More Leads with Real Estate SEO

A REALTORS Guide to SEO

Although real estate Search Engine Optimization is more competitive and has some unique challenges, many of the steps involved in ranking real estate websites are the same as traditional website search engine marketing.

DO NOT BELIEVE a Web Developer that claims to “include” SEO in your website build

Below is the step by step process that real estate agents can use to get the search results they require for traffic and lead generation.

Below is not a list of real estate SEO tips but the full process to rank a real estate website.

The First Step is Local SEO

The first step in ranking your real estate website is getting the local SEO nailed down.  It has been said a million times…” real estate is local”.  That has never been more true than in the world of online real estate marketing.

The first step in establishing your local SEO is creating and claiming your Google My Business listing.  This will officially tell Google about your brand, your business name, business address, and business phone number.  Real Estate SEO experts call that your NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number).  A super important aspect of this process is ensuring that your NAP is consistent with your Google My Business account and your other online mentions such as Facebook, Twitter, and of course, your website.

Verifying your GMB account will usually require a postcard to be mailed to the business address claimed.  The postcard will contain a PIN – which you enter into GMB for verification.

Once your Google My Business account is created and verified, you will want to create/update citation accounts. Citation accounts are websites that reference your business online such as Facebook, Yelp, Yellow-pages, and Foursquare.  There are literally thousands of potential citation websites that you can create.  We can not stress enough how important it is to ensure that all citations have the identical NAP as you Google My Business listing.

The next Step is Keyword Research

Real Estate Keywords

Many of the brokers provided, agent websites act as if adding “real estate keywords” as meta tags to your real estate website will somehow make it magically outrank your local competition and even large real estate aggregates such as Zillow and Realtor.com.  This is absolutely silly.  Real estate SEO is much more than simply choosing your real estate keywords.  As a matter of fact, Google stopped looking at meta keywords as a ranking factor at all years ago.

That doesn’t mean that keyword research isn’t a major part of any SEO campaign and real estate keywords are no different.  You need to have an understanding of what you want to rank for.  That should be defined as the “main keywords” for any specific page.  Do you want to rank for *your city* real estate or *your city* homes for sale?  How many searches do the specific subdivisions in your area get?

What Should be Your Real Estate Keywords?

The obvious key-phrases are simply *your city* real estate or *your city* homes for sale.  In many instances, these can be the most searched keyword phrases but are not necessarily what keywords you should be going after.

Low Hanging Fruit Keywords

You will need to find specific key phrases that your potential clients are searching for that does not have a ton of competition.  These may be unique terminology that your area uses such as “shotgun homes” in New Orleans or “Boston Brownstones”.  If you dig deep and understand your client’s intent, you can find some keywords that the big boys have not gone after.  Large portals such as Zillow create all of the pages automatically.  This gives a definitive advantage to the custom-built page with unique content.  Finding some “low hanging fruit” should be your first step in real estate SEO keyword research.

Keyword Research for the Real Estate Industry

True Real Estate SEO experts will look a little deeper than simple “homes for sale” type searches.  You will also want to review latent semantic keywords to make sure you properly seed your content.

Your keyword research should include not only the obvious but every deviation of those keywords.  For instance, *your city* + homes for sale should also include:

• *your city + state abr* homes for sale
• homes for sale in *your city*
• homes for sale in *your city + state abr*
• *your city* real estate
• *your city + state abr* real estate
• *your city* real estate for sale
• *your city + state abr* for sale
• real estate *your city*
• real estate in *your city*
• real estate for sale *your city*
• all of the above with the state abbreviation
• similar search phrases with subdivisions
• similar search phrases with counties

keyword research is an important step in understanding what terms you want to rank for.

Each of these search phrases will have a different number of monthly searches, different levels of competition and ultimately the user (the person doing the search) will have a different intent.

With Google’s algorithm learning at lightning speed, today the correlation between keyword research and user intent is more important than ever.

Is there a different user intent if the search is *city* real estate vs waterfront condos for sale in *subdivision*?

Of course, there is.  The “real estate” search may be wanting statistics on the local market, or other general information on the real estate in the respective city.  Where the “condos for sale” search is expecting to see active listings in the respective condominium complex.

Coming up with your specific set of real estate keywords takes time and a methodical approach.

Complete a Website Audit

Now that your local SEO is in place and you have a good idea of what keywords you would like to be found for, the next step is completing an SEO website audit.

For most of you, your best bet in the website audit process is to either use a free, website audit tool like the one JustBaazaar SEO provides, you could also use specialty SEO tools like Screaming Frog, SEMrush, or SERPed.

A more expensive, but more thorough option is hiring an SEO agency to do a manual audit.  Depending on the size of your site, a manual SEO audit should start around $500 and go up from there.

Once you have the audit results, you now at least know where your website stands from the technical perspective.  It is important to remember, there is no silver bullet for SEO – to effectively rank any website, there are many parts that must all work in concert.

Meta Titles and Descriptions

The next step is reviewing your meta headers on each page. Meta titles and meta descriptions are very easy to update and important aspect of your on-page SEO.

The meta title for each page should include the main keywords you would like to rank. When you boil all of the content on the page down – you should end up with your meta title.  The meta title for each page should be somewhere between 10 and 70 characters long.

Your Meta Title and Description is what people will see in their search engine results page on Google and other search engines.

The Meta Title and Meta Description are very easy to update on most real estate website platforms.  The title has a huge impact on rankings and the description explains what is on the page.

Your meta description is slightly longer at 160-300 characters.  The meta description for each page provides a quick description of what the page itself is about.  The meta title plays an important part in the ranking of the page while a well-written meta description will entice users to click on your site as opposed to the others in the search results.

Mobile Responsiveness and Site Speed

It is 2020 – by this time anyone who is even remotely serious about their website has already made it mobile-friendly.  In addition, this should be caught in your website audit too — but it is so important, we felt it still deserved its own section.

With more than half of the internet traffic in the world being from mobile devices, we even recommend building your real estate website Mobile First.  A mobile-first website is one that is built to be displayed on a mobile device and then adapted afterward to display on a desktop computer.  This may seem like a minor difference, but from the web design perspective, it changes the entire process.

Another no-brainer is assuring that your website is as fast as possible. These two factors somewhat go together as the speed in which your website loads is even more critical for mobile devices.  In addition to how the site is built, the hosting that is utilized for your website will play a large role in its speed.  We have done extensive work to come up with the best WordPress hosting for SEO purposes.

AMP Pages for Real Estate

Another new technology that can be leveraged to speed up your real estate website is AMP. Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP for short) is a process in which you create a stripped-down version of your web page or blog to make it AMP compatible.  AMP pages are then delivered straight from Google’s servers for lightning-fast results.

Having AMP pages on your real estate website for your blogs can provide a super-fast experience for your readers.

SEO for IDX Listings

Anyone in real estate understands one of the main reasons that home buyers and sellers use the internet in the real estate sales process is to search for listings.  The process of having real estate listings, from other brokers displayed on an agent’s site is through the implementation of IDX or a VOW, with IDX being the dominant option.

Most REALTORS working on their digital marketing will already have IDX in place, but is it implemented best for SEO purposes?

When you display an IDX listing on your website you are pushing out the same information as every other local real estate site with a RETS feed from the local MLS. Ultimately, that has everyone displaying IDX on their site is displaying duplicate content.  Google looks at MLS listings as very low-quality content because it is not unique and is duplicated across the internet.

For the last 5 years, Google has been moving from a quantity of content to quality of content algorithm for ranking.  Throwing out thousands of mostly duplicate content pages dilutes your QUALITY CONTENT that you should be pushing out of your site.

This can be avoided by creating a custom IDX display or augmenting the IDX data with other 3rd party information.  This will have your IDX listings be somewhat different than other real estate brokers in your area.  Another option for reducing the duplicate content issue when using IDX is to place the IDX property listings on a subdomain of the main website.

Backlinks from Authoritative Real Estate Websites

The quality and quantity of backlinks that point to your real estate website is what shows Google that you are an authoritative source of real estate information.  There are different ways to acquire backlinks, but it is very important to remember that all backlinks are not created equal.

The more authoritative and relevant the site linking to you, the more powerful the backlink.  If you have many spammy backlinks pointing to your website, that can actually be detrimental to your SEO.  In addition, just because you have a link from a powerful real estate site doesn’t mean that it counts the same. As an example, you can have a profile page on Realtor.com, Zillow and many other large real estate sites.

Many will not have that link pass any “link juice” to you by using a rel=nofollow tag.  Some go to great lengths to not have any outbound links showing.  Even very powerful, real estate domains such as Zillow linking to your site from a profile page will have little impact your real estate sites’ authority.

The most authority is passed from otherwise powerful real estate websites from within the content itself.  For instance, if Zillow were posting an article on their blog, and they were to mention the term “discount real estate brokers” and use that term as the anchor text and point to your site, that link would be very powerful in ranking for the term discount real estate broker.

Here are a couple of ways that you can create and sculpt your backlink profile.

• Guest Posting
• Study Your Competitors Backlink Profile
• Content Marketing
• Social Media Syndication of Original Content
• Creating Citations for Local SEO
• Finding Broken Backlinks From Sites You Want a Link From
• Web 2.0 Sites

Backlink creation is the single most important, and most challenging task of an SEO Agency or individual.

Much of what is done in the content marketing process is done to have other websites link to that content.  So not only do you need content worth linking to, you need the process for getting that content in front of enough people to have them a link to it.

With backlinks being the single most important factor for ranking on Google – it is also the single most abused process by many SEO agencies.  In the past, simply a higher number of backlinks increased the authority and visibility of your website.

Today, mostly because of the abuse from real estate SEO companies, Google looks very closely at every backlink.  Although in the past, many found success with the creation of tons of back-links from just about anywhere, today too many backlinks from the wrong websites can hurt your search engine optimization efforts and even get you banned or de-indexed from Google.

Socially Syndicate Your Original Real Estate Content

You can not be a successful REALTOR today without a strong social media presence.  Your social media accounts should post all of the community pages and blog posts from your real estate website.  Most real estate agents post articles from real estate websites like ActiveRain, Inman, or Realty Times to their social media accounts.  Wouldn’t it make more sense to be pushing your own real estate content where they end up on your website?

All agents and brokers should have the following social media accounts:

• Facebook Business Page
• Twitter Page
• LinkedIn Profile

There are many products that will assist you in socially syndicating your original content from your website.  Hootsuite is a very popular content sharing application as is Buffer.