7 Ways To Kick Your Real Estate Website SEO Into High Gear
By JD Esajian on May 26, 2015
How can real estate professionals boost their search engine optimization to get more leads online?
With almost 100% of consumers starting their real estate searches online today, how visible real estate agents are makes all the difference. Most are familiar with the term ‘SEO.’ Fewer might realize that good SEO is important for getting traffic to their real estate websites. Most get that they need to do a much better job at it in order to get the results they want. However, few get past this point. So how do you get unstuck, and improve your SEO and position on Google?
The first thing to realize is that if your real estate website isn’t getting enough visitors, SEO may be your first problem. Whatever you do that is positive is going to be a step in the right direction. Note that this is doesn’t mean go cheap and fill your site with junk. That will be counterproductive. You must get started making an effort. So what do you do?
1. Keyword Research
Keywords are the foundation of SEO. Identifying the right keywords makes all the difference. This means keywords that your ideal prospects are using to search the web. You’ll need more than one, and you need to know that these change frequently.
2. Plug Them Into Your Website
Those keywords need to be plugged into your own website. If you are managing your own real estate website on WordPress or another easy to use CMS, you can probably quickly see where to incorporate them. In addition to title tags, meta descriptions, and keyword tags, these keywords also need to be worked into the main text, and linked together between pages. You may even need to add pages to your website to accommodate new keywords.
3. Social
Your keywords need to reach beyond your real estate website. They especially need to be integrated into your social media profiles. Not just your social media posts, but your profiles and page names too. Don’t overlook this or you are missing half the advantages that social media offers. And don’t forget hashtags either. Keywords should be woven into hashtags in your posts. And hashtags can be created especially to drive viral campaigns.
4. Blog!
Real estate blogging is one of the easiest and most effective ways for investors, agents, and businesses to improve SEO. If your blog is barely a skeleton of content, or you don’t have one you are severely limiting your potential. Consistently weekly real estate blog posts can make all the difference in SEO, incoming traffic, leads, deal flow, and revenue. But it does need to be consistent, good quality, and relevant.
5. Off-Site Blogs and Articles
What you do on your own website is as important as what you do offsite. The truth is that you don’t hold a lot of authority with Google and Yahoo when you get started. It takes some time to pick up speed, gain depth, and grow credibility. But real estate pros and companies can leverage others. The easy way to do this is via guest blogging and articles. Again; the keys here are quality and relevance. And the best part is that this is one of the best ROI forms of real estate marketing you can do.
6. PR
Real estate businesses and independent professionals really don’t need separate services or agencies for social media, copywriting, SEO, branding, and PR today. Much of these tasks can be combined and overlapped. But don’t neglect the power of press releases. They are now easy to create and self-distribute. And they can have a lot of SEO benefit.
7. Mobile Real Estate Websites
This is one of the few SEO factors that don’t have to do with keywords. Google has made no secret of the fact that it is no favoring mobile sites. All real estate websites should now at least be mobile responsive. If yours isn’t and you’ve seen traffic and leads go down in the last couple of months this is probably why.
Summary
SEO is vital to real estate lead generation and success today. Don’t get lost in trying to figure out every nuance up front. Get started. You may have to hire some outsourced help, but probably not as much as you think. And while you are waiting for the benefits of these moves to kick in, remember that you can always augment with online PPC ads or offline marketing like direct mail.