The simple guide to SEO for real estate agents

Before we dive deep into our definitive guide to a winning search engine optimization (SEO) content strategy for real estate, let’s first understand what real estate SEO is and how real estate agents need to leverage SEO to succeed in today’s digital age.

What is an SEO content strategy for real estate?

A successful SEO content strategy for real estate is showing up higher in search rankings within search engines when the real estate agent’s target audience is looking for an estate agent to help them buy or sell property. It’s important for real estate agents to put themselves in the shoes of their customers to better understand their needs of buying or selling a piece of property.

Did you know that up to 44% of home buyers head straight to Google to search for their home-buying options?

This proves that real estate agents need to understand and take advantage of SEO, as their target audiences are gaining higher search intent for finding their next home purchases online.

This is where SEO for real estate agents will be given the time to shine in satisfying the demands of the surge in online searches.

Local SEO for real estate

And why it’s more vital than ever

In the real estate industry, real estate agents need to focus their efforts on a local area. In SEO terms, this means that real agents will need to focus largely on succeeding at local SEO.

Local SEO relies on producing area-specific content and landing pages to increase relevance towards the city or area they are operating in.

Local searches work by having search engines like Google identify the area where the searcher is located (through internet provider addresses) so that Google can then tailor the search results to be relevant to their searcher’s specific area or city.

Google and other large search engines want to provide their users with the relevant and helpful information that best matches their search term. In this case of SEO for real estate agents, this means successfully delivering local search results based on real estate inquiries, questions, and news.

To be effective in local SEO, it helps to produce and include certain local content that is based on your city or areas inside your blogs as followed:

• Landmarks, attractions, or points of interests
• Sports teams (e.g. Bangkok United F.C. if you are based in Bangkok)
• Restaurants or shopping malls
• Schools, Universities, and communities

More essential practices to implement into your Local SEO strategy includes NAP (Name, Address, Phone) citations, Google My Business optimizations, local keyword research, Google reviews/star ratings, social media shares, and more.

Read this guide to local SEO for more in-depth information covering the core approaches needed to succeed in local SEO.

Defining your SEO content strategy for real estate

“Content isn’t king, it’s the kingdom.” – Lee Odden

The first important aspect of a winning SEO content strategy for real estate is to produce various sections of content while still covering the same topic, as the more content you produce, the higher opportunities you can have to target the relevant keywords you want to rank for.

A fine example for this would be to also target the synonyms of your keywords such as “Home” and “House” as well as “Rent” and “Rental” so that searches for both of these synonyms have larger search volumes with different results – allowing you to cover more keywords for the same topic.

When conducting your keyword research for real estate SEO, it is worth looking into both the search volume and how competitive the keywords that you’re using are.

Keywords and search terms that are too short will also most likely be too broad and too competitive – thus causing a lower chance to rank on Google among other similar website content.

These shorter search terms are called short tail keywords. Short tail keywords are made up of less than 3 keywords and usually refer to very broad topics. Examples of short term keywords include “rent condo”, “home buyer”, “realtor rentals”, etc.

Short tail keywords may be possible to rank for large businesses that have high authority and well-established websites, but how for small businesses and real estate agents, ranking high for short tail keywords may be very unlikely.

Short tail keywords are also known to have lower chances of conversions due to them referring to very broad and less-specified topics. The majority of people searching using short tail keywords tend to preferably read reviews, look at news, or visit Wikipedia pages relating to that search first rather than buying.

If you are a small business or a real estate agent, we highly suggest that you focus your efforts on long tail keywords instead.

Long tail keywords are longer keywords/key phrases with usually 3-5 keywords inside the phrase. Long tail keywords are more specific, which allows for higher search intent from the searcher’s side causing greater chances of conversions. Long tail keywords are also less competitive to rank for, due to the added specified keywords, and can still get decent search volumes.

Examples of long tail keywords include: “buy one bedroom condo”, “homes for sale in Bangkok”, “rent condo in Bangkok Sukhumvit”, etc.

According to MOZ, more than 70% of global search queries come from long tail keywords! This is due to consumers and online searchers becoming more specific in their searches – demanding more specified results as fast as possible for their searches made online.

While including the keywords that you would like to rank for in your content is important, it is also important that you do not include them too much.

The method we recommend is to carefully sprinkle your keywords into your headings, sentences, title, meta description, and URL – making the targeted keywords flow into the content, rather than stuffing them in too often. A good ratio to bear in mind is 1 – 2% of your keywords to be within your entire blog post.

If you do over-use the targeted keywords well past 2%, Google will start to recognize and may penalize you for the overuse of the same keywords – as this will simply look unnatural to readers.

Google wants content to be informative, helpful, and to provide great user experience (UX) to the reader. To sum up with SEO content writing, write with the user in mind first.

Here are more helpful tips to producing relevant and quality content for real estate SEO:

• Analyze your customer’s needs and why they should buy or rent from you. This will help you gain more perspective from your customer’s point-of-view which can assist you in content production.
• Create a landing page with a collection of blog posts covering relevant, informative, and helpful topics on real estate. Your written content should be in long-form (aim for in between 1,000 – 2,000 words) with in-depth content on a topic, meaning that you will dive deep and break down each of the main topics you are covering in the highest detail.
• Develop your blog and landing page content to further help your target audience overcome specific difficulties based on what they are searching for on search engines.

Quality content is crucial for real estate SEO, but also the quantity of your content is important as well for you to target a wider range of specific keywords based on what your customers are looking for. It’s important to maintain a good balance of quality and quantity of your content when optimizing for SEO.

Organically boosting your online presence

The importance of online content contribution

Sharing or contributing your real estate blog content to well-known publishers in the real estate industry will gradually allow others to notice the expertise you shared which can then lead you to showcasing higher brand authority.

With local SEO and SEO in general, an important procedure to implement in your SEO content strategy for real estate agents is link building through gaining relevant and quality backlinks.

Backlinks are like a vote of confidence from other websites. Google views the backlinks gained as trust signals which can help boost your website’s online domain and page authority within your blog content’s niche.

Some of the proven methods to gaining quality backlinks are through appearing in online press/PR, being a guest blogger on guest articles, producing consistent quality content that’s sharable, having a presence in online real estate directories (which we will cover more below), and more.

A strong tip that we recommend is to be present in online real estate directories. Online directories can provide local citations/backlinks to your landing page or blog content – giving you a helping hand in link building from a relevant directory website.

Online directories are still great to this day because users tend to do lots of research on them. Being present on relevant online real estate directories not only boosts your website’s SEO with local citations/backlinks but also builds extra channels for you to develop lead generation.

Another helpful SEO tip we suggest is to comment on other online real estate blogs. Blog commenting can help build traffic from other blogs to your own blog through referral traffic – especially when commenting on high-profile blogs in the real estate industry.

Google rewards added SEO traffic in balance to the volume of online traffic from other relevant sources.

Try commenting on local real estate blogs today, or start claiming free spots in online real estate directories nearby! By being present and sharing your website and blog content online, there will be an assured boost in the referral traffic followed by added SEO traffic.

Technical SEO

Optimizing your landing pages for SEO and mobile-friendliness

Mobile devices continue to transform the way organizations interact with potential property buyers and renters. A supporting report by NAR research group informed that a whopping 72% of buyers have searched for a home using mobile devices, with higher potential as younger buyers are particularly likely to rely on smartphones and tablets more in the future.

Other similar statistics from Core Logic shows that up to 58% of millennial homebuyers found their home on a mobile device.

Focusing more on customer decisions and behaviors, it’s clear that businesses must ensure that their websites, landing pages, and blog content are all well-optimized to provide great UX on all major devices (mobile, desktop, tablet), especially as Google is soon moving to a mobile-first rule which will prioritize the mobile versions of your real estate website.

A good rule on mobile optimization for SEO is to keep things simple.

It’s suggested for all your on-page website content to have a responsive design that automatically adjusts to fit on any device’s screen, whether it is a mobile phone, desktop computer, or a tablet/iPad.

Make sure that all your users who visit and are on your landing page or blog can easily navigate through towards the end goal – as the more the user has to navigate around the content, the less likely the user will smoothly follow through to your end objective.

Page speed is also becoming more important for landing pages and blog content. If visitors have to wait too long on your web page, they’ll be more likely to click out of your website to find another similar site that potentially loads faster.

Having more people leave your website after visiting just one landing page is known as having higher bounce rates. Optimizing your landing pages and blog content to load faster, on both mobile and desktop, is key to reducing bounce rates and to retaining the customers who are already on your web page to lead to a potential inquiry or deal.

To speed up your landing page or blog, it helps to minify your web page’s code (such as removing any unnecessary CSS and JavaScript animations) while also optimizing all images on your web page. For effective image optimization, we suggest compressing your PNG or JPEG images to be within the range of 50-500kb in size while still maintaining good, lossless quality.

We advise using online Mobile-Friendly Test tools to help conclude if your blog content or landing page’s current site passes the test and also for you to receive a list of mobile-related issues that can guide you towards resolving any problems.

Responsive design, usability, mobile-friendliness, and page speed are all now very crucial to SEO because Google now considers all those technical factors to be strong ranking signals for websites to rank higher on Google.

Conclusion

To succeed in your SEO content strategy for real estate, we strongly advise putting your core focus on succeeding in local SEO to ensure that you will appear well on local searches for home buying or renting inquiries within your own city or area.

For on-page SEO optimization, make sure to craft unique, helpful, and informative content that is relevant to real estate whilst including specific long tail keywords based on well-searched real estate topics, questions, and inquiries.

For off-page SEO optimization, it helps to sign up and be present in online real estate directories and to contribute and engage your own blog posts to other relevant real estate websites. The aim of these off-page SEO tactics is to build local citations and backlinks to build-up your website to be more authoritative and trustworthy in your local real estate niche.

Lastly, for technical SEO, make sure that your website’s landing pages and all blog content loads fast, provides great UX for users, and are mobile-friendly.

Implement all these points into your SEO strategy, and you will be well on your way to succeeding in SEO for real estate agents.