High-quality SEO services start their pricing around $5,000 a month, as much as you might pay a mid-career employee. This high barrier to entry keeps smaller real estate companies from implementing the level of search engine optimization strategy that they need in order to succeed. But plenty of real estate SEO work can be performed in-house by current staff.
Search engine optimization allows search engines to quickly and easily index your site with their web crawling tools. By making your site easy to load and simple to crawl, you’ll be ranked higher by search engines.
Related – How to Get Ranked on Page 1 on Google Search Results
There are lots of other metrics that search engines use when ranking a site. If you’re looking for easy to implement a real estate SEO strategy, try these 6 tactics to boost your business.
Top Real Estate SEO Tips to Lift Your Business
#1. Use Local Keywords for Local Content
When you search for “pizza” on a search engine, you’re likely to get a list of pizza places close where you’re searching from. Google uses a combination of your search history and cookies to figure out what content would be most relevant to you. While you may not have even entered a location, your results are likely to be close to your zip code.
When you add keywords like your city name, nearby neighborhoods, or important local attractions, search engines will be able to help you target customers. When someone from your area searches for you, you’ll rank higher than other real estate businesses that don’t list where they’re located.
Related – Top Local SEO Ranking Factors for Google Local Listings
Real estate SEO lives and dies by local keywords. Whenever you’re adding content, images or video to your site or social media profiles, include those local terms.
#2. Create a Blog with Original Content
If there’s one thing that search engines love, it’s to find a site with lots of fresh and regularly posted content. The best way to add lots of content about what you do and what services you provide is to create a blog.
A blog can serve as a useful touchstone of information for your potential clients and will help you grow your audience. A blog is a great opportunity to write about your interests and expertise using your most important keywords.
Related – Benefits of Focusing on Long Tail Keywords
Related – How to Craft Impeccable Content that Drives Conversions
Come up with a list of keywords that are essential search terms for finding your business on a search engine. For each keyword or phrase, come up with 5-10 different subjects that you could write about using those words in the title.
Writing content will help you to build a “brand authority”, which means that users will know that you’re qualified to write about the topic your blog is based on.
#3. Provide Useful Information
For companies looking to give their real estate SEO strategy a boost, it’s important to provide useful tools to potential home buyers. Since most homebuyers don’t know what they’re getting into when applying for a mortgage, you could help them out.
A strong and well-designed infographic could describe the step by step process of homebuying in laymen’s terms. Since more people share images with text and images with text are also easier to learn from, you’ll be casting a wide net with an infographic. Your image could go viral and become a resource that people use all around the country.
Just make sure you include the name of your company at the bottom so that you get all the credit.
Try adding a survey to help gather important market data and even include an email input at the end so you can follow up with customers.
More real estate companies are including a mortgage calculator tool on their sites. Many potential homebuyers don’t realize what kind of home they could afford, or whether they could afford one at all.
#4. Build A Community
Within your blog posts, you should connect back to other relevant posts you’ve written. You should also connect to valuable information and research that reputable news and information sites have found.
Connecting to sites that get more traffic allows you to help build a relationship to those more visible blogs. Reach out to those bloggers and ask if they would be willing to exchange links with you. It can be mutually beneficial in growing your audience for your blog.
Buy advertising with reputable local outlets and begin to build a relationship with those papers. When they are looking for information on real estate trends and concepts, they’ll reach out to you or link to your site.
#5. Make Videos
Video walkthroughs have proven to be more popular with buyers than more expensively produced 3D virtual tours. Video walkthroughs give buyers a realistic view of a space, in real time, so they can get a feeling for what a home looks like.
Must Read – 5 Reasons Why Video Marketing Can Revolutionize Your Marketing Campaign
Even if they’ve viewed the home already, they might have forgotten some of the better details of a property. Walkthroughs will allow them to revisit without having to reschedule with you.
On top of that, in coming years, almost all internet traffic will be video-based. People find videos more engaging than still images and are more willing to sit through a longer video than a brief slideshow.
#6. Be Mobile First
Mobile browsing has finally surpassed the amount of browsing done on desktops and laptops. This means that more and more, people are looking at their phones and tablets when they’re shopping, reading, or looking for a home.
Also Read – How to Optimize Your Site for Google Mobile-First Index
Sites that load slowly with hard to use menus are penalized by search engines. For your real estate SEO strategy to be effective, you need to be where your customers are. You need to make sure that your site and all of your information is designed for best viewing on a mobile device.
Real Estate SEO Strategies Can Be Easily Implemented
You can implement many of these SEO strategies with the tools that you already have on hand. Whether or not you hire a professional, you’ll save them time and save yourself money if you’ve done some of the work already.
If you’re ready to take your real estate SEO to the next level, check out our guide of 5 tips to bring traffic to your site.