You wake up.
You see your phone blowing up.
You’re being showered with home buyers’ enquiries.
New leads show up in your sleep.
You’re living the dream.
…No, literally. This was all in your dream.
Because then, you wake up.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
You can actually make this dream come to life. And that is, by implementing top-quality SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) to your real estate website. A great SEO can actually make you wake up to new clients, leads and home buyers every day. It’s something that has unlimited and increasing potential.
In case you’re not too familiar with what SEO is: It’s concerned with revamping your website so that Google recognizes it and shows it along with the top results in the 1st page. Basically, SEO increases traffic, making your website reach to a significantly higher number of home buyers every day.
In the next few minutes, you’re going to be well-versed and confident with how to get the best out of SEO for your business. Hang tight, cause we’re about to give you some quality info.
Whether you’re a beginner or an informed individual, this article is going to be a productive and informative read for you.
The 6-step guide for the perfect real estate SEO.
Starting with SEO for your real estate website might feel like searching for the end of that damned cello tape. This also means that chances are you keep missing that right spot even if it’s right under your thumb.
Following this guide, you’ll be confident about where to start, what comes in between, and how to get the desired results.
If you don’t wish to read the whole thing (a bad decision), these are the points we’ll cover.
Competitor Analysis
A website audit
Your GMB listing
Utilising keywords
Creating backlinks
Hiring the right agency.
Now, let’s dive into each of these steps in detail and learn what they really mean.
1. Know your competitors
You’re surely not unaware of the competition you have in the real estate industry. You knew that before you decided to enter. But besides just knowing of their presence, you need to have a great idea about them. This doesn’t just mean the competitors you know are ahead of you, but also those who are lagging behind you.
Researching about both sides of the competition chain will tell you both what works and what doesn’t work in the real estate industry’s SEO plans. You’ll know you’re doing your competition analysis right when you have a thorough idea about keywords that are successful and those which have been overused and probably outdated. You’ll understand what you can do to drive past them—by avoiding their mistakes and bettering things they’re already doing well.
More often than not, there’s something to learn and note from every competitor you come across, if there’s one website with more efficient use of keywords, there’ll be another with more features. But of course, your role here isn’t to just admire their works and achievements. Take what’s best and leave the rest.
2. How’s your website?
If you want to get big, you need to know-how. To know-how, you’re supposed to gain thorough and extensive information about your website’s current performance. This is what the pros call an SEO audit. This will tell you how well your website is optimized for search, where you’re going wrong, and the features that need to be added or improved.
A proper SEO audit covers a lot of ground. You’ll know you’ve done a complete audit when you have clear information about various aspects of your website. These include, but are not limited to,the pages’ loading speeds, the responsiveness of the design, meta titles and descriptions (this is what people see in the search results page), the overall content and specific page user analytics and insights.
Here, Google mentions some important factors which it takes into consideration when filtering out the most relevant websites. Following these guidelines are a must.
This is a step that many dealers find to be tiresome and unworthy. While it might be the former, it is the most worthwhile step to your websites’ SEO. The task may seem boring and even redundant, but once you have your audit results, creating your SEO plan will be a breeze.
3. Listing your business on Google
A majority of the leads and clients you get are going to be local. But to effectively reach these home buyers, you need to have your local SEO built on a strong foundation. This foundation is your Google My Business (GMB) listing.
When buyers lookup real estate dealers online, they are first greeted with a map and the locations of the best dealers pinpointed on it along with their reviews. Your goal is to reach the top of that list to get the most recognition and come to every buyer’s notice.
For this, just creating your GMB account isn’t enough. It needs to be consistently updated and optimized with target keywords and other important content like including images and informative videos. Ensuring an impressive GMB account tells Google about your business, pushing it to the top of the results page in the Google Maps section.
4. Keywords—but different
Keywords are a sensitive aspect of real estate SEO. What many dealers do wrong is use the most general and obvious keywords they can possibly think of. Naturally then, they never get to witness the true potential that effective keywords use can bring to them.
This is why keyword research is important before you randomly start stuffing your website with ‘keywords’ like ‘realtor’ and ‘real estate’ (Great work, Sherlock.)It’s imperative to locate words that you can take full advantage of. Face it, there are hundreds of words home buyers could use when searching for a house, so you have plenty of options at hand. You’re offered this pot of gold, don’t settle for what’s at the top without a little digging.
Also, keywords don’t necessarily have to be limited to 1-2 words. It can be long-tail phrases. More the words in a specific long-tail keyword, higher the chances of you hitting the sweet spot and getting targeted traffic driven to your website.
5. Contribute content
When you connect with reputable sites in the real estate industry and contribute content to them, you start getting recognition and building a reputation. Your goal here is to get different websites to provide a link to your website, directing its traffic to you. These links are called backlinks.A very important building block for real estate SEO.
Getting as many backlinks as you can improve your chances of visitors reaching you online. This is because your potential audience automatically includes the audience of those websites which link your site as well. Consequently, the brand authority of these websites assists and promotes you. Not only this, when you have a good number of backlinks, Google starts to recognise your site as posting informative and reliable content, thereby promoting your website more and more, further helping your SEO.
6. Talk to us
You’ve already got a lot on your plate in order to set up and run your real estate business. If SEO is just another item in that plate of yours, it’s not going to work. It’s as good as nothing. SEO needs a fresh, new and separate plate of attention.
This is the plate we, at ignicious, take care of. In order to get the best SEO results, you need to give it professional treatment. It’d be a waste if you’re giving everything you’ve got to build up a successful real estate business and not succeeding just because you decided to compromise on your SEO. For reference, imagine wanting to be a writer but never publishing your novel. Sounds absurd? Exactly.
Don’t fret, reach out to us. We’ll work together and make your real estate website more popular than ever.
