Use the power of SEO to increase your real estate business potential
Here at Muzz Web Design we are great believers in the power of real estate SEO. We believe that in order for you to be truly successful online you need to invest in SEO.
People are buying homes at much younger ages than they used to. Everyone now has a mobile phone and knows how to use it. When people are searching to find their perfect new home, the first thing they do is do online research.
Having a website is important, but without an SEO plan, no one will be able to find you. It’s not enough to have a website. You also need to make sure you’re showing up at the top of the search results when people type in your products or services. This is where a solid SEO strategy comes in.
I’m a fan of diving in with some general SEO knowledge before getting to know about real estate. It’s easier to understand SEO on the ground floor. Plus, the real estate industry is fairly new to the web. So it will be helpful to understand how the basics of SEO work.
Read on to learn:
What is real estate SEO
What are the benefits of implementing a real estate SEO strategy?
Real estate SEO as a lead generation engine
Real estate SEO tips: 17 steps checklist
What is the ROI of real estate SEO?
What is real estate SEO?
SEO for real estate is a way to make sure your website and related social media platforms are well optimized to help with the search process. It involves using certain words and phrases in your content and making sure they are consistent across the board.
In the past, if you wanted to be found online. You had to focus on getting great rankings in search engines for keywords. While that still works and can be helpful in certain cases. Now that the search engines have become much more sophisticated in how they view and ranks websites content. Great content has become more about providing the right information and experience for users. It’s become even more important to keep up with user expectations.
Keep in mind that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a long-term strategy. You should not expect to see results overnight. Instead, you can look at SEO as a way to implement your business goals, now and in the future. Many companies pour their SEO efforts into ranking on Google. There is no surprise there with Google dominating 88.83% of the search market.
But it’s not just about Google! Bing and Yahoo are other good search engines to optimize for. There is less competition in their alternative search engines so it will be easier to rank well in them.
What are the benefits of implementing a real estate SEO strategy?
As more and more realtors invest in SEO. Being visible online is critical to the success of a real estate business. Here are just a few reasons why you need to start building your SEO strategy.
You will also find that many of your competitors are still not familiar or are unwilling to invest in SEO. So this will give you a head start. Remember SEO is a long term strategy, so starting early is of paramount importance.
Increase traffic and revenue
There are numerous benefits to SEO. A stronger SEO strategy is a great way to increase your traffic. Not only will your traffic increase, but if you are publishing relevant content and keywords. You will be attracting more of the right audience with greater chances of becoming clients.
For me, this is why SEO is the most effective marketing channel. Unlike other forms of marketing where you are showing your content on the off chance that they may be interested in buying a home. The correct SEO strategy will bring you ONLY people that are looking to buy homes. They are finding you, not the other way round, another huge difference.
With the right conversions in place, you can turn that traffic into new revenue.
Boosts your brand
Quality content establishes your business as the go-to source of knowledge, which builds trust with your audience. When someone reads your content and gains value from it, they are positively interacting with your brand. The conversion rate increases with better brand awareness.
All too often on real estate websites, it´s all about the listings, there is little to no extra information. It´s just sell, sell, sell. We don´t care about anything else.
This brings natural mistrust for potential clients. However, if you were also to publish home-related content on your websites. For example, the best areas to live. What are the benefits of buying a home instead of an apartment, what are the disadvantages? Writing content about specific areas and what benefits they have to the homeowners there etc. etc.
This will gain a person’s trust because they see that you care about your customer and are providing them with invaluable information about choosing their homes. So they will trust your brand more and this is crucial.
Also, this will benefit your SEO as it shows that your content has deep contextual relevance. So it will rank higher.
Real estate SEO creates the best leads
A good real estate SEO strategy is one that is not only part of the marketing and sales funnel but is also integrated into your website. This allows it to create new points of entry for new leads to enter the funnel.
When you have a website, you must have conversion points. These include contact forms, newsletters, and other methods to ensure you keep your visitors engaged and informed.
While you want to appeal to everyone, you should tailor your approach to fit the needs of each person. For example, users searching for specific types of properties like homes for sale or houses for rent will have different needs and desires than people looking for other things like property for sale. The more focused your content is on the needs of a particular group, the better off you will be.
Real estate SEO tips: 12 steps checklist
It is a jungle of information out there. So to help get you started on building your SEO strategy, here are actionable must-know tips for SEO success.
1. Analyze your SEO competitors
You’ll always have competition in your market. It’s just a question of how good you are at beating them. If you know your competitors really well. You’ll know which keywords they are ranking for, and it’ll be easy to make changes to your site to be more competitive for those terms.
How do they structure their pages and their websites? Study and learn from their wins and mistakes, and you have a good starting point off which to build your own strategy.
2. Do your keyword research
To rank high on search engines. You need to find out which keywords your potential clients are typing in when they start their housing search. You then need to investigate which of these keywords are reachable, depending on how much search volume and competition there are for each keyword.
You can use search engine optimization (SEO) tools to discover the keywords your competitors are ranking for. You can also use it to find out what keywords you are already ranking for.
3. Look for long-tail keywords opportunities
A successful SEO keyword does not necessarily have to be a popular or common one. A long-tail keyword is a keyword or phrase that is very specific and usually does not have a lot of search volume. Long-tail keywords are also usually more niche. This means that if you find a keyword that is very relevant to your audience, you can more easily dominate rankings.
Examples of possible relevant long-tail keywords could be:
Luxury homes in Marbella
Affordable apartments in Fuengirola.
Best schools in Costa Del Sol.
4. Create good quality content with your clients in mind
As mentioned earlier, the main goal of SEO is to help visitors to your website find what they need. In SEO, content is king, so the top priority is having good quality content that is relevant to your keywords. It’s also important to not go overboard stuffing your content with your chosen keywords.
As we mentioned before, a good way to write content that people need and want is to focus on answering their questions. If you can get into the habit of answering what your potential customers are looking for, you can also build a reputation that they come back to when they need help.
5. Perform a full technical audit of your site
If you want to begin building a successful SEO strategy for your website, you should first have an understanding of how technically optimized your website is. These are elements on your website that you should look for:
general errors in your website
Make sure you have a good website structure and internal links.
Canonical and tags issues
Duplicate URLs and duplicate content issues
XML sitemaps and robots.txt file setup
Web security (SSL certification)
Negative SEO (harmful backlinks pointing to your website)
6. Prioritize solving crawling and indexing issues
Once you have audited your website for the appropriate technical elements, you should focus on fixing the issues that influence crawling and indexing. Without proper indexing, your website will lose its SEO value.
Crawlability issues can arise from a variety of sources. Some of the things that can happen when crawling a site include broken links, missing pages, outdated URL’s, and duplicates. If a website doesn’t have a sitemap, it can make it hard to keep track of pages that are still linked to but not accessible.
7. Have a local approach
If you’re a business, your customers should always be able to find your business. To do this, claim your Google My Business listing and optimize it for search to appear in the right locations.
Put your contact information where your users will find it! Make sure your contact information is visible, easy to access, and easy to change whenever necessary. This includes your email address, company name, contact phone number, and mailing address.
8. Get local backlinks to your real estate website
Just as in the real world, word-of-mouth referrals are key to growing a business online. A backlink is a link from another website to your own. A local backlink is therefore a link from a local online source, such as a business directory, a local newspaper website, or a blog.
Local backlinks provide a direct signal to search engines that your website is indeed a real, legitimate business. This also helps you get a higher PageRank for your site. Your PageRank will improve the higher the number of inbound links you receive. These links are important because they indicate to search engines that you are authoritative within your niche.
9. Monitor your keywords rankings
To keep track of your goals and report on your performance, it is essential to monitor the evolution of your keywords. You need to know which pages are ranking for those keywords so that you can make any tweaks or course changes to your strategy. Monitoring also helps you keep an overview of which pages need further optimization.
10. track your SEO performance
With Google Analytics and Google Search Console, it is easy to monitor how your SEO strategy is performing. Generally, you should see a gradual increase in organic traffic.
Everything from Impressions, click-through rate (CTR), time on page etc. can be monitored and with time SEO will improve all these metrics.
11. Have a well-functioning internal search engine
When a user is on your website. They prefer to use your internal search bar to find the things they are looking for. Make sure that your internal search bar shows the right pages without broken links and redirecting pages because a poor experience with your internal search engine could jeopardize your conversion rate.
Gaining insight into what your potential clients are looking for is an added benefit of having an internal search engine. This knowledge can be used to improve the experience for users.
12. Optimize your real estate website for mobile search
More and more people are searching on their mobile devices. So much so that many websites are automatically switched to mobile indexing first which means that Google only crawls the websites with mobile bots. These mobile bots treat your website the same as a mobile device, therefore, your website must be optimized for mobile users.
If your mobile bots are unable to easily navigate your website, your rankings will suffer. You should be working to make it as easy as possible for your visitors to access and use your content.
Conclusion
SEO can lead to incredible results, however, you have to understand that this is a long term strategy that will deliver results in the long term.
Also, SEO is complicated and has many factors. Therefore you should seriously consider hiring an SEO expert to do this for you.
You should look at SEO, not as a cost but as an investment for your real estate business. With a successful SEO strategy, your business growth and potential will reach their full potential.
