Until quite recently, the millennials would rather opt to stay at rented homes or choose to live in their parents’ homes. The good news is that the situation seems to be changing in favor of the realtors. As per a National Association of Realtors survey, millennials make for the largest share of homebuyers in the United States.
If you are a realtor, now is the time to prepare for the upcoming trends so that you get an edge over your rivals in terms of business and revenue.
Do you know that 90% of prospective property buyers use online resources to search for their ideal homes? It is why realtors like you need to invest in good SEO strategies to build an online presence for your real estate business.

Why Is It Important for Real Estate to Implement SEO Strategies?

Just having a real estate website is not enough. You need to implement the correct strategies to make it visible on the search engine pages. When your website starts ranking on Google, your business will gain significant exposure beyond the local realms.
SEO is the strategy you need to implement to generate leads for your real estate business. SEO is a form of online marketing. It is incredibly cost-effective yet offers excellent returns on your investment. It drives traffic to your website. And, it provides you with several opportunities to convert leads into proper revenue-generating sales.
You can enhance your client base and also improve sales with effective SEO strategies for your business.

1. How to Boost Real Estate Sales With SEO?

Real estate SEO is an important strategy that requires a lot of effort from SEO professionals. As a realtor, you might find the strategy a little overwhelming initially. There are some more straightforward techniques that you can use for enhancing the SEO of your real estate website.
In the long run, these strategies will help you boost more organic traffic to your website, thereby increasing sales.

2. Real Estate SEO Keyword Research

Keyword research is considered one of the most critical factors in real estate SEO. So, research and choose your keywords carefully.
Google, the search engine giant, gets billions of search queries every month. Prospective home buyers search for properties with queries like “best real estate company,” “where can I get a good real estate agency,” etc.
Depending on the queries, Google shows relevant pages on its result page. The websites that have similar keywords within their website content are likely to show up on the first pages of Google.
The general trend for online users is to click the first few websites that pop up on the search engine pages. People seldom visit the second page of the search engine if they find their query answered on the very first page. So, to show up on the first page, you need to fortify your website with the right keywords.
When you use the right keywords on your website, it will increase your chances of landing on the first pages of SERPs.

3. Real Estate Competitor Research

To have an edge over your rivals, you must invest some time and effort in real estate competitor research. It can guide you about what factors are working for your competitors so that you can implement them for your website too. It will be possible for you to identify areas in which you can capitalize on the weaknesses of your competitors in the business.
With the competitor SEO Analysis, compare your position with that of your competitors. It will also help you prevent any bit of complacency.

4. What Are the Three Real Estate SEO Pillars?

The three main pillars of real estate SEO are:
● On-page SEO
● Off-page SEO and
● Technical SEO
On-page SEO deals with the quality of the content on your website along with keywords strategy and lead generation and conversion.
Off-page SEO works on link-building strategies to build the reliability and authority of your website.
Technical SEO deals with the website’s structure along with the website speed and the mobile responsiveness of the site.

5. Use Quality Real Estate Content on Your Website

A great way to capture the attention of the visitors and the search engines is to update your website with new valuable content constantly. Changing the website content often is not necessary. But you can keep a separate webpage with real estate blog content. Add new content consistently on your website blog page.
The quality of the content must not be compromised, and it must add some value to your users. Don’t forget to throw in relevant keywords to the content of your blog.
Do you know that businesses with a blog page on their websites generate 126% more leads than websites that do not have a separate blog page?

6. Create Real Estate Video Content for Your Website

Everyone knows how important content is for websites. But most don’t realize that what matters the most is the promotion of the content. Unless you know how to promote your content, visitors won’t know about the treasure trove hidden in your website.
When it comes to content, only written content will not suffice. People tend to pay more attention to content that also appeals to them visually. Hence, invest in creating and producing good quality video content. Create a YouTube channel and post video content on that channel consistently. Next, share these videos on your social media platforms and on your website too.
Create and share video content on as many social media channels as possible. Add geo-targeted keywords to the content while sharing them.
Add URL, descriptions, headlines, and hashtags while sharing the content. You can also use video transcripts in your content. It will make it easier for search engine crawlers to index your content on the search engine pages.

7. Optimize Your Real Estate Website for the Search Engine Pages

Don’t make the mistake of just creating good content only for your website blog. You also need to optimize the content of your real estate website to gain maximum advantage from SEO strategies.
Search engines like Google have their content crawler bots that look for relevance in the content of your website. When the bot finds something of relevance on your website, they pull your page up on their search engine result pages.
Some of the elements that you need to optimize on your website are:
Meta title: The meta title appears on the search engine pages. You should ensure that the content on this Meta title has some accurate estate-related keywords.
Meta description: This content appears right below the meta title on the search engine pages. Hence it is a good idea to put relevant keywords in the meta description too.
URL: The URL of your website should also have target keywords in it to attract visitors to your website.

8. Create a Social Media Page Dedicated to Your Real Estate Business

Social media platforms have a broad reach. Hence, use these social media platforms to reach out to a considerable number of prospective home buyers. Create profiles on different social media pages and post regular unique content on each to gain maximum advantage.
It will give your real estate business great brand exposure online. It will also enhance your visibility among your target audience.
9. Request for Your Past Real Estate Clients to Post Reviews for Your Service
Online reviews for your service can influence your online reputation to a great extent. They can also impact your website SEO. A large number of prospective home buyers rely on online reviews before contacting a real estate agency or a realtor.
Invite your earlier clients to leave you a review on your social media pages. You can also post these testimonials on your website and review sites dedicated to real estate agencies.

10. Be an Active Participant on Your Real Estate Social Media Pages

Many young people turn towards various social media pages when they are looking for information about a particular business. So, when people are looking for realtors, a lot of them will search on social media platforms apart from researching on Google.
Stay active and buzzing on all your social media pages. Post relevant content and communicate with visitors actively. It is a great way to gain attention from your target audience. Keep sharing links to your website and blog content on your social media pages.
You can also share third-party relevant content to enhance the user experience for your potential customers.

11. Make Your Real Estate Website Mobile Responsive

55% of global web traffic comes from mobiles. It simply means, if you want to keep Google happy, you have to ensure that your website is mobile responsive. It should operate perfectly on tablets and smartphones.
A mobile responsive website will automatically adjust to the screen of the mobile or tablet. A mobile responsive theme enhances the user experience and is a crucial SEO factor for your real estate business.

12. Add Your Real Estate Website to Google My Business and Other Listings

The more you add your business to listings and directories, the better it is for the SEO of your business. Add your business credentials to all the available local listings and directories. Don’t forget to create a profile on Google My Business too. Add contents, videos, and photos to these listings. These little tasks will help you increase your chances of making it to the top of the search engine pages locally. These directories also act as a local sales channel for your business and enhance lead generation.

13. Earn Real Estate Featured Snippets on Google

It can indeed be a game-changer for your real estate business. Google snippet is not something that most companies target, making it a great SEO opportunity. If you want to earn a real estate snippet from Google, research for queries that do not already have relevant answers. Create content around those queries and provide answers to them.
Run a keyword analysis and find out the geo-targeted keywords and phrases. Place them within high-quality content on your website. Mark your content with appropriate headings and subheadings, images, and charts.
It is also a good idea to create a question-answer section within your website. Such a Q&A section has more probability of getting displayed on Google. It will appear as a featured real estate snippet, especially if the section answers specific queries.

14. Implement Real Estate Local SEO Strategies?

Real estate local SEO is the process of optimizing your website for local search. It is a compelling way of promoting your real estate business to the visitors of a particular location.
As a real estate agency, it is best to focus on local SEO for business as that can give you better traffic and boost sales. But local SEO strategies are different from general SEO. It is best to hire a reputed SEO professional service with expertise in handling local real estate SEO.

15. Secure Your Real Estate Website With an SSL Certification

Often, you may come across such websites that come with a warning of “not secure.” Such websites do not have the SSL certification. SSL stands for Secure Socket Layer. It is a security certificate that essentially acts as a verification interface. It creates a screen between your website and the server in which the site is hosted.
An SSL Certificate confirms that there is no harmful element between the website and the server. Without this certification, it can lead to the stealing of user information. Your website will show “HTTPS” in the URL when it is secured with SSL.
You must know and understand that the most important of all things is user information. Building trust with your clients is an important way of winning and keeping them. When your website has an SSL certification, your clients can trust you with their information.

Conclusion

SEO strategies need at least a few months to show results. The competition in the real estate domain is fierce. But that doesn’t mean you should not make an effort to break through the competition. Real estate SEO is challenging to initialize. But the rewards are well worth every penny.
Be unstoppable simply by making some minor changes to your website. The SEO strategies shared above are a great way to start your journey towards a rewarding real estate business.
If you are unsure about how to get started with SEO for your real estate website, get in touch with an expert SEO service agency in your location today.

Author BIO:

Joseph Schneider is the Marketing Director at Haitna.. With high-quality content and targeted content marketing campaigns, he has helped hundreds of SMEs to increase their inbound leads organically.