10 Simple Steps to gain more engagement,Fundamentals SEO good practices for Real Estate Websites Articles traffic, and higher ranking on search engine result pages
Competitor Analysis (SWOT)
Keyword Research/Analysis
Contents Management
Blog Content (sub-domain)
Links Building
Social Media
Youtube Google Operators such as Google My Business, Images Searches
Google Operators such as Google My Business, Images Searches
Optimize for Voice Searches (for the future and NOW!)
Structured Data/Schema Markup (Technical SEO)
One of the oldest business and investment forms in the world is in real estate. As a buyer, a seller, or as an agent the competition is very strong. Competition in the field of real estate has and always will be very competitive. Since the beginning, becoming a real estate agent was to find a property for sale from a seller and to find a willing buyer.
However as time changes, the real estate industry has quickly adapted with advancement for technology and data-driven information. Today the real estate industry turns into a data-driven market with instant information and results.
The best way for buyers and sellers to find information on properties they wish to purchase is typing in Google. If you are a real estate company, and have a website, this is your opportunity to grow your business.
We will go through 10 simple actionable steps on how to increase your real estate website ranking, engagement, and traffic through simple SEO tips to dominate local searches.
1. Always Start With Competitor Analysis
If you want to make something great, you should always start with competitor analysis. Best practice and way to understand the market is analyzing what your competitors are doing well.
Ask yourself few simple questions:
What are your competitors not doing well? And doing great?
What unique keywords are they using differently to rank high?
What are the top 5 ranking pages?
On the other hand, you should check real estate websites that are not ranking well on various search engines to create a SWOT analysis on why these competitors for yours are not ranking well.
2.Keywords Analysis/Research
Above we have slightly mentioned keywords, and now we are going to detail keywords. Keywords are the primary focus to rank high on SERP. Without keywords, there is no SEO and vice versa. When doing keyword research it is important to understand the three forms for keywords.
One word: Keyword
Two – three words keywords phrase
Long-tail keywords
One word keyword
They are competitive keywords that all businesses want to rank for on SERP. For example, let’s use the word, London, while trying in the keyword “London” on the search engine. Google provides various links, answers, wikipedia pages, and even images results. If you are a real estate broker in London, that is a keyword all your competitors want to rank for you on Google first page.
Two-Three Keyword Phrase
This is an interesting part. Two-three keyword phrases are competitive with a search volume between 5,000 – 10,000 monthly searches local. Global volume searches can generate high traffic. Stick to the previous example, two-three keyword phrases are where your audience are typing London best flats. Now they might be a different type of competition. As some of your competitors are not even in the area. You can challenge that and create amazing content to let users land on your landing pages.
Long-Tail Keyword
Long-Tail Keywords are interesting to compete with. Long-tail keywords provide less competition than the two previous keywords recommended. Long-tail keywords provide low competition, but for real estate companies, you will find the right lead. Long-tail keywords search volume per month is around 80, the highest you can find. You should use this for buyers who are interested in buying, but they do not need any more information.
Long-tail keywords are for buyings who are ready to purchase a property and just want to know the steps of becoming a homeowner. In a marketing funnel, long-tail keywords are for buyers who are ready to take action, and become a proper lead.
3. Content Management
Bill Gates once said, “Content is king, and marketing is queen”. To understand content you have to first ask yourself. What does the word content mean for you? You can ask 50 marketers and everyone will give a different answer. There might be some similarities, but content these days are just not long-written form content. In a niche market like real estate, content marketing is paramount to reach your target audience. There are various ways to reach your audience with long-form written content, videos, images, podcasts, 3D visuals.
You would need a proper content management software system to keep all your content on a software. A popular software for example is wordpress, to keep all your contents on one trusted management software. Google does prefer older content which has been indexed into Google database before. You should update your older content, as information as people consume content which is data-driven.
Having a good content management system in place is ideal, but you should not forget the next step which is content discovery. There are various strategies for users to discover your content and we will go into details later. One of the main ways to discover content is by SEO. Optimizing your content with targeted search queries and keywords.
4.Blog Contents/Visual
Content Management is paramount to schedule and keep track of your topics, ideas, and to have coherent ideas between text content and visual contents. Later on will go into details on how visual contents are gaining popularity among users and search engines pages like, primarily Google.
To create content is by first setting up a brief between the copywriter, the SEO expert, the data analysis, and manager on the types of content which will rank high on search engines, are our users going to consume the content, and is the content going to gain wide popularity among new audiences.
Especially in a niche market such as real estate, where you have to understand the user’s journey on how they can reach the point of purchase. Secondly you would need to identify the personas as well.
Two main categories where each of the team members have to come up for blog contents or content to upload to rank higher for landing pages.
The SEO expert is there for keyword research, internal linking placement, and how to find good external backlinks, where other webmasters will want to share your content. You have to remember that backlinks are a priority for SEO.
Secondly, the copywriter is there to write out amazing content for better engagement where audiences feel they are connected with the brand. The copywriter is like the fix-it person. As brands and audiences need to connect via the internet. The copywriter needs to be the bridge, needs the content to be.
Thirdly, data analysis is there to inform about trendy topics that bring users to your website. Real estate websites are about bringing in as many users to the website and becoming members. The marketing funnel for sales is a long process. To purchase property is not a light decision that you should take. With so much information out there, data analysis is there to provide data-informed context on topics that users like from your brand.
The idea for writing content is easy, but to generate engagement, to rank high on search result pages, and to solve a problem for users via informed data take time to write quality content. In the real estate sector, time is an important decision between users and leads. However, time is not in the right direction as things change very quickly.
5.Link Building
The third pillar for SEO. SEO has three important pillars.
Technical SEO
Contents
Popularity (Link Building)
If Google thinks you are popular and have lots of backlinks and referring domains pointing to your site. Well it means you have authority over your market. In real estate, having authority is important. You want to rank higher on search engines results pages, 33.3% of your SEO strategy is on link buildings.
In the real estate industry, where you are using similar keywords with each other competitor to gain a competitive edge. Even using semantic search phrases by adding long-tail keywords, your competitors will be doing it as well.
But the link building strategy is where you can gain a competitive edge from your peers.
Real estate companies need to rank well for their terms in order to get more leads. This is where SEO comes in. SEO is the backbone of any digital marketing strategy and it’s important that real estate companies implement it in their strategy as well.
The following are some link building tips for real estate companies:
– Optimize your website for various search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and others.
– Create original content for your website and blog to share on other sites like LinkedIn, Medium, Quora etc.
– Connect with other websites by exchanging links with them.
– Use social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter etc., to create a buzz around your company’s name and content that you have created or shared on these platforms.
Link building strategy comes after creating contents. As content is king, link building is for bloggers, journalists, or your peers to point links back to you. As you have created an original piece of content that is informative for your audiences. In Brian Dean words, create content that you want “Linkreators” to link back to your content. There are many ways for link building strategies.
We have mentioned only one, by creating original problem-solution contents. Or the other strategy is by guest posting on various blogs sites about real estate. You are the real estate company and an expert in the industry. It is important to have authority over your site, and to have effectiveness in your website.
6. Social Media
In the age of social media, it is crucial that real estate agents use social media to reach a wider target audience and elevate their business. This post will provide you with some tips on how to optimize your social media for higher reach.
Real Estate SEO in 2022 is different from the SEO of today. In order to stay ahead of the competition, you need to focus on content management with the support of social media for a wider content discovery for people to know about your brand. Even if your real estate company is geared towards locals. Social media is a good platform to have a wider reach. Pro Tip: social media might not reach the right lead, but with a wider audience, they will be the right lead coming in.
Contents that users consume are informative, educational, and entertaining. For social media, you want a perfect balance of entertaining and informative. Test the waters with various graphics, videos, or motion graphics. Even for websites and blog content, social media are a great way to redirect users and traffic to your website.
The tips for Real Estate SEO in 2022 are:
– Leverage social media for higher reach
– Create content that is engaging and shareable
– Optimize your site for mobile devices
– Build a blog with valuable content
– Create high quality content with keywords in mind
– Use hashtags that are relevant to your niche
– Use platforms like Facebook or Instagram Stories for visual content
– Engage with other influencers in your industry
7. Google Operators such as Google My Business, Images Searches
The following are 10 tips on real estate SEO to help you improve organic search traffic onto your website or proptech web page. This is the 7th handy tip especially for local SEO searches. Google likes it when your website is on internet directories. You have an address, a postcode, a landline number, and a location on Google very own maps. You have a physical store, and now you can use Google’s many operators to your advantage and have an edge over your competitors.
These are 3 handy uses for Google operators.
1) Create a Google My Business Page – This is a free service from Google that allows you to create a business listing and manage it from one central dashboard. By creating a GMB page, you can get your company name and contact information in front of potential customers when they search for businesses like yours.
2) Optimize Your Website for Search Engines – This includes ensuring your website is mobile-friendly, using keywords in the title tags and meta descriptions, and using keywords in the text content on your site. This is very important. Since 2017, Google search queries are leading from mobile devices. Google data represents that mobile usage has taken desktop searches.
So when you are optimizing for your content, use Google Search Console to analyze keywords for mobile search queries, to increase organic search traffic.
However users use mobile search queries for quick research. Target audience still purchase through desktop webpages or to your physical location.
3) Optimize Your Listings for Search Engines – If you’re also listing properties for sale or rent on other sites, and use social media and Youtube video searches to your advantage. More on that later.
The SEO process is a long and arduous one, and you need to be patient if you want your website or proptech web page to rank well on Google.
Add Custom Titles And Meta Descriptions To Your Web Pages
Custom Titles are blue links that use click to enter your website. Meta descriptions are snippets for what users can expect by clicking on the title link. Pro tip uses actionable verbs to acquire new users to click on your link on SERP.
8. YouTube
The real estate industry is one of the most competitive industries in the world. This is because there are so many companies that offer similar services and products. In this section, we will talk about how YouTube can increase users, increase organic search traffic, and backlinks for proptech companies in the real estate industry.
YouTube has 1 billion active users every month who spend over an hour on the site on average. As listed above, Google search operators consider YouTube videos to be considered on their SERP. As the second largest search engine in the world after Google and it has more than 5 billion searches per day which means that it has more than 3x as many searches as Google does each day
YouTube can be used to create videos that are informative, entertaining, and engaging to your target audience. Your users consume an average of 1,500 contents per day on various platforms. One of the leading contents is visual content. Google ranking YouTube videos on their search engines, means it’s time to use it for your advantage
Especially local real estate companies to go out and film amazing project videos. As with real estate it’s better to see with your eyes. YouTube can be used to create videos that are informative, entertaining, and engaging to your target audience. On the platform you can create videos such as:
Project viewing: stunning long-shots, drone shots,
User Journey – on what steps it takes to purchase a house
What can you as a business provide valuable service to your audience?
Real estate SEO can be a great way to stand out from the competition and get ahead of your competitors.
YouTube can be a very powerful marketing tool for real estate companies. It has been found that Youtube videos can increase users, increase organic search traffic, and backlinks for proptech companies.
9. Voice Search
The future has arrived with: voice searches.
Voice is the next frontier of search. Voice-activated devices are taking over our homes with more than 10 million people now using them to control their smart homes or find a recipe on the internet. In fact, voice-activated devices are becoming so popular that they will soon overtake the number of people who use a keyboard or mouse to navigate their computers.
The first step in optimizing your property listings is making sure they have been optimized for voice searches by including keywords in your listing title and description that match what a person might say when searching with their voice on an AI. For quick and clear to the point voice searches with answers, it builds trust. Trust is what both users like and Google love.
10. Structured Data Map (Technical SEO)
Structured data markup is a way to tell search Mahogany Bay Belize engines about the content on a webpage. It helps them understand what you’re trying to say in a more efficient way, and it can also be used to provide information about the website’s content, like reviews or opening hours.
Schema markup is an open standard that enables rich snippets in search engine results pages. This means that when Google indexes your page, it will not only show you as one of the results but also show some extra information like reviews or opening hours right beneath your URL.
This is an important step for both SEO and usability because it helps Google index your website better, which will ultimately lead to more people finding you through search engines.