What is the real estate agent’s dream? Let’s guess! Maybe having quality leads on autopilot without cold calling or meetings with unqualified prospects?
You can actually make this dream come true! “How?” You might ask. The answer is simple: Real estate SEO!
By investing in SEO for real estate, you can forget about your endless hours of cold calling and paid ads. Instead of draining your marketing budget, invest your time into improving your website’s SEO, and soon you will see the fruits of your work.
We know that this sounds compelling but also quite confusing especially if you haven’t optimized websites before.
Here’s great news for you!
We have analyzed the top real estate websites and created a complete guide to help you with your SEO efforts. Follow the steps mentioned in this guide, and your dream will come true sooner than you think!
What is Real Estate SEO?
Real estate SEO is the practice of getting more traffic to your website and ranking higher on the first pages of search engine results. You can reach this by having quality content on your website, optimizing the website, and using specific keywords on each page.
Let’s imagine you are someone who wants to buy a new house in New York. What would be your first step?
Just like most home buyers out there, you will go to Google, open a new tab, and type there- house for sale in New York.
Once you click on the search button a list of options will appear in front of you. 60% of home buyers will click on one of the top 5 results to start their evaluations!
What makes the SEO for real estate challenging is that ads appear even above the organic SEO results!
This example proves that there is less organic real estate left on the search engine results pages, so you will need the best real estate SEO strategy to rank for the keyword you want.
Why Does Real Estate Need SEO?
According to recent surveys carried out by the National Association of Realtors, 44%+ home buyers search online for property in their preferred area as their first step of the journey.
| 44% of people searched online for properties for sale |
| 13% searched online about how to buy a home (guides, any kind of information) |
| 17% called a real estate agent |
Here are a few reasons why you should improve your real estate SEO:
- Higher rankings on search pages
- Better organic traffic from the target audience
- More organic leads
- More sales
Keep in mind that only the pages situated on the first page of Google get the most clicks. More than 75% of people don’t look at the second page of Google.
This means that you are losing thousands of dollars in the 2+ pages of Google and a few people click on “next page” and have a look at the results there. Your goal should be to be displayed on the first page of Google, too!
Benefits of SEO
- Cost-Effectiveness with High Impact
SEO stands out as a highly cost-effective strategy for commercial real estate marketing. Unlike paid advertising platforms where costs can escalate quickly, SEO primarily demands an investment of time and effort rather than direct financial expenditure. For commercial real estate businesses, this means being able to allocate resources efficiently while still achieving significant online visibility. To capitalize on this, ensure your website is not only search-engine friendly but also enriched with unique, valuable content, strategically chosen keywords, and well-optimized meta descriptions tailored to the commercial real estate market.
- Sustained Traffic Growth Over Time
The nature of SEO offers a compelling advantage for commercial real estate professionals: sustained traffic growth. Organic search results are often perceived as more trustworthy and relevant compared to paid advertisements. This trust can lead to higher click-through rates for your listings and content. By developing a robust real estate SEO strategy, your online presence becomes more durable and resistant to the fluctuating costs of paid search campaigns, providing a steady stream of potential clients interested in commercial properties.
- Enhanced Return on Investment (ROI)
Implementing an effective SEO strategy lays the groundwork for a reputable and authoritative online presence in the commercial real estate sector. Over time, this leads to a higher return on investment compared to many traditional marketing tactics. SEO helps your site rank higher for relevant searches, which means more targeted traffic from potential investors, tenants, and buyers specifically looking for commercial properties. This targeted approach ensures that your marketing efforts are reaching the right audience, thereby maximizing the efficiency of your investment and significantly boosting your ROI.
Best Real Estate SEO Strategies
On-Page SEO Tips
Let’s dive deeper into on-page SEO tips tailored for real estate.
Competitor Analysis
The first thing you should do to start the SEO for real estate website is to find your competitors and analyze all their actions.
Search them on Google and the first top ten pages will more likely be your competitors. Create a doc and gather all the important information found on their websites:
- Used keywords
- Density of the keywords
- Site structure
- Site speed
- Backlinks
- Content quality
- CTAs used
What do these websites have in common? What is the most important element they use according to you? Gather all the info in one place and create a real estate SEO strategy. With the help of the latter, you can start improving your content and creating a website with perfect performance that drives organic traffic and increases leads.
Keyword Research For Real Estate
Another important aspect that you should never ignore when improving your real estate website.
Some real estate agents love spending hours on social media platforms and creating social media strategies for their businesses. However, not all of them spend time doing effective keyword research.
If you do the research correctly, you will get organic traffic for each keyword without spending money on it. People will just search the keyword and your website will appear as a result of that search.
Here are a few tips for you to help you target the right keywords on your website:
First of all, you can use the Google search bar for long-tail keywords. This will show you what people usually search on Google.
Besides these, you can also use SEO tools like Ahrefs or Semrush to do keyword research.
Remember that there are 2 types of keywords:
- Head keywords
- Long-tail keywords
Head keywords are extremely difficult to target as they are competitive and broad. Real estate or realtors are examples of head keywords. If you have decided to appear on the first pages of Google for these keywords you need to win over all the authority websites.
Besides this, head keywords aren’t even well converting. When people search for these words, they don’t have the intention of buying a house. Maybe they want to read some news about real estate or learn what kind of business it is.
On the other hand, more than 70% of people search for long-tail keywords. Some examples of long-tail keywords are- buy 2 bed home in New York, lake house near my area, etc.
The more long-tail the keyword is, the more chances you get! They convert way better than the head keywords:
Source: Crazyegg
Your keyword research should include not only the obvious but various versions of those keywords.
Keyword search example:
*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
These are great examples of long-tail keywords for your real estate website.
Remember, the goal is not just to find these golden keywords but to integrate them seamlessly into your website’s content, from property descriptions and blog posts to FAQs and about pages. This strategic placement ensures that search engines can easily match your content with relevant queries, propelling your site to the top of search results and connecting you with potential clients at the peak of their buying journey.
High-Quality Content Creation
High-quality content creation is the cornerstone of any successful SEO strategy, especially in the real estate sector. This component is crucial for engaging potential clients, establishing authority, and improving search engine rankings. Below is an enhanced version of the section focusing on high-quality content creation for a real estate website:
Why premium content matters for real estate:
- Builds Trust with Potential Clients: Informative, well-researched content establishes your agency as a knowledgeable and reliable source in the commercial real estate sector.
- Enhances SEO Performance: Quality content enriched with strategically placed keywords improves your website’s visibility on search engines, driving organic traffic.
- Encourages Engagement and Shares: Engaging content is more likely to be shared across social networks and linked to other sites, further increasing your online presence.
Key strategies for crafting impactful real estate content:
- Identify Your Audience’s Needs: Understand the specific needs, questions, and challenges of your target market. For commercial real estate, this could include investment advice, market trends, and tips for selecting the right commercial property.
- Diversify Your Content Types: Incorporate a variety of content formats such as blog posts, market analysis reports, how-to guides, and video tours of properties. This not only caters to different preferences but also makes your content more engaging.
- Use Local Insights: Use your local market knowledge to create content that offers valuable insights into the commercial real estate landscape in your area. This can include neighborhood guides, investment potential analysis, and updates on local development projects.
- Incorporate Visuals and Interactive Elements: High-quality images, infographics, and interactive maps can significantly enhance the appeal and comprehensibility of your content, making complex information more digestible.
- Maintain a Consistent Publishing Schedule: Regularly updating your website with fresh content keeps visitors coming back and signals to search engines that your site is active and relevant.
- Optimize for Search Intent: Beyond incorporating keywords, ensure your content aligns with the search intent of your target audience. This means providing the answers and information they are truly seeking when they enter a query into a search engine.
- Promote Your Content: Don’t rely solely on organic search to get your content seen. Utilize email newsletters, social media, and industry forums to share your content with a wider audience.
By prioritizing high-quality content creation, your real estate website can become a hub of valuable information, attracting more visitors, generating leads, and ultimately driving sales in the competitive commercial real estate market.
Learn more about real estate content types that drive success- Real Estate Content Marketing Ideas: Getting Creative for Success
Optimizing Images and Videos
In the visually-driven world of real estate, images, and videos are not just embellishments—they’re critical tools for engagement, storytelling, and conversion. Here’s how to ensure they contribute positively to your site’s performance and SEO.
Why image and video optimization matters:
- Faster Page Load Times: Optimized media files load quicker, reducing bounce rates and improving the overall user experience.
- Improved SEO Rankings: Search engines favor websites that load quickly and provide a good user experience, directly impacting your site’s visibility.
- Enhanced User Engagement: High-quality, fast-loading visuals keep users engaged, increasing the likelihood of them staying on your site longer and taking action.
Strategies for optimizing images and videos on your real estate site:
- Compress Images and Videos: Use tools like Adobe Photoshop, TinyPNG, or other online video compressors to reduce file sizes without compromising quality. This is crucial for maintaining fast loading times.
- Choose the Right Formats: For images, JPEG is generally best for photographs, while PNG is suitable for graphics with transparent backgrounds. For videos, consider formats like MP4, which is widely supported and offers a good balance between quality and file size.
- Implement Responsive Images: Ensure images and videos automatically adjust to fit the screen size of the device they’re being viewed on. This improves the experience for mobile and tablet users.
- Use Descriptive File Names and Alt Tags: Rename your media files with descriptive, keyword-rich titles. Similarly, use alt tags for images, incorporating relevant keywords to improve SEO and accessibility.
- Use Lazy Loading: Implement lazy loading for your media files, so images and videos only load when they’re about to enter the viewport. This significantly reduces initial page load time.
- Host Videos Externally: Consider hosting videos on platforms like YouTube or Vimeo and embedding them on your site. This approach reduces the strain on your server and takes advantage of the advanced streaming capabilities of these platforms.
- Use Thumbnails for Videos: Create compelling thumbnails for your videos. A well-designed thumbnail can dramatically increase click-through rates.
- Optimize for Search: Beyond technical optimization, ensure your visual content is optimized for search. This includes using keyword-rich titles and descriptions for your videos on YouTube or other video hosting platforms.
Optimize On-Page Elements (meta titles/descriptions)
Optimizing the on-page elements of your website, particularly meta titles, meta descriptions, and headlines, is crucial for both search engine visibility and user engagement. These elements serve as your digital storefront, enticing users to click through to your website from the search engine results pages (SERPs).
- Meta Titles
- Precision and Relevance: Ensure each page’s meta title includes the primary keyword you aim to rank for. This not only aids in SEO but also aligns with what users are searching for.
- Length Matters: Aim for a sweet spot of 10 to 70 characters. This range ensures your titles are concise enough to be fully visible in SERPs, avoiding cut-offs.
- Meta Descriptions
- Engaging Summaries: While meta descriptions don’t directly influence rankings, they’re your pitch to potential visitors. Craft descriptions between 160 to 300 characters that concisely summarize the page content and include a call to action, encouraging users to click through.
- Keyword Integration: Incorporate relevant keywords naturally. This highlights the relevance of your content to searchers and search engines alike.
- Headlines
- The 8 Out of 10 Rule: With 8 out of 10 people reading your headline but only 2 out of 10 venturing further, your headline’s impact cannot be overstated. It’s the make-or-break element determining whether the rest of your content gets the attention it deserves.
- Crafting Magnetic Headlines: Adopt a formula that combines curiosity with benefit. For example, “How to [Achieve a Goal] in [Timeframe]” or “X Secrets to [Desirable Outcome]” are frameworks that promise value, enticing readers to explore the full article.
Off-Page SEO Tips
Now that we know about on-page SEO tips, it’s time to proceed with off-page SEO. The latter is also important if you want to drive more traffic and succeed.
Building Quality Backlinks
Link building determines how authoritative your website is! High-authority websites appear on Google search results more than the low ones. Accordingly, your goal should be to gain links from authoritative websites and become authoritative, too!
The more authoritative and relevant the site links 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.
Here are a couple of ways that you can create and strengthen your backlink profile.
- Guest Posting
- Study Your Competitor’s 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
Social Media Engagement
Integrating social media into your real estate SEO strategy can significantly amplify your online presence and attract more potential clients. In the realm of real estate, leveraging social media isn’t just about posting listings; it’s about creating a cohesive narrative that enhances your SEO efforts through increased engagement and visibility.
By actively sharing insightful market analyses, engaging property visuals, and behind-the-scenes glimpses into your operations, you craft content that resonates with your audience and encourages interaction. These interactions, especially when your content is shared, contribute positively to your website’s search engine rankings by generating social signals that search engines consider as indicators of quality and relevance.
Here’s a list of social media strategies designed to boost your real estate SEO:
| Strategy | Description |
| Content Sharing | Regularly post valuable content like market insights, property showcases, and real estate tips to drive engagement and shares, indirectly boosting your SEO through social signals. |
| Hashtag Optimization | Use targeted hashtags (#RealEstate, #PropertyListing, #YourCityHomes) to increase discoverability by users and search engines. |
| Client Engagement | Encourage clients to share their purchase or selling experiences on social media, tagging your agency to enhance credibility and organic reach. |
| Visual Content | Leverage high-quality images and videos of listings, including virtual tours, to increase user engagement and time spent on your posts. |
| Local Engagement | Focus on local hashtags and content that highlight community involvement or local market trends to boost local SEO signals. |
| Cross-Promotion | Link to your website’s content, like blog posts or listings, in your social media posts to drive traffic and improve your site’s search engine ranking. |
| Interactive Posts | Utilize polls, questions, and contests to encourage interaction, increasing the likelihood of your content being shared and commented on. |
| Performance Analysis | Regularly review your social media analytics to understand what content performs best and refine your strategy accordingly. |
Local SEO Tips
Google Business Profile Optimization
Starting with Google Business Profile optimization, it’s more than just claiming your spot on the map. The real magic happens when you fill out every detail of your profile, from business hours to services offered, ensuring everything is up-to-date and accurately reflects your business.
Adding high-quality photos and actively seeking customer reviews can significantly enhance your profile’s appeal, encouraging more potential clients to engage with your business. Regular posts about updates, offers, and news can keep your profile fresh and engaging, further improving your visibility in local searches.
Learn more about Google Business Profile- Managing Google Business with Multiple Locations
Local Citations
These mentions of your business across the web, from local directories to social platforms, help reinforce your presence in the digital landscape. The key here is consistency; your business name, address, and phone number must be uniform across all platforms to avoid confusing both search engines and potential clients.
Targeting real estate-specific directories and those relevant to your community can also amplify your reach, making it easier for locals to find you.
Local Keyword Optimization
Local keyword optimization is the thread that ties your local SEO strategies together. Integrating geo-specific keywords into your website’s content, meta tags, and even your social media profile signals to search engines the areas you serve.
This could range from using city or neighborhood names in your content to incorporating them into the meta descriptions that appear in search results.
Creating content that resonates with your local audience, such as market analyses or community event highlights, not only enriches your site with valuable, localized information but also improves your search engine ranking for those living in or interested in those areas.
Technical SEO Tips
Make sure your site is mobile-friendly
If you want to rank in Google, your website must be mobile optimized. Mobile optimization just means when someone visits your site on their smartphone or tablet, your website adapts to whatever screen they’re using.
So why is mobile optimization important for SEO?
Google knows more than 50% of people search online using their phones, and because of that, Google prioritizes the mobile version of your website rather than the desktop version. If the mobile version of your site doesn’t adapt to the screen or it loads too slowly, you’re probably not going to rank.
Focus on page load speed
The faster the speed of your website, the better it will rank — plain and simple. Even milliseconds count!
You can use Google PageSpeed Insights to find out the loading speed of your website. If it is low there are lots of different ways to increase your page load speed:
- Compress image files
- Clean up clunky code
- Reduce redirects
Secure Website (HTTPS)
Securing your real estate website with HTTPS through SSL implementation is a critical aspect of technical SEO that goes beyond just protecting user data—it significantly boosts your site’s trustworthiness and search engine ranking. Google rewards secure sites with a higher ranking, recognizing the importance of user safety.
The visual cue of a padlock icon in the address bar further instills trust in your visitors, essential in the real estate industry where clients share sensitive information. Essentially, upgrading to HTTPS is not just about security; it’s a strategic move to enhance your online presence and build a strong foundation of trust with potential clients.
How to secure the website:
| Step | Description |
| SSL/TLS Certificate | Encrypt data transfers by installing an SSL or TLS certificate, often available for free from hosting providers. |
| Secure Hosting | Choose a hosting service with robust security measures, including regular updates and backups. |
| Update Regularly | Keep all website software, plugins, and themes up to date to protect against vulnerabilities. |
| Strong Passwords | Enforce complex passwords for backend access and use a password manager. |
| Web Application Firewall (WAF) | A WAF helps shield your site from common web threats. |
| Vulnerability Scans | Regularly scan your website for security weaknesses and address them promptly. |
| HTTPS Everywhere | Use HTTPS for all pages, not just sensitive ones, to secure the entire browsing session. |
| Limit Access | Restrict backend access to essential personnel and manage permissions based on roles. |
| Regular Backups | Automate website backups and store them in a secure, off-site location. |
Implement a Comprehensive Sitemap
Sitemaps are files where you provide information about your site’s pages, posts, videos, and other content. Google and other search engines use sitemaps to identify the most important content and more efficiently crawl your website.
If you don’t have a sitemap you can use tools like Screaming Frog, Yoast, or WordPress to generate one. XML-sitemaps is also a great option to generate it for free.
Don’t forget to submit the sitemap to Google Search Console after you generate it!
Utilize Schema Markup for Enhanced Listings
Schema-structured data is what structures your website’s code to tell Google and other giants about your website and what it is about. Accordingly, you should include in your schema that you are a real estate agency, real estate agent, realtor, or real estate broker. etc.
Imagine you have a table that describes a property and mentions its prices, bedrooms, etc. With the help of a schema, you can make this table the “favorite” of Google and incentivize it to show your table as an eye-catching snippet or as an answer to questions.
The Schema should also contain information like your address, name, and phone number, opening hours, what real estate markets you serve, etc.
SEO Tools for Real Estate
1. Yoast– This tool will help you optimize key on-page elements, check content readability, create custom site hierarchies, and manage technical SEO.
2. Search Console– A tool that provides insight into your search performance, identifies technical SEO issues, gathers link data, and checks exactly how Google sees your content
3. Google Lighthouse– A full suite of testing tools built into Google Chrome that gives you insight into the technical SEO elements of your site (loading time, content-blocking scripts, etc.)
4. Ubersuggest– A tool that helps you find keyword ideas and evaluate the level of competition.
5. Yext– Helps you optimize existing listing information (NAP)
6. BrightLocal– A great way to build out a larger citation footprint as it has connections with thousands of local directories like Yelp, Google Maps, and Facebook.