5 Real Estate SEO Tips for Your Website

Real Estate SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a crucial strategy for enhancing the online presence of your real estate businesses. With a majority of first time home buyers being in their 20’s and 30’s, the internet is the first place they will go to start their house hunt. Even for experienced home buyers, Google is often the starting point. With this in mind, your business can’t afford to be buried on page 5 of a Search Engine Results Page (SERP).

5 Real Estate SEO Tips

1. Have a strong review profile. I know that asking customers and clients to give you a review can be uncomfortable, which is why businesses often lack in this area. As awkward as it can be to ask someone to leave feedback on your services, having a profile of high-quality, positive reviews is critical for SEO. First, these reviews on your Google Business Profile and on other platforms sends signals to search engines that you’re pretty good at what you do, and they should probably show your business to people looking for the things you have great reviews for! Second, this facilitates instant trust and starts you off on the right foot with any potential new clients. If you have no reviews, or not great reviews, I can almost guarantee buyers and renters will look for someone else.

It is also crucial to respond to each review. This indicates that you care about your online presence, and that you value communication even after you’ve received your commission. If you get a bad review, unfortunately you can’t remove it (unless it violates the search engine’s guidelines). In this case, it’s important to respond to the review in a professional manner. Don’t be too defensive, but make sure anyone reading the review can see both sides of the story. Not responding to a negative review can be seen as an admission of guilt.

2. Prioritize “Local SEO”. Local SEO refers to optimizing your website for searches in a specific location. This is especially important for real estate, as every aspect of your business is centered in one area. Make sure you find and understand the best keywords for your location, then optimize your website for those terms. Also, search for and add your business to any local or real estate-specific directories. This sends additional cues to search engines about what/where your business is so that it can better match your website to those local searches. Then, find and go through any other directory listings and ensure that your NAP (name, address, and phone number) are listed correctly.

3. Improve your website speed. Typically, real estate websites have TONS of images, as they should. However, if not done correctly, this means all of those images drastically slow your website down. Have you ever gone to a website, gotten frustrated that it didn’t immediately load, and then left? Now imagine all of those times you left a website as a potential client leaving yours. Ouch. It’s critical that you optimize the images on your website to load quickly. If you have a WordPress website, do yourself a huge favor and install WP Rocket. This is a speed optimization plugin that instantly improves your website’s speed. It has advanced features to improve image loading, such as Next-Gen format options. I wrote a whole article on how to optimize your website in WP Rocket. You can find that here. If you don’t have a WordPress website, search for the best speed plugins for your CMS (content management system). Make sure the plugin has good reviews and is compatible with the version of the CMS your website is on.

4. Create good content. I know, easier said than done, and an annoyingly ambiguous tip to provide. There is a lot that goes into this, but the main idea is that you want to establish yourself and your business as an authority in your industry. Start with a blog where you post helpful articles about all aspects of your business. Make sure to keyword-optimize each article and focus on giving your readers something valuable. Don’t be afraid to get really niche and personal with it, oftentimes you aren’t the only one struggling with certain concepts and practices. Use your experience and guide your readers with the type of article you wish you found when you were struggling.

5. Optimize your website for mobile use. These days, most website traffic is from mobile devices. Chances are when designing and updating your website, you (or your developer) were doing so on a desktop. Don’t overlook the way that your website works and functions on phones and tablets. As of 2019, Google actually analyzes websites from a mobile view rather than a desktop view. So, if your website doesn’t function well on phones, it probably isn’t going to rank very well. Rankings aside, if your website doesn’t work well on phones, you’re going to lose your potential clients to your competition. You most likely have a website development company that built your website. Get in touch with them and invest the cost into making your website flawless on mobile-devices, it will be well worth it. If you don’t have a developer and need help with this, get in touch.

That’s all the tips I have for now. If you’re new to SEO and looking for a more comprehensive SEO guide, we just released Part 1 of our Beginner’s Guide to SEO in 2024.

Categorised in: Search Engine Optimization

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