What Are The Best Tips On Real Estate SEO That Drives Leads

Handling real estate business is tough and so is implementing real estate SEO efforts. But when done right, the rewards can be surplus.

Real estate business is a real struggle to pull through – both offline and online. Any online realtors dream is to get quality traffic and converting leads that too on an autopilot mode, isn’t that your dream too?

Every real estate business venturing on the online world wants – fewer cold calls, growing revenue and canceling meetings with the unqualified property buyers. Well, you will be really amazed to hear that it is actually possible to put your traffic and lead conversions on autopilot mode. How? By focusing on SEO for real estate.

Almost 90% of property buyers consult the internet to buy the property. Having just a real estate website is not enough, you need to run it parallel to search engine optimization’s best practices to uplift its ranking, traffic base, and lead generation capacity.

The following article will unwrap key practices that should be a part of your explicit real estate SEO strategy. No matter what search engine you are aiming to target – be it Google or Bing, in the following, you will learn about the best practices of SEO for real estate business that’s bound to work on any search engine and other online platforms. Continue reading if you want to be the host of a real estate website that ranks on top in SERP, drives regular traffic and brings qualified sales leads.

1. Great Tips on SEO for Real Estate Business of any Size and Scale

Read on to find out how you can leverage or fully scrutinize your real estate website to capture traffic and converting leads. Here are the top tips on how to optimize your real estate website, curated by our real estate SEO expert team to help you dominate the local searches.

1.1. Have a detailed SEO audit first

Realtors or website owners usually get confused about where to start from. The best way would be to start from an exhaustive SEO auditing.

You need to analyze the gaps behind the incompetent results in the form of poor lead generation, inadequate sales figures, and the reasons behind slim to none brand’s shout-out amongst the target groups.

Find out the reasons or practices that are resulting in such unpleasant outcomes

While conducting the local SEO audit, have tight monitoring of these factors:

1. How it is doing in terms of usability – website load times or mobile platforms compatibility, are they positive?

2. Is link building (interlinking, outbound linking or inbound linking) all-powerful with updated link pages and without any broken links?

3. How effective are keywords and link placement, web content structure, use of visuals and infographics?

4. Is page structure composed of optimized titles, meta descriptions, heading and alt tags, URLs?

5. Look for the nuances in the site’s structure – XML sitemap, robots.txt, and redirects.

When you will have a detailed eye on the above factors, you will easily identify the gaps that are hindering your website’s path towards traffic building and client invites.

1.2. Optimize your real estate website for mobile devices

Almost 48% of real estate searches happen via mobile devices. Along with making your website just desktop friendly, make sure it is mobile-friendly too – as your entire ranking preference is decided via the mobile experience of the website.

Make sure your websites’ UI and UX for mobile devices are in great sync with the mobile-savvy property buyers’ expectations.

Here are the most important factors you need to address while considering optimization for mobile devices:

• Website’s usability on different mobile devices orientations
• Responsive website design
• Homepage interface
• Website’s navigation
• Hosting and page speed
• Traffic, leads and conversions frequency
• Website’s AMP-support and load times
• Resourceful entry forms

To serve mobile-first website experience to your buyers, make sure the website is supportive of Google’s AMP and loads within less than two seconds upon every users’ search query.

Have simple and convincing entry forms to keep the attention of users on your website distraction-free.

If your website is posed with ill-elements like slow-loading pages, distracting entry forms, search engines will notice and roll your website out from the top spots in SERPs.

Here are a few tips on SEO for real estate agents to help them optimize their mobile-first websites:

Optimize the visuals in terms of size, make sure it is still well-pixelated after being resized. Put non-wordy yet descriptive and keyword infused ALT tags over every image.

Make your website AMP supported, the website’s load time will gradually improve.
Search engines and buyers hate to navigate a website that’s hard to access. If you have advertisements and pop-ups, limit their quantity as when they are in abundance, they block your users to access the real content and annoy them until they decide to leave the website.

Make sure the reasons behind your website’s poor performance aren’t related to caching and hosting. Ensure that all your HTTPS requests are handled by flash only.

Ensure that your website’s internal search feature is acting all right and displaying the relevant results to the buyers. Make sure the filters within the search are all accurate and users are not doing the heavy lifting by zooming your mobile web elements too much.

Have a simple and easy to navigate website’s homepage inclusive of visually appealing CTAs, short menus with large tabs, search fields with related filters, easy to fill contact forms, a clickable logo button that lets buyers swing back to the homepage and other pages of the website.

Optimize and edit the website’s code, delete all the flash and script elements that are hindering your website’s load times.
Have a quick test of the website’s mobile-friendliness over Google’s Mobile-friendly Test to pinpoint the issues restricting the website’s performance.

1.3. Put appealing & informative animations, images, infographics throughout your every digital content

If you are in the habit of putting great walls of texts with no footprint of enriching and captivating multimedia – wait, you are doing it all wrong.

Almost 1/3rd of full-time marketers have expressed that multimedia is one of the important aspects of overall content marketing efforts. 50% of users want to experience the property via virtual reality over the website before actually seeing it in real life. The websites with sharp & HD images of properties tend to sell at equal or at more than the list price.

When you include visuals and graphical content to your website, the buyers feel captivated to stay longer on that website. It’s especially important for you to leverage great use of images since you are dealing with the real estate business – imagine a real estate business website without no images of the property – would you prefer to stay on that website?

The use of well-pixelated, quality property images, videos, infographics will not only hold the attention of the buyers but will as well let them decide better before making buying decisions.

Few ways to do the multimedia inclusion right:

• Shoot and add video testimonials of the past buyers.
• Shoot the property to be sold with the in-depth narration of the property’s facilities and benefits.
• Have facts and figures rich infographics – it could be about flash offers about the property or about curiosity driving information for the buyers.

Studies have shown that websites hosted with videos get a tripled amount of inbound links than those who don’t. While an Australian real estate group conducted a small test by putting video to their website and compared them alongside the websites those who didn’t. By doing so, the Australian brand noticed 403% more inquiries from the target buyers.

1.4. Enlist yourself on local real estate directories and business listing platforms

To prove your real estate business authenticity and drive great backlinks and traffic, registering your business website with the real-estate related directories or listing platforms is a must.

Buyers conduct research on these directories and listing sites directly to have real reviews and more information about real-estate businesses.

Directories like Zillow have around 498 million page views per month while Trulia has 277 million, approaching and targeting such directories will eventually help in attracting the real and heavy traffic.

Tips to list your business on directories and listing rightly:

• Research and compile a list of heavy traffic generating directories and listing platforms.
• Always make a courteous response to the user’s query and comments over your directory’s profile.
• Have a mention of popular directories and listing sites (you are active on) over your website to convey your authenticity and credibility.
• Put accurate information of business name, address, communications, visuals, detailed descriptions in your directory & listing account.
• Cover the keywords inside your description that people are fondly searching for.

1.5. un a real-estate Blog

You need optimized and informative content to interact with your audience, take a step ahead of competent realtors and dominate the search engine’s results.

If you are just starting off and has limited resources and can’t go big with writing and publishing heavy content types, you can start with the following:

• Write and publish articles – You can start writing unique and authentic articles subjected around your listings. You can write about the type of property you are selling, what its neighborhood, locality around looks like, facilities that one can avail. You can as well talk about the real estate market condition or how investing in a property can be the best thing, for now, backed by realistic facts and stats.
• Visual content – You can list photos, video tours, infographics to your website to hook the interest of the buyers even more.
• Interviews with Q/A about users’ most searched queries and doubts.

Pro tip – Make sure to thoroughly optimize every content you write with relevant keywords for the real estate business. Include geo keywords inside the titles, meta titles, and descriptions (if you are targeting particular locality), alt tags, URLs, hashtags and more.

1.6. Create realistic video content and optimize it for search engines

Make video curation an important aspect of your real estate SEO. Video content can really help you get thousands of upvotes from the search engines as well as the property buyers.

You can start by:

• Make a Youtube channel
• Post regular videos there
• Share those posted videos to your social media and integrate them within web blogs
• Get live on Youtube, Facebook or Instagram to engage the audience and prove your genuineness

Pro tips:

• Including every audience, understandable subtitles within the video and video translation in the description area can help in getting a good boost in search engine crawling and indexing.
• Optimize every video before posting for local searches by including geo-targeted keywords for real estate inside the video title, descriptions and hashtags.
• Use the description space wisely and put CTAs in the form of links to your websites, social media channels, and listing pages.

What type of video content should I produce and upload?

You can make video content as:

• 360-degree property tour video
• Video on neighborhood
• Generic videos displaying different topics like why to invest in property? What are the affordable listings you have?

Q/A videos with the realtors, agents and the builders
And many other videos solving the buyers’ doubt and query while buying any commercial or domestic property

1.7. List your business in Google 3 pack

Google 3 pack is a consolidation of – Google My Business, Google Maps, and Google+.

If you want to have a heavy stream of clients and website visitors, listing your website on these platforms will definitely help in improving the real estate SEO efforts.

And if your website hosts engaging content, genuine authoritativeness, you will easily get the ranking in the top 3 non-paid search results spots.

Buyers pay special attention to websites that host ratings, reviews, and intuitive Google maps directions. There, signing in the Google 3 pack will be helpful to grab the attention of targets.

Tips to list your real estate business on Google My Business effectively

• Add a correct office address as Google sends the authorization code on the address you have mentioned. Even if you don’t have a physical office, put your home address instead.
• After claiming the business on Google My Business, you won’t be able to easily tweak the information put by you in the first place. Make sure to cross-check the information related to your business communications like address, phone numbers, telephone no., email id multiple times to avoid later on changes.
• Write a non-wordy yet detailed, catchy and real estate SEO keywords infused business description – clearly describing what your business is all about and services and products it offers.
• Add real and clear photos related to your business, you can display your listings along with a concise URL to your homepage.
• Do specify your business operating hours and every possible contact information.

1.8. Optimize your entire website structure

takes a perfectly optimized website to make it visible and ranking high in the search results. Thus, you need to monitor and optimize the following areas:

• Have proper and updated outbound and inbound links allocation
• Eliminate the broken links
• Have site speed optimization
• Have overall content optimization with the insertion of relevant keywords for real estate
• Optimize the CTR and bounce rates
• Use SEO-friendly concise and crisp URLs only
• Conduct detailed real estate SEO keywords analysis to find and add the high volume search terms
• Optimize XML sitemap, robots.txt, schema, SSL certificates, and W3C validation

Deeply analyze and treat the above parameters of your website to enable it to do better in the rankings and traffic generation game.

1.9. Feature your website in Google’s “featured snippets” section

Google’s featured snippets give you a great position above the #1 in the search results which is #0 (which users see as a “trustworthy” and “most likely to be clicked” spot).

On winning the featured snippet space, you can:

• Attract users who are interested in your listings
• Increase conversions directly
• Improve rankings and traffic footfall

Here is how you can work hard to attain that priceless featured snippet spot:

• Conduct an effective real estate SEO keywords analysis to find geo-centric longtail keywords and phrases.
• Use them inside the quality and in-depth content, mostly around the areas where the users’ queries are shortly answered within the long passage.
• Make use of shorter paragraphs within the content that could fit inside the snippet.

If possible, make a Q/A section, as they mostly get the preference to appear in the featured snippets.

2. Final Thoughts

To dominate the local SEO searches, the following practices of SEO for real estate agents and their websites would be enough to drive the desired traffic, ranking and quality sales lead.

The key SEO tips we learned about are:

1. Have an SEO audit
2. Optimize the website for mobile users
3.Making use of attractive multimedia
4. Make a profile on real estate directories and listing platforms
5.Run an informative and captivating blog
6.Create realistic video content
7.Mark your spot in Google 3 pack (Google +, Google My Business and Google maps)
8.Optimize the entire website structure
9. Make efforts to win that spot in Google’s “featured snippets”

If you have a real estate website to rank and make fuller use of it to earn effortless leads, our real estate SEO expert team can help you deploy these above and other hundreds of SEO methods — to help you drive converting leads. Let’s collaborate and help your real estate business enjoy all sales perks.