9 Best Practices For Real Estate SEO
COVID-19 did not kill the real estate industry. Instead, it brought more opportunities, competitions, and challenges than ever to the real estate world. As we adjust to the new normal, more agents begin to realize the importance of online visibility.
One of the most direct and efficient ways to gain online exposure as a real estate professional is leveraging SEO. However, not everybody knows how to do it right.
In this article, we’ve rounded the nine best practices for Real Estate SEO. Next time someone approaches you with a blog offer, you will know what you should be looking for.
Optimize For Mobile Viewing
A mobile-friendly and responsive website is the default minimum requirement for anybody doing business online nowadays. Mobile SEO allows you to interact with the massive population browsing on their smart devices - which account for over 90% of website traffic.
To succeed in mobile SEO, focus on the following items:
Page load speed: audiences have even shorter attention spans when they are searching on the phone. Make sure your website loads within 2 seconds and shows core information shown within the first second.
Responsive Layout: Nobody enjoys zooming and swiping on a phone just to find one piece of information. Make sure your site has a mobile-friendly layout that allows seamless browsing.
Optimize On-Site Content For Local SEO
Most real estate agents have targeted neighborhoods.
If you have community pages on your website, make sure they are optimized for local exposure. Add local keywords such as community initiatives and historic events.
For your listings, make sure they contain the zipcodes, locations, communities/sub-groups, and other local indicators that will attract your potential buyers. Make sure the optimized information can be found both in the headline and body text of your listing.
Mark Your Territory on Every Page
Local small businesses increase local SEO ranking by adding their phone and address at the footer so they are visible on each page. For real estate SEO, this is a bit different.
Write out a one-liner that explains who you are, what areas you serve, and where you are located. Use this one-liner instead of your office address alone for better ranking among search engine results.
Build a buyer persona
Often others will tell you persona-building is for sales and business development. However, few know that having a buyer persona directly impacts your content efficiency, and thus influence your SEO ranking.
Nowadays, Google no longer calculates webpage ranking according to simple factors like keyword density. In fact, user satisfaction is more impactful on your SEO efficiency compared to simply writing optimized content in today’s online world.
That is why you need to build a buyer persona before creating any content. You must write in a way your target audience will read, and provide the information that resonates with their pain points and their value system.
A Localized FAQ Page
At the end of the day, you want to be visible so you can help more people. Therefore, building a localized FAQ page is one of the most efficient ways to both build consumer credibility and search engine ranking.
Format your FAQ page into sections with local keywords. Make it into a listicle under each section or even use an accordion structure for fast browsing.
Segment your blog posts
If you don’t have a blog… build one.
If you do, make sure they are organized according to your target areas. Create categories under your blog section for each community you serve. Add a “community guideline” or similar section under the corresponding landing page for those listings.
You don’t have to stuff a page with 5k words for it to be a pillar landing page. You can utilize the blogs you’ve already written for that purpose.
Internal Linking
Build internal linking between relative contents. This can be done as:
Hyperlinks from one blog post to another
Hyperlinks from a landing page to a blog
Hyperlinks from a blog post to a landing page
Internal links help to establish keyword clusters surrounding the same core topic. A keyword cluster is far more powerful when it comes to gaining higher rankings compared to isolated keywords.
Go After Specific Keywords
Imagine this.
If you are selling luxury condos in Kansas City, who would you want to talk to? Is it people searching for apartments for sale in Kansas City, condos for sale in Kansas City, or luxury condos for sale in Kansas City?
Now you get the idea.
Not only are specific, long-tail keywords less competitive, they also have higher value because they often indicate the searcher falls closer to your target market.
Diversify Social Linking
Last but not least, diversify your social linking technique because backlinks still count as one of the key factors affecting your search engine ranking. It is 2020, stop posting a fluff caption with a link to your blog post.
Things don’t work like that anymore.
Create correspondent content related to your blog post. At the middle or the end of that content, link back to your blog article. You may even drop the auto-generated social image and switch it for a more informative, valuable piece of content.