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Want to increase organic traffic, generate quality leads, and make your real estate website authoritative in search engines such as Google? A well-optimized website can help you achieve these goals and more! 

While a high-powered PPC campaign for your realtor site can undoubtedly provide you with quality results over a short time, if you wish for long-lasting, consistent results, then you’ll need to go above and beyond.

We’ll go over the basics behind a sound real estate SEO strategy for your website to get your site found on Google. 

What Does SEO Mean for Real Estate?

Did you know that 93% of prospective purchasers use online websites for their home buying journey?

This percentage demonstrates that websites are not an extra feature for your real estate promotional strategy but rather a necessity. 

However, only counting on a website isn’t enough.

One common mistake real estate agents tend to make is using their website as an online business card. In other words, they don’t optimize it. 

As a result of failing to set a strategy for optimization, websites receive little to no organic traffic. This, in turn, limits their site’s and overall brand’s visibility on search engines such as Google and Microsoft networks. 

Due to the ongoing consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, people are getting more involved in looking for a place that allows them to relax while at the same time focusing on their new work-from-home modalities, resulting in a significant increase in home-buying-related searches for 2022.

Search engine optimization (a.k.a. SEO) focuses on organically growing your website for it to appear frequently on these searches. Put differently, it gets your business found online. 

An effective SEO strategy tailored for a real estate site ensures that it’s present to potential buyers at all stages of their journey, from finding the right broker to refurbishing their new house. 

Top SEO Benefits for Realtors

Investing in real estate SEO can provide you with many advantages. Here’s why you need SEO for your site:

• Increase organic traffic, leads, and conversions. 
• Build brand trust and credibility with your audiences. 
• Bring in a more targeted audience to your site.
• Your site will have an improved user experience.
• SEO results are long-lasting.

And the best part of it all is that these benefits are constant. That is to say; you don’t need to worry about results dropping due to scenarios such as a limited budget. 

Nevertheless, you must first have a clear picture of how SEO ranking works to reap these benefits. Let’s go over setting up your online search engine optimization strategy. 

Building a Real Estate SEO Strategy

A solid SEO strategy for Realtor websites must have a local SEO approach. It must focus on having your business become more visible on search results with local intent. 

Real estate-related searches often display localized SERPs, showing features such as the Local Pack and online business directories. 

For this reason, the recommendations we’ll mention ahead fixate on local search engine optimization. 

Keep these real estate SEO website tips in mind to achieve ideal positioning in SERPs:

• Perform effective keyword research.
• Great content positions your site.
• Add high-res photography.
• Google My Business creation.
• Build citations to increase trust.

Let’s go over each of these tips.

Perform Effective Keyword Research

Powerful, real estate SEO keywords are the foundation of your content marketing strategy. Therefore, you must know how to perform keyword research to choose your target topics for your site’s pages. 

Likewise, selecting long-tail keywords to form part of your content strategy increases your chances of appearing in voice searches. 

You can also analyze SERPs for each keyword to gather more insights, such as future keyword ideas and defining potential locations for your strategy. Stay on the lookout for places such as Google-related searches, autosuggestion, and “People Also Ask” sections.

Great Content Positions Your Site

To write real estate content with good SEO, you must follow specific guidelines.

Once you’ve chosen high-intent keywords that receive sufficient monthly searches and aren’t too competitive, you must assign the main keyword for a specific page. 

Doing so will facilitate optimizing said page by following tactics such as strategically placing it in the title tag, meta description, Headings, URL, and a few times inside the page’s content. 

Pro tip: Include the real estate’s location (city or state) in these spots. 

Furthermore, create an outline to provide structure to the page. You can make this outline by performing an SEO competitor analysis of the top organic results that appear on the keywords you’ve chosen for your strategy. You can check out which features are in these top-performing sites. 

Here are some important recommendations to follow to create an SEO-friendly landing page:

Once you’ve finished performing these steps, add related secondary keywords to the page’s assigned keyword inside its content. These keywords will help Google better picture the specific page’s topic. 

Lastly, avoid talking about different topics on one page, as Google won’t fully grasp its content. 

For instance, if the keyword you chose for a page talks about “homes for sale,” don’t mention real estate properties that don’t fall under the category of a home, such as commercial buildings or industrial warehouses.

Add High-Quality Photography

Real estate photography plays a significant role in buying a house. 

Because of this, photos are on up to 87% of real estate websites, according to Statista. 

Homes that have professional photographs sell much faster than those that don’t. Not only that, but real estate images also help potential purchasers get a complete picture of a property’s rooms and features. 

Nevertheless, many Realtor site owners tend to make some common mistakes regarding the images they choose for their website. 

Here are some guidelines to follow for your real estate images:

• Choose multiple unique, high-quality images over stock images.
• Be sure that the pictures you choose highlight the fantastic features of your real estate property. 
• Compress photos to avoid page speed issues.
• Use keywords on your pictures’ alt tags and names.
• Watermark your images.

Google Business Profile Creation

Have you ever noticed that whenever you’re searching for terms such as “real estate agencies” or “home for sale,” a map always appears on the results page?

This map is what we call a local pack. And for you to appear on it, you must have a Google Business Profile. 

Think of Google Business Profile as an online listing that makes your business visible on Google search results. Each of these listings appears on the map section of SERPs. 

Similar to your website, only creating a Business Profile for your real estate agent isn’t enough. You must also optimize it by adding essential information such as your business’s NAP (Name, Address, and Phone number), business hours and categories, website URL, and photos. 

Pro-tip: Asking customers to leave reviews on this profile can help boost your positioning in these local pack segments. 

Once you’ve added all of these data to your profile, make sure also to keep your profile active by regularly posting on it.

Build Citations to Increase Trust

Finally, citation building must be part of your real estate SEO strategy to increase your site’s authority. 

Citations are online mentions of your business’s NAP on other websites such as online directories. 

They act similar to backlinks as they are often links received from other reputable sites. Unlike backlinks, though, they don’t send link equity to your site as they’re no-follow links.

It doesn’t mean that they aren’t necessary. 

Citations help search engines such as Google verify your business’s legitimacy and trustworthiness. The more consistent your NAP information with these other sites, the more Google trusts your site and overall business. As a result, they are a crucial ranking signal for local searches. 

Furthermore, if your business is on these other sites, you’ll likely start generating more brand awareness.

Before starting your citation-building efforts, you must first begin performing a citation audit to ensure that your current citations and overall online mentions of your business are consistent. 

Next, focus on fixing any incorrect citations containing incorrect or outdated data. You can do this by reaching out to these sites. However, if you wish for a faster proceeding that’ll allow you to create citations on websites you don’t already have, we highly advise you to use paid online tools to help you out. 

Once you’ve fixed and submitted these new submissions, we encourage you to finish off by seeking any citations your competitors might have that you don’t submit your data as well on these sites. 

And that concludes our guide to building a successful real estate SEO strategy for your site! 

Remember that if you’re ever in need of professional help, you can rely on expert real estate SEO services. Have you audited your site lately? Our team will ensure that your site ends up with nothing but positive results for your site.