions, and users click on it.
In addition to organic traffic, it is also possible to pay to bring visitors to your real estate website. The SEM Real Estate or (Search Engine Marketing) is the area specialized in managing digital real estate advertisement campaigns to achieve the highest number of visitors with the lowest possible cost and, finally, the highest number of sales and profitability for each dollar invested.
The magic of real estate SEO lies in the fact that once your website has reached the top position on search engines, maintaining that position is possible with minimal continuous SEO work. Achieving the top spot makes your real estate website a great asset and a constant source of new clients for your real estate agency.
Real Estate SEO: What does not work:
Due to the high competition in search engines, reaching dominant positions requires doing a lot of things well. That’s why you must consider some actions that don’t yield any results and can hurt your business. These are some frequent examples in most real estate websites:
A large number of properties:
– Posting a large number of properties, without any real estate SEO strategy. Many real estate agencies believe that having a large number of real estate (own or shared) will lead them to have a large number of requests for information. This usually has a negative impact as it dilutes the focus of marketing campaigns. The more property you post, you more you must invest in marketing. That’s why at the beginning, real estate businesses must focus on a small number of highly valuable properties for the best bang on your bucks.
Unfocused content strategy
– Real estate website with content without a plan for publishing, promoting, and creating links. Creating and optimizing content is essential, but it is only part of the web positioning strategy for real estate agents, and without an appropriate link strategy and increasing the authority of your real estate website, it will not be enough.
Mediocre content.
If your goal is to attract visitors and then turn them into customers, the content must be excellent. Only the best content will rank for competitive keywords, and for this, it is necessary to know about both digital marketing and real estate.
Real Estate SEO: What does work.
An effective real estate SEO plan has a good number of aspects, and all of them must be executed to achieve your goals:
1.- Build a domain with authority.
One of the most relevant factors to achieve a good search engine position is to build an authority website. You can have the best articles, but if Google does not value your real estate website, you will not get any visitors. Simply put, a domain of authority and high-quality, optimized content are the keys to success. The main way to achieve this is regularity and frequently getting quality backlinks to your real estate website, distributed between the home or main page and inner pages of your website. Also, a catchy brand name also helps to instill the confidence of customers in your business.
2.- Local focused content strategy.
A point of great importance in real estate SEO is to get visitors in the form of people who can access your services, usually living near you, or looking to buy or sell a property in your area. By creating local content and getting other companies and websites to share and link your content, you will be perceived as an authority on Real estate and be able to compete at that level with large companies and real estate websites.
3.- Long-tail keywords
Creating content for your real estate website, competing for the first position for the term “Real Estate + your city,” can be very difficult. So as a small real estate business owner, you must focus on finding the best long-tail keywords for your business. Long-tail keywords are usually easier to rank. Using this strategy will give your business a head start you need without worrying about outranking the large corporations.
4.- Interesting content that get shared in social networks.
One of the factors Google uses to know if an article or web page is pleasing is by analyzing its dissemination in social networks. The theory is that if a webpage has been shared by lots of users in social networking websites like Twitter and Facebook, then it must be a quality article.
5. – Create useful resources related to real estate
: In addition to creating informative content on your real estate blog, you must create guides, and tips on life in your city, and the cities you operate in, information on the process of buying or selling a property. You should also provide real estate investment resources to your website visitors. This kind of guides will make your business more trustworthy and help with improvement in ranking on Search engines.
6.- Plan for Long term
Real Estate SEO strategies require months or even years to show results. Many of your competitors will choose to carry out advertisement campaigns that bear fruit from day one, forgetting about real estate SEO. In my view, it’s ideal to combine both strategies to get the best results in the short and long term. If you were able to create a real estate website that in one year gets you, prospect clients, every day while you sleep, would you do it? Of course, yes! So, keep in mind sticking to deadlines and being consistent is very important to carry out any search engine optimization strategy for real estate.
7.- Use photos and videos on your real estate website.
Good quality pictures and videos are essential for a real estate website to generate visitor interest in the properties you’re selling. Most prospective buyers want to have a basic idea or how a property looks like before contacting the agents. That’s why you must take high-quality pictures of the interior and the exterior of the property. Also, you must optimize and tag the images properly for high ranking in Google Image search.
8.- Create a Responsive website.
Smartphones have already outpaced computers for local searches. That’s why you must create a responsive website for your real estate business. If your website function appropriately on smartphones and tablets, you’ll not lose sales from people using these devices.
9.- Personal and professional information.
As a professional working in a real estate agency, you must develop a specific page with information on each person on your team. Many people look for real estate agents name on Google and Bing looking to know more about them before choosing them as a real estate agent. Make sure that you have a complete profile of yourself with work experience on your website. Further, it’ll also help to create a profile for yourself in real estate directories.
How to find the right keywords for your real estate SEO campaigns?
The first step is to create a list of possible seed keywords in the real estate sector by seeing through the point of view of your potential clients. Ask yourself this question, if you were a potential customer for your business, what keywords would you search in Google to look for your business? Most likely it’d be real estate + city or town. Once you’ve figured out the keyword, you must think of other variations for the keywords. For example, real estate agency + city, or sale or apartments in + neighborhood”, or apartments in + neighborhood/town. After you’ve created a list of seed keywords, it’s time to generate more related search terms using keyword research tools.
There are also a good number of tools that can help us know which keywords are the most useful, based on the number of people who use them (Traffic) and the difficulty in ranking each of them (competition) on search engines. These tools will help you to discard difficult and unrelated keywords and prioritize your objectives.
Here are the best keyword research tools for Real Estate business:
Google Keyword Planner: Google Adwords keyword planner is a free keyword research tool by Google. It’s very easy to use. Just enter the seed keywords, and it’ll give you a series of related long-tail keywords, as well as information on the number of searches and the difficulty in reaching the top positions for each of them.
SemRush : Although most features of this tool are paid, this powerful SEO software provides some basic user data in its free version of both keywords and the position of your website or that of your competitors. This feature-rich software will help you create the best content marketing strategy for your strategy. The best way to win with a real estate SEO strategy is to conduct proper competition analysis and keyword research and create the best SEO strategy to outrank your competition and win more customers for your Real estate business.
If you have any questions related to Real Estate SEO or want to add something to guide. Go ahead and post your thoughts and questions in the comment box.
