Easy SEO Tips for Real Estate Agents

It is every real estate agent’s dream—an autopilot that drives quality local leads. Such a tool would facilitate productive meetings with qualified prospects, send out cold emails, and, best of all, lead to more revenue!

Is this science fiction or reality? Is there such a tool?

There is!

Real estate Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Something else you should know is that real estate SEO never takes a rest. It generates leads at all times of the day, every day, without calls, purchasing ads, or traversing neighborhoods!

Below are SEO tips that will help keep your property listings findable and accessible online, generating leads on autopilot.

Create branded keywords

Branded keywords (KWs) are search terms that include a brand name, a form of the brand name, or even the name of a specific product. They are also known as “navigational queries,” as these are terms that people use to search for brands.

Researching and monitoring online context around your name helps you:

Understand listings that your customers want to see.
Plan a content strategy for your business that explains listings available and fills your search results pages with branded KWs.
Identify weak points of your listings or service.
Understand what your competitors lack, so you can fit in the local market better.

Rank in featured snippets

Featured snippets appear prominently at the top of search results, usua ly including text blocks and photos that answer questions that users ask Google. These snippets drive more traffic compared to other search results, so you should be optimizing your content for one. Ideally, a brief paragraph of about 35 to 55 words should provide an answer to a commonly searched question. Place the text either above your blog post or below a header identifying questions you are answering.

However, this does not mean you should write short blog posts. Instead, Google prefers insightful and dense posts.

A featured snippet also steals organic traffic from other search results, even content ranking in the number one position.

Leverage Google My Business

Setting up a Google My Business account for your real estate business gives you two major advantages:

An exponential increase in visibility – You appear above the fold for branded terms that include company names. Google populates the entire rail on the right hand of search result pages with information about your firm, including reviews, popular times, office hours, images, a phone number, and an address. These are elements that you can customize on your account.
Appearance on Google Maps and local search – Your details appear any time a user is looking for real estate companies. For instance, when someone in your geographical area searches for real estate agents, you appear in the Google Local Results section. The details show up even when you are not organically ranking for competitive terms, like “real estate agents close to me” or “real estate agents,” and give you guaranteed page 1 visibility!

Setup takes only a couple of minutes. In the last stages, you need to verify the relationship between yourself and the proposed business listing.

Provide online real estate tools

Adding online real estate tools to your site makes it better than those of your competitors. The limitless value that such tools add to your site is easily apparent in business and function.

Some of the most important online tools you should include are:

Live chat – This is useful for engaging with visitors and providing fast answers to queries.
Testimonials – These are first-hand experiences of your satisfied past customers talking about you.
Walk score – This tool shows a property’s rating in terms of nearby amenities, commuting reports, and drive times.
Mortgage calculator – This provides visitors answers about home financing options without having to leave your site.
Embeddable forms – These forms provide a means of collecting visitor contact information when you intend to contact them with a report later.
Social sharing – This makes it easy for your visitors to share the awesome content on your site with their social media followers.
Analytics – With this tool, you can provide real-time tracking results so you can make improvements to your marketing strategy using data.
Newsletter opt-in – Not all visitors will transact with you immediately. Getting them on a mailing list lets you stay in touch until they are ready.

Make use of relevant authority links

What is the most significant difference between real estate sites that get traffic from search engines and those that don’t?

Backlinks!

These are links that lead back to your website from other sites. However, the backlinks you seek should:

Be relevant to the real estate industry
Have good quality to boost your search engine rankings

While securing authority links is not too complicated, make sure to put in the work. People trust powerful institutions. So, if your real estate business links to one of them, the trust spills in, too.

Some resources that provide authoritative backlinks include:

Universities
Government websites (.gov)
Charities
Unions and associations

Focus on local SEO

Local SEO is all about optimizing your website to be found on the local search results.

Here are four reasons to invest in local SEO right now:

Lower competition – Uptake of local SEO by local businesses is almost non-existent, which provides an enormous opportunity that your real estate company can jump on.
Google prefers local – Google has had to re-think how it offers users local search results. Today, local businesses have an immense advantage over large national brands because of how they can immediately cater to the needs of their local market.
Clients are online – A large proportion of your customers first perform their search online before they engage with a business.
Budget-friendly – Implementing local SEO is a pocket-friendly means of achieving high rankings. SEO traffic is more convertible compared to other online channels, ensuring a good return on investment (ROI).

Overall, local SEO is here to stay!

If you are not implementing local SEO, you are missing a lot of web traffic!

Optimize your website for mobile

About 93 percent of buyers aged 36 years and younger use mobile devices when searching for real estate opportunities.

Considering the prominence of mobile devices today, it is time you maximize your listings’ reach by making sure that your site is responsive on smaller screens. Potential clients should be able to access and navigate your listings on their smartphones.

A responsive website design makes your site accessible across all devices, from smartphones and tablets to laptops.

Set up a blog

Creating awesome content to educate, inform, and engage with your customers is a requirement for any real estate business that wants to thrive!

Your customers expect value-adding experiences, and a blog is a good way to give them that.

Setting up a blog is one of the most critical SEO tips because it can help your real estate business grow by:

Increasing website traffic with each blog post reminding Google that your site still exists.
Establishing authority by delivering content that addresses common questions your clients have.
Providing information through constant blogs that serve as your customers’ reference material.
Maintaining interest by providing up-to-date information that reminds your customers you are still in business.
Offering a personal touch by showing your existing customers and potential leads that you are passionate about real estate and want to help them find their dream properties.
Leaving your mark on search engines, such as Google, so people find your site any time your posts appear on search results, even if they were published months ago.

Ask customers to leave reviews

One of the most critical steps for buyers to ensure a smooth property search and transition towards purchase is picking the right real estate agent.

While personal referrals are great for customers moving in the same city, what about families who are moving into a new area and do not know anyone?

They check online reviews.

As a real estate agent, ask your customers to leave reviews because:

They help establish trust and credibility once potential customers read how happy your previous ones are.
Positive reviews increase your online reputation, which helps enhance and improve your search results.
Great reviews outperform negative reviews or new reviews.

Partner with a reliable real estate SEO expert

Experts understand there are many benefits to outsourcing your SEO. Eventually, the benefits far outweigh the cost savings you are hoping to accrue by trying to do real estate SEO yourself, especially if you are inexperienced or pressed for time.

Improved website – An SEO expert helps you implement methods critical for improving your search visibility, increasing chances of potential customers reaching out to you while reducing your investment in marketing.
Experience – Experts in SEO for real estate agents are knowledgeable enough to make smart decisions for your website, resulting in increased visibility and rankings. Partnering with them ensures you are well-placed to handle unexpected changes, such as algorithm updates.
Better results – Real estate SEO professionals test your site, goals, and competitors before creating a comprehensive plan to increase your search visibility. They track your progress and adjust your plans, so you are always on the right path to achieving the best results.
Freedom to focus on what you are best at – You can focus on running your real estate business, which is your most important responsibility, while the experts take care of the rest.

Conclusion

There you have it: arguably an in-depth SEO guide for real estate agents looking to improve their search results. Now it is time to act!

What SEO tips are you going to incorporate into your real estate business website?

If you know that taking time off to read hundreds of blogs is not plausible, but you recognize the value of staying up-to-date on matters related to your business, don’t worry. There is a single comprehensive resource available to you. Through our website, you can learn everything from novel ways to attract more clients, to recent regulatory updates that encourage business growth.

For more information that you can use for business, browse our site!

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