Tackling SEO for real estate is difficult. It requires a unique blend of hyper-local information and broad content.
How does your real estate brand use content to rank higher? What tips and strategies does a real estate SEO expert use to achieve access, and how can you adopt them into your SEO strategy?
These experts have worked with companies and brands dominating the real estate SEO sphere, and here’s a compilation of their best strategies and tips for increased organic market share.
But first…
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Understanding Real Estate SEO
Imagine you are the customer and want to purchase a home. While several factors come to mind, how and where do you start?
Over 97 percent of home buyers will visit Google during the search process. These customers get millions of results in a few seconds. Despite the variety of choices, you are more likely to click on the top search engine results.
However, the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) layout is continuously changing. Instant answers, local map packs, and advertisements are now affecting visible organic rankings. The resulting effort for increased internet visibility, establishing brand awareness, boosting site traffic, and netting home buyers have become more stressful and tedious than ever!
Plus, competition is tough as the number of real estate businesses, realtors, and other professionals increases. While creating a site and publishing content is a go-to marketing option, it’s not enough to stand out.
What’s the solution? A proper SEO for real estate strategy can come into play to help your firm’s site be on top of the SERPs, drive leads, and increase a good return on your investment.
Top SEO Strategies and Tips for Real Estate
Here are a few SEO strategies experts recommend for the real estate niche.
Create Multiple Content Pieces For the Same Topic, But Use Different Keywords
The first step to conquering real estate SEO is creating several pieces of content around the same topic.
The more content your firm has, the more opportunities you have to target desired keywords. For instance, “house” and “home” or “rental” and “rent” searches bring in large search volumes.
Picture trying to rank for the keywords “homes for rent.” Search engines such as Google will not recognize you as the subject authority. But you can build on your SEO strategy for better results by:
- Creating a series of blog posts featuring in-depth, long-form content.
- Considering your customer needs are beyond the decision to rent or buy.
- Expanding your content to help your online customers over specific challenges based on what they are searching for.
To stay ahead in the real estate game, you need quality content. However, quantity is also critical. As you find the keywords your customers are looking for, you are in a better position to create enough quality content to target the keywords.
Come Up With City-Specific Content
Google uses a specialized search engine algorithm that focuses on local content. This presents you with a massive opportunity to get traffic from local searches.
Search engines are looking to provide their users with the most useful and relevant information, especially for real estate SEO—so, they return local results.
Real estate SEO services can help you be useful and local by creating content for your location’s:
- Sports teams
- Shopping and restaurant districts
- Points of pride, attractions, and landmarks
- Neighborhoods and schools
Provide Online Tools
Online tools are in high demand. They have the highest search volume in the entire real estate vertical. The tools are mid-stage content that provides your company with the ability to engage with your customers early in their shopping journey.
Your target audience is in love with these tools. As any real estate SEO expert would say, these are the most widely searched calculators:
- Mortgage payment calculator
- Best mortgage calculator
- Home loan calculator
- Investment property calculator
- FHA mortgage calculators
- Cost of purchasing a home calculator
- Real estate calculator
The SEO professional can guide you on how to install one of these calculators on your website.
Align Your Site With Reputable Publishers
This involves contributing content, re-targeting, or advertising on publishers with high visibility within your niche.
Content contribution to reputable publishers in the industry is one of the most important SEO services for real estate agents. This helps ensure some of their brand authority rubs off against your business. It borrows from the “you are the company you keep” adage, and Google also views these links as trust signals you are a niche authority.
Some top-performing sites in the real estate industry where you can publish your content include:
- US Mortgage Calculator
- Nerd Wallet
- Mortgage Calculator (with .net and .org)
- Realtor
- Bankrate
Ensure Your Website Is Mobile-friendly
Handheld devices are changing the way businesses interact with their potential renters and buyers.
According to research by the National Association of Realtors profiling home buyers and sellers in 2020, more than 62 percent of home buyers use mobile phones to search for homes. Younger buyers are more likely to rely on their handhelds, with 58 percent finding their current homes on smartphones. Over 67 percent of renters are using mobile phones to find apartments.
Looking at these statistics on customer behavior and preferences, it’s clear that brands must ensure they optimize their sites for all devices. Plus, Google has adopted mobile-first indexing that optimizes your site’s mobile version.
Steps in Doing SEO for Real Estate
To make sure they do everything right, professional real estate SEO companies follow a specific approach when handling SEO for your website. The steps below summarize the process:
- Locating and analyzing your competitors to inform themselves on the right content to create and improve on strategy
- Auditing the current SEO efforts to ensure the best performance
- Zeroing down on the keywords critical for success
- Optimizing your Google My Business (GMB) listing, so interested customers can easily find and walk into your physical office for information
- Optimizing content, so it becomes easy for your target audience to find it
- Implementing blogger outreach to improve on authority link building
Drive More Traffic to Your Real Estate Site
To sell or rent out more properties and homes, you need to invest in the best SEO strategy. A real estate SEO expert can help you get closer to your dream as you focus on developing your business!
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