As a realtor today, it’d not be out of place for you to consider going digital with your real estate marketing strategies because the world’s at that point now where most business transactions are done online.
However, you must know that the real estate niche is a highly competitive one that requires a great deal of creativity from realtors who want their real estate listings to rank high on search engines like Google and Bing.
The National Association of Realtors (NAR) puts the percentage of homebuyers who start their search for properties by first going online at over 40 percent. This implies that a large number of potential homebuyers first go on the Internet when searching for a home to buy, and you need to leverage on this as a realtor.
This article will focus on real estate SEO tips and strategies and tips that you can use to facilitate effective search engine optimization in real estate. But first, I’ll enlighten you on the overall concept of SEO. You can find best idx solution for wordpress.
What Is SEO?
SEO is an abbreviation for “search engine optimization” and its general concept is to satisfy the search intent of users of search engines. Therefore SEO optimization is simply the modification of your website’s contents to meet the search needs of search engine users.
Generally, when it comes to marketing, you can either use paid ads or organic marketing. At the end of the day, people will be searching for the same things and they’ll find you one way or the other, whether you’re using organic marketing strategies or paid advertisements.
2021 Real Estate SEO Tips and Strategies
Adopting a strategy in real estate SEO is an effective way to make your real estate listings rank high on notable search engines like Google and Bing. This will come in handy as it’ll generate lots of leads for you as a realtor, and if you get in the good books of SEO, your listings will be among the first to appear on the first page of search engines.
For a detailed guide on real estate SEO, read the ultimate guide to harnessing SEO for realtors.
Meanwhile, below are some tips and strategies you can start using to rank high on search engines.
- Conduct a Research on Your Competitors
Oftentimes, realtors neglect this real estate SEO strategy, forgetting that it doesn’t hurt to pick a leaf or two out of the playbooks of your competitors that are killing it in the real estate industry.
Here you only need to take a peek into your competitors’ sites to see what they’re doing differently that makes them rank on the first pages of search engines.
Upon identification of what boxes they’re ticking correctly, you can then make the necessary adjustments to your website. Meanwhile, keep in mind that you have to be creative about this by making your modifications stand out.
- Claim Your Google My Business (GMB) Listing
Claiming your GMB listing is one of the first steps in ensuring you appear on Google SERP’s knowledge panel. GMB listing is a valuable real estate SEO strategy that’ll massively help when it comes to local searches.
So if someone is searching for your business by name, or simply searching for realtors in their city, a Google My Business listing will help you pop up for the search.
To claim your GMB listing, head over to Google My Business and create your business profile. After that, you can list your business details on Google. It could be your business name, address, and contact number. It’s important to note that these three details are very vital to have across all digital channels including your website and social media pages.
After your GMB listing has been verified, you can also create citation accounts on Facebook, Yelp, Yellow Pages, and Foursquare. Doing this will ensure that when a user searches for real estate agencies or listings on these platforms instead of Google, your business would still appear in their results.
- Use Zillow to Boost Your Google Rankings
For your real estate website to rank well on Google, it needs to have a solid profile on Zillow because Zillow is a market leader when it comes to online real estate. In 2018, Zillow received over 7 billion visits on its website and apps.
Creating a Zillow profile will let you list your properties on their website, and this will help maximize your visibility a great deal. And with Zillow’s huge market share, there’s a high possibility of your clients finding you first on Zillow.
Input all your business details in the ‘about me’ tab of your Zillow profile, sprinkle your target keywords in the ‘description’ and add links to your website to gain authority.
- Create City-Specific Content on Your Site
Creating highly informative city-specific content on your website will help in your marketing, especially when you put out useful blogs that aid people to learn more about different cities and areas, which allows them to make better decisions.
This is because when you provide useful information to people when they’re in the searching stage, they’re more likely to trust you and come back to you when they’re in the decision stage.
For instance, in the blog, you can target users who plan to move to a particular place to stay. You could talk about the neighborhoods, cost of living, transportation, and more. Capitalize on this by using internal links to your properties. This way, you’d be gradually guiding the users along the sales funnel with your blog’s content.
- Use Guest Posts and Backlinks on Real Estate Blogs
Guest posts are a tried and true method for effective link building. Here you have to identify reputable publishers within the real estate industry and reach out to them to see if they’re looking for someone to contribute great content to their blogs.
Guest blogging is a great way to get backlinks that lead back to your website, and if you put out great content, you’ll be able to publish it on some of the biggest blogs in your niche and get backlinks from authoritative websites.
- Show Testimonies From Previous Customers
Online reviews can make or break your business, depending on the nature of the review. Most prospective homebuyers would love to see good reviews from your past clients before patronizing your agency.
Keep in mind that all the reviews you get ought to have the appropriate schema details and ratings as this will enable Google to authenticate the reviews so it doesn’t look as though you copied an already existing review.
Summary
With the right real estate SEO strategy, your business stands a chance of having a strong presence on the Internet, thereby making your site’s content easy for search engine users to find and navigate through.
In addition, be mindful that search engine optimization in real estate aims to give your listings a very high publicity level which in turn would rake in a large number of visitors to your website.
Finally, when it comes to SEO, you’ve got to keep up with the trends to stay abreast of the best practices you can adopt to break even in the highly competitive real estate industry.
