Digital platforms like Google, Yahoo, and Bing use a process called search engine optimization (SEO) to generate top-ranked results of their users’ searches. Hence, being a real estate agent with a mastery of SEO for your website is critical. This is because it serves as a key factor to achieve a higher ranking within the first few pages on popular search engines (regarding the content is relatable to the search). You can read the Real estate content marketing Guide for more information.
This being said, there are several steps to apply effective SEO in your real estate websites to ensure that the content appears prominent in digital platforms’ search engine results pages (SERP).
Choose the Right Keywords
The first step is choosing the right keywords to employ on your website. There are some free online platforms, such as keyword tools and keywordseverywhere, which could help you in this exercise.
Be forewarned though that these keyword generators would typically offer plenty of suggestions. This thus boils down to you making your own choice. To have a better judgment call, it would be best to establish beforehand who your target audience is/are.
Read More: Creating Customer Personas for Real Estate Marketing
Put yourself into the target customers’ shoes, and think of the words they’d type into a search engine like Google. Consult your friends and relatives too, as well as your current or previous clients. In coming up with the keywords that best drive SEO in real estate, you can likewise scout your competitors’ websites and take note of what they’re using to further broaden your keyword ideas.
Go for the Right Keyword Density
Avoid what Google calls as keyword “stuffing,” which entails placing too many keywords strongly relating to the main topic of the website content. To get the most of SEO in real estate, some webmasters lean towards just one keyword per page.
Search engines like Google strive to deliver a better user experience. Therefore, high keyword density could be considered as search spam and eventually rank poorly in SERP.
Read More: How to Find Your Real Estate Niche
Find Keywords Synonyms
Improve your website’s search engine visibility through keywords within their natural context. Online articles that use keywords synonyms come out natural and work best for SEO in real estate.
This approach makes your website score well in latent semantic indexing (LSI). Google and other digital search platforms use LSI to compare and study relationships between different concepts and terms. With LSI’s take on keywords synonyms, you can achieve higher SERP rankings and wider audience reach.
Use Long-tail Keywords
All real estate is local which makes its keyword choices often geo-specific. This geo-centric industry character augurs well for SERP rankings, as it opens the opportunity to use long-tail keywords more naturally.
Long-tail keywords consist of two or more words and the resulting phrases create a more focused online search. For purposes of SEO in real estate, long-tail keywords would typically include a specific city, region, or community (e.g., homes for sale in Toronto). Since the keywords are more specific, conversion value will usually be higher although the traffic generated is lower.
Create Good and Varied Content
Post quality content flawlessly weaving your keywords so that SEO in real estate can contribute much to your marketing success. Your website content, more than providing information on your services, should also flesh out your broader business objectives via interesting and high-quality content. We have a great article about How to write a blog post for a real estate website That you can read it for more information
Create a mix of marketing content that stirs wide consumer interest. Potential topics can include subjects that help cultivate your community presence, such as industry news, personal stories, product updates, and opinion pieces. For more variety, you can source top-level content ideas from major trade and industry publications.
Use Optimized Photos
It’s a given that you have to use pictures or images and captions relevant or matching your marketing content. But more than this, any photo or image supporting the content has to be optimized, meaning the file size has to be reduced for low loading times and easier page access.
This optimization process contributes much to your marketing content ranking favorably on image search engines like Google.
Master the Art of Linking for real estate SEO
The dynamics of SEO in real estate, as in other online content, put much weight on link building. This process essentially facilitates the interconnection of web pages to enable users’ access to additional relevant online data.
The craft of linking for SEO advantage involves building internal and external hyperlinks. Also called inbound links, internal links are hyperlinks that lead a user to a separate page on your website. On the other hand, external links send a user to a different website but whose information/messages support an element or topics in your marketing content.
Deep linking is the way to go in connecting your marketing content to other websites. On all occasions, your external hyperlink should connect to a searchable, indexed or specific piece of web content and not just on its home page.
In sum, link building activity is critical for SEO in real estate to deliver results. It allows you to highlight the most important points in your content that your target market is looking for.