September 27, 2022

SEO Strategies for Real Estate Agents

Learn more about SEO for Real Estate Agents!

If you’re a Real Estate Agent or Brokerage then this article is for you. Read this blog to learn more about SEO for Real Estate Agents!

Numbers Do not Lie: in 2021, the first, second and third leading real- estate-related websites in the United States recorded 36 million monthly visits. So if you are a real estate agent looking to work with more clients, stop dilly-dallying and seize this golden opportunity! Start investing in building a website and working on your SEO for real estate. 

This article will put SEO into the simplest words for you and show you how to build your website’s SEO for Real Estate keywords so you can reap all the benefits. Combine theory with practice, and you’ll be on your way to a search-engine-optimized website.

SEO for Real Estate

Real Estate SEO

In simple words: real estate websites provide the necessary information for finding a property to buy. People, especially younger ones, are now landing on these websites with computers, tablets and smartphones. SEO for real estate is like fishing with a net. You can catch a lot of leads if you cast the net in the right place.

If you give Google and other search engines what they want, they will reward you with higher rankings. Each search engine has an algorithm that crawls online websites to determine what results appear when a specific keyword is searched for, i.e., the words typed into the search engine.

Technically, SEO for real estate is the practice of driving targeted traffic to your website via a search engine’s organic rankings.

Importance of SEO in Real Estate for Agents & Investors

This is one of the most effective marketing strategies to bring visitors to your real estate website. Thousands of people use this method to generate website traffic. Unlike content marketing such as photography, videos and virtual tours for Real Estate, SEO is an organic approach to getting referrals from Google itself.

When considering SEO for real estate strategies, we believe that paid advertising and cold calling are no longer necessary. Instead of spending your marketing budget or sitting on the phone for hours, invest the same time and budget into improving your website’s search engine ranking.

The technique is inbound marketing; the result is rewarding: your target audience visits your website regularly, asks you to contact them to sell or buy a home, and gives you their contact information!

How Search Engines Work

Search engines are like libraries that store web pages instead of filling shelves with books. For this purpose, they use some algorithms that create ranking systems. Even their developers don’t fully understand how exactly the algorithms work – they just have some clues, and we know some of them.

Ranking systems consist of a series of algorithms that are linked together. Search engines take into account many factors, including the wording of your search query, the relevance and usability of the pages, the expertise of the sources, as well as the location and settings.

Ranking Factors

Google’s algorithms use more than 200 ranking factors. But don’t worry; you don’t have to master all these factors to succeed. With a basic knowledge of SEO, anyone can start building their rankings.

seo guide for real estate
Top 8 Search Engine Ranking Factors with SEO for Real Estate

#1 Quality & Unique Content for Search Engines & Users

Content quality is one of the most crucial ranking factors. You can have a website optimized for SEO, but if your visitor doesn’t like the content, it won’t rank high.

“Thank you, Captain Obvious! But what does high-quality content look like?”

Search engines want content that answers search queries thoroughly. Studies show that longer content ranks better than short content. Make sure your content is thorough and unique.

#2 Backlinks to Your Real Estate Website

A backlink for a resource is when another website links to your site. It can be seen as a vote of confidence from another website. At least, that is how Google describes it. Search engines like Google and Bing measure these votes. They use them to understand which pages deserve to be ranked higher.

Learn more about Backlinks for SEO.

#3 Mobile Optimized Real Estate Website

Your website needs to be mobile-friendly if you want to rank higher on Google or other search engines. Mobile optimization means your website adapts to the screen when someone accesses your website with their smartphone or tablet.

Make sure your website is fast, mobile-friendly, and compatible with all devices. When building a website we suggest hiring a marketing agency or professional that can build you something high-quality, fast, and focused on SEO and content. From there you can add tons of plugins, marketing integrations, videos, real estate listings and more. Common platforms most agencies use that we suggest for Real Estate websites would be WordPress or Squarespace.

#4 Crawlable Web Pages

Google has bots to read, test and rank your website. But if your web pages are hard to read or un-crawlable, Google won’t like them. When focusing on SEO for Real Estate as a marketing or agent, you’ll really want to make sure your website and online presence is setup and optimized according to Google’s guidelines.

So you might be asking, “How can I tell if my website is fully crawlable?” One way is to create a real estate website with pre-built options for proper communication with search engines.

This mean Google will read and acknowledge all of your website, content, and SEO to rank you above competitors. Common pages you might need would be a home page, about page, listings page, contact page, and sales page.

#5 Page Load Speed

It’s simple: the faster your web pages load, the higher they rank. And even tiny fractions of a second count. There are several ways to increase the loading speed of your pages. For example, you can compress image files, clean up clunky content, and reduce redirects to improve your site’s speed.

However, we recommend creating a fast website from the beginning. And for that, you need to use a pre-optimized website builder to make your website load fast and rank well in search engines.

We recommend GTMetrix or Google Page Speed Insights for the best page speed analysis to help your website SEO. This highly benefits SEO for Real Estate.

#6 Real Estate Keywords

You will not rank high enough if you cannot target a specific keyword with the web page you want, such as a landing page. Tell Google what keyword you want to rank for; the clearer and more relevant your keywords are, the better your chances of appearing on the first page.

Relevant keyword-rich content is king when it comes to communicating your value and services to Google as a Real Estate Agent.

#7 Domain Power

As mentioned earlier, your content will become more valuable if you get your website as many backlinks as possible. This will help Google learn more about you and trust you more, and your domain power or domain rating will increase significantly over time.

This is also known as Domain Authority (DA) which is coined term with a ranking out of 100. Momentum Digital has a 50/100 which is phenomenal. Most small businesses rank between 1-20/100 and larger real estate companies like Zillow or Trulia are above a 70/100 typically, which allows them tons of keyword ranking and traffic opportunities. This is achieved mostly through high authority backlinking, press, and anchor text links from articles.

zillow domain authority

#8 Local SEO & Google My Business

As mentioned earlier, your content will become more valuable if you get your website as many backlinks as possible. This will help Google learn more about you and trust you more, and your domain power or domain rating will increase significantly over time.

This is also known as Domain Authority (DA) which is coined term with a ranking out of 100. Momentum Digital has a 50/100 which is phenomenal. Most small businesses rank between 1-20/100 and larger real estate companies like Zillow or Trulia are above a 70/100 typically, which allows them tons of keyword ranking and traffic opportunities. This is achieved mostly through high authority backlinking, press, and anchor text links from articles.

Google My Business Real Estate

Knowing how search engines work and the factors they use to rank your content is critical to creating content for your real estate business. Search engine algorithms are constantly being updated, so there is no guarantee that what is necessary today will be important tomorrow. However, backlinks, keywords and matching search intent have been critical for many years. 

Please get in touch with us if you need more information. At Momentum, we can review your real estate website for SEO best practices so that you can consistently improve your online presence.

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