On the face of it, real estate may seem like a business that’s done face-to-face. However, that’s far from reality. In fact, most millennials are likely to search for their new homes online.
And guess what?
It’s not just the millennials. About 84% of all home buyers used the internet to search for homes. And this makes real estate SEO extremely important.
Why, you might ask?
Search engine optimization is one of the best ways to get discovered online. Wouldn’t you want your project to appear at the top of the search results when someone looks for homes in your area?
Without SEO, you can’t possibly think of achieving that sort of visibility for your real estate website. But what exactly is real estate SEO and how to use it to your advantage.
To answer all of these questions, we have put together this detailed guide on real estate SEO.
So, let’s dive right into it.
Disclaimer: This content contains some affiliate links for which we will earn a commission (at no additional cost to you). This is to ensure that we can keep creating free content for you.
Table of Contents
What Is Real Estate SEO?
Search engine optimization or SEO is the process through which you can show up on search engine results pages (SERPs) when people search for what you have to offer.
When it comes to optimizing websites for real estate agents and companies, it’s termed “real estate SEO.”
It includes using a mix of SEO and local real estate SEO tactics to optimize your real estate website for relevant searches.
Why, you might ask?
That’s because you’d want to show up in both local search results and even for searches conducted for other locations.
The idea is to create brand awareness and get people to know more about your company, agency, or real estate projects.
But guess what?
You can also use real estate SEO tactics to generate leads and find potential clients as a real estate agent or business owner.
And how exactly can you do that?
When potential buyers or tenants find your property or agency, they may want to learn more about it. This may prompt them to give you a call or they may even provide their contact information to you and become leads.
For this to happen, you will have to showcase your phone number or add a contact form to your website. This will make it easier for prospects to connect with you if they are interested in your property listings.
That being said, it’s important to understand how to do SEO for your real estate website. So, let’s take a look at the different components of real estate SEO.
What Are the Components of Real Estate SEO?
Real estate SEO is a subset of SEO and can be broken down into four major optimization parts, which include:
- On-Page Real Estate SEO: It deals with all of the factors for which you can optimize your website for real estate SEO.
- Off-Page Real Estate SEO: It includes all of the factors which require you to optimize things on websites other than yours.
- Technical Real Estate SEO: It can be called a subset of on-page real estate SEO as it deals with all of the technical factors for which you can optimize your real estate website.
- Local Real Estate SEO: It includes optimizing for all of the factors that will help you rank your website for local searches.
Let’s now dive into the various techniques and strategies that you can implement to improve the search performance and real estate SEO of your real estate website.
The Real Estate SEO Strategies You Need in 2024
To help you optimize your real estate website for SEO, we have put together this detailed guide on real estate SEO. If you want to rank higher in the search results, you should use these strategies diligently and consistently.
So, without further ado, let’s get started with the real estate SEO strategies:
On-Page SEO Tips for the Real Estate Industry
As mentioned above, on-page real estate SEO deals with all of the factors for which you can optimize your real estate website to improve your search presence. Some of the on-page real estate SEO strategies include formatting your pages well, creating high-quality content, improving your internal linking, etc.
Here are some of the most important on-page real estate SEO tips that will help you through the optimization process.
1. Conduct Keyword Research
Keywords are essential components of any SEO strategy and real estate SEO is no different. Ranking for the right set of real estate seo keywords ensures that your website will be easily discoverable for your target audience.
That’s why it’s critical to find the right set of keywords for your website. For that, you need to leverage keyword research tools such as Google Keyword Planner, Semrush, and KWFinder.
All you need to do is to search for a primary term and the tool will come up with a list of long-tail keywords relevant to it. From there, you need to select the ones that are the most relevant for your real estate brand and market.
Additionally, you should check for the competition scores and search volumes of your selected real estate keywords. This will help you understand whether ranking for those keywords can help you drive enough organic traffic to your website.
But where should you use them?
Once you’ve found the right set of keywords for your website, you need to include them in your web copy. The idea is to tell search engines what your website and content are all about.
Along with the web copy, you should also add them to the title tags, meta descriptions, and URLs of your web pages.
A word of caution here, though:
You shouldn’t go overboard with your usage of keywords. Google frowns on websites that overstuff keywords into their real estate content to boost real estate SEO. Instead, you should write content for your readers and include keywords naturally.
Recommended tools: Semrush, KWFinder, Google Keyword Planner
2. Segment Your Keywords
Selecting your keywords isn’t enough. You also need to segment them into the right groups to use them more efficiently to boost real estate SEO.
Here are the three groups you can segment your keywords into:
- Navigational keywords: Keywords used to navigate to a certain website. These are also called branded keywords such as “real estate agent near me, “ properties for sale in Orlando.”
- Informational keywords: Keywords used to look for some information. This is where you can create content with tips and guides such as “ how to boost the value of your home,” or “XX ways to attract quality tenants in New York.”
- Transactional keywords: Keywords that have some transactional intent such as: “houses for sale in Kentucky,” “ cheap condos in Houston, “ or “lakefront villas in North Carolina.”
But why should you segment your keywords?
This is because they meet your users’ search intent or the purpose behind a user's search, or the desired outcome that the user hopes to achieve by typing a particular query into a search engine.
Understanding the user search intent is essential for any business that wants to boost its real estate SEO efforts. It can help you produce relevant and useful content for your audience.
By segmenting your keywords, you can put them to better use. For instance, you can use transactional keywords on pages where you’re listing properties.
3. Structure Your Website Well
One of the most important components of on-page real estate SEO is your website’s structure. A complicated website structure would mean that the search engine robots will have a hard time finding new pages on the website.
What’s more?
It will not only affect search crawlers but also impact the browsing experience of your website visitors. They may get lost while navigating through your real estate website.
However, along with the website structure, you also need to be careful about the structure of your pages.
You need to add your title tags and insert the target keyword there. Also, you need to include a meta description for each page and include the keyword into that as well to ace real estate SEO.
Similarly, you need to insert header tags into the page to structure it appropriately. For instance, note how we’ve incorporated these header tags into my content. The target keyword is also included in the tags.
Image via Attrock
Pro Tip: Make sure that you use relevant sub-headings frequently to ensure that your content doesn’t appear like a wall of text.
4. Start a Real Estate Blog
A blog is an essential component of any SEO and content strategy and the same applies to real estate SEO. By adding a blog to your website, you can target a greater number of keywords, improve your site’s organic search performance, and increase organic traffic.
And how can you achieve that?
Once you’ve created a blog, you need to start coming up with ideas for blog posts related to the real estate niche. Your blog posts should cover relevant industry topics and address the problems that your target audience is facing. The idea is to turn your blog into a valuable resource for your ideal customers.
You should also write informational content pieces that will help your audience learn something new related to the real estate space. You should focus on internal linking as well.
But how will doing all this help you enhance your real estate SEO?
When you create high-quality content for your blog posts, you will have to conduct keyword research. You need to look for the right set of keywords for each of your blog posts and include them in the content.
Doing so will help you increase the chances of getting your content ranked for that keyword, which will help you drive more traffic to your website. In other words, an improved real estate SEO. However, as mentioned earlier, you should be careful not to overuse keywords in your content.
Over time, when you create more blog posts for your website, you’ll start ranking for a greater number of keywords, which will positively impact your real estate SEO. This, in turn, would mean that you’d be able to reach out to a much wider audience.
For instance, note how CBRE has added a blog to their website. On it, they share content related to real estate topics.
Image via CBRE
Recommended Tools: WordPress, Squarespace, WordPress.org
5. Improve Your Page Loading Speed
Your website’s page loading speed has a big impact on your real estate SEO.
But why?
Real estate SEO is all about improving the experience of those who are visiting your website. Search engines strive hard to ensure that they divert their users to high-authority and relevant websites.
Google favors websites that not only provide the right information but also deliver a safe and great browsing experience.
In such a situation, a slow loading website would mean a poor user experience for the visitors. Both search engines and people won’t prefer those websites that load too slow.
After all, who’d want to visit a website that takes ages to load?
But what is the actual impact of your page loading speed?
When it comes to ecommerce websites, even a 0.1-second improvement in your website’s loading speed can boost your conversions by 8-10%.
Image via Deloitte
Recommended Tools: Google’s PageSpeed Insights, web.dev
6. Make Your Website Mobile Friendly
While improving the real estate SEO performance of your website, you need to take care of the web design as well. Nearly 51% of all the web traffic in the world now originates from mobile devices. This makes mobile-friendly websites the need of the hour.
Image via Statista
But why?
If your website’s design isn’t mobile friendly, it’ll lead to a poor browsing experience. This, in turn, will not only put off the visitors but will also negatively affect your real estate SEO performance.
And with the big mobile-first indexing update that Google launched, the importance of designing a mobile-friendly website has increased further.
So, how can you go about building a website for mobile devices?
The best way is to start the development process for mobile screens and then scaling it up for larger screens. This ensures that your website will render in the best possible form on devices of all screen sizes.
But what if this process sounds complicated?
Alternatively, you can go for a responsive website design. In this form of web design, all of the website elements are responsive, which means that they’ll resize themselves based on the screen size to ensure that the website fits perfectly well.
This, in turn, will help you ensure that the elements not only load quickly but also deliver a good browsing experience with improved readability and real estate SEO.
Recommended Tools: Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test
7. Create Landing Pages
To give a further boost to your real estate SEO efforts, you should consider creating landing pages. These pages are specifically targeted towards a single goal, which is usually related to lead generation or driving sales.
Which landing pages should you consider creating?
There are three major types of landing pages that you can create for your real estate website:
Let’s take a quick look at each of these.
Property Pages
You can create special landing pages for each property type that your agency or company has to offer. People may have different preferences when it comes to the types of properties they want to rent or buy.
For instance, some may be interested in offices while others may want to purchase apartments. The idea here is to create individual landing pages that cater to the interests of each of these user segments.
Everything, right from the copy of the page to the property listings should be customized to meet the needs and preferences of specific clients.
Neighborhood Pages
Like property pages, you should also consider creating a separate landing page for each neighborhood that you service.
The idea here is to rank on search engines for as many neighborhoods as possible. This way, whenever someone looks for properties in a specific area, they are likely to view your landing page for that area.
This is where local real estate SEO strategies will come into the picture.
City Pages
If you serve multiple cities, you should create landing pages that are dedicated to each city where you’ve got a presence. You should optimize each landing page for location-based keywords to help boost your search rankings for city-based searches.
As a result, whenever anyone looks for properties in that particular city, your landing page will show up on the search engine results pages (SERPs). This, in turn, will help you generate more leads for that city.
Recommended Tools: Instapage, Leadpages, HubSpot, ClickFunnels
8. Add Internal Links
Internal links are essential components of any real estate SEO strategy. They help improve your website navigation and also help you keep visitors on your website for longer intervals.
Your goal should be to link relevant pages on your website so that visitors can keep moving between them and this can help keep them from bouncing away.
But that’s not the only purpose internal links serve when it comes to real estate SEO. They’re also helpful in improving the discovery of new pages.
When you add internal links, you help search engine robots discover new pages on your website. This, in turn, means quicker indexation on search engines.
For example, note how we’ve added internal links on all of the blog posts on our website.
Image via Attrock
Pro Tip: Take care of the anchor text while building internal links. It’s the factor that may draw the readers to click on the link.
Off-Page SEO Tips for the Real Estate Industry
Off-page real estate SEO deals with all of the optimization factors that you take care of through other websites.
Here are some of the most useful off-page real estate SEO tips that you should consider leveraging:
1. Build Backlinks
When it comes to off-page real estate SEO, acquiring backlinks is one of the most important tactics. Each link from another website to your website counts as a vote of authenticity for your website and helps boost your authority in the industry.
While backlinks are one of the most important ranking factors for real estate SEO, they are also one of the most misunderstood and abused ranking factors.
A backlink is simply a link from one website to another. Google uses backlinks as a way to measure the quality and relevance of a website. The more high-quality backlinks a website has, the higher it will rank in search results.
There are two types of backlinks:
- Dofollow: A dofollow link is a link that passes SEO value from one website to another. This is the type of link that you want to have.
- Nofollow: A nofollow link is a link that does not pass SEO value from one website to another. This type of link is often used for sponsored content or paid links.
However, there’s a caveat:
It’s not just the quantity of the backlinks that matters but also the quality. You need to build backlinks from other websites in the real estate industry. Also, these websites should be authoritative sources.
If you get hundreds of links from poor and spammy websites, it’ll adversely affect your website's reputation.
How can you build quality backlinks for your website?
- Publish high-quality content: The best way to get high-quality backlinks is to publish high-quality content on your website. If you write informative and helpful articles, other websites will be more likely to link to your content, which will improve your real estate SEO.
- Reach out to other website owners: If you know of a website that would benefit from linking to your content, reach out and let them know. You can find prospective websites that accept guest posts and then write high-quality content for them. In your posts, you can include a link or two that direct users to your own website.
- Create infographics and videos: Infographics and videos are great for earning backlinks. People are more likely to share visual content than written content, so infographics and videos are more likely to go viral and earn you backlinks from other websites.
- Add social media sharing buttons to your website: Make it easy for visitors to share your content by adding social media sharing buttons to your website. The more times your content is shared, the more likely you are to earn backlinks, and as a result, boost your real estate SEO efforts.
- Participate in online forums and communities: If you participate in online forums and communities related to your niche, you may be able to earn backlinks from the signatures you use in these forums. Many platforms allow users to include a link in their signature, so use this opportunity to earn backlinks and optimize your real estate SEO.
Pro Tip: Look for broken links on other websites and reach out to them to replace those with your links.
2. Acquire Brand Mentions
Backlinks are great. However, it may not be possible to get them all of the time. That’s where brand mentions come into the picture. While brand mentions may not be linked to your website, they definitely help with real estate SEO.
But how?
When your brand’s name appears on multiple prominent websites, it adds to your overall credibility. This, in turn, will tell search engines that your website is trustworthy. As a result, they might rank your site higher in relevant search results.
How can you get brand mentions?
You might earn some brand mentions naturally without any effort. However, for others, you can write testimonials, be part of expert roundups, get featured on other websites, etc.
For this, however, you might have to reach out to other websites and build good relationships within the industry.
You can also explore guest blogging, social media marketing, Google AdWords, and forum marketing.
Guest blogging is a great way to get brand mentions and sneak in real estate SEO because you are essentially getting your brand name in front of a new audience.
When you guest blog, you write a blog post for another website in your industry. This gives you the opportunity to include a link to your own website, which helps strengthen your backlink profile and improve your real estate SEO.
Social media marketing is another great way to get brand mentions. When you post on social media, you are essentially creating an online conversation about your brand.
This conversation can then be picked up by other Internet users, which gives you more exposure and increases the chances that your brand will be mentioned.
Google AdWords is also an excellent way to get brand mentions and optimize real estate SEO because it allows you to target a specific audience with your advertising.
This ensures that your ads show up in front of people who are searching for information about your topic, which gives you more opportunities to get brand mentions.
And last, but not the least when it comes to boosting real estate SEO is to try forum marketing.
Start by finding forums that are relevant to the real estate industry. Here are some forums to explore:
- Commercial Real Estate GTA
- Real Estate Investors
- StreetEasy Discussions
- Wall Street Osis
Once you've found some forums, spend some time reading through the posts to get a feel for the topics that are being discussed.
Create a profile in the forum that interests you and start participating in the discussions. Be sure to include a link to your website in your profile so that people can find your business. And when you post in the forum, be sure to add value to the discussion.
3. Participate in HARO Roundup Requests
HARO (Help A Reporter Out) can help you get brand mentions and backlinks from news websites. These websites usually tend to have high authority, which means that featuring on them can help improve your real estate SEO.
How does HARO work?
When you sign up for HARO, you typically receive three emails every day. You can choose to respond to these emails and help reporters with their stories. If they like your response, they might include your name in their story and may even give a backlink to you. This, in turn, can improve your off-page real estate SEO.
A handy tip here would be to give detailed, useful responses to the HARO requests. It will also help if you can give quick replies as most reporters are in a hurry to publish their stories. In such situations, they may pick the most reliable answers that come in first.
Technical SEO Tips for the Real Estate Industry
Technical SEO deals with all of the technical optimization needs of your website. These include fixing your broken links, securing your website, and making it easier for search engines to index your pages, among other things.
Here are the top technical SEO tips you should follow when trying to improve your real estate site’s SEO performance.
1. Use HTTPS
Your website’s security is an essential component of real estate SEO. After all, search engines wouldn’t want to send their users to websites that aren’t safe for browsing.
When you add an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate to your website, you secure the browsing experience of your visitors. That’s the reason why Google considers HTTPS an important ranking parameter in SEO.
And what does this mean for you?
If you haven’t got an SSL certificate for your website, you might be losing out on your rankings in the SERPs.
Make sure you get an SSL certificate when you purchase your hosting plan or domain. We recommend using Bluehost as it gives you a free SSL certificate with your hosting plan.
However, once you’ve got your SSL certificate, make sure you use a 301 redirect to direct the traffic from the HTTP version of your website to the HTTPS version. If you don’t use this redirect, you might end up with two versions of your website and this can negatively affect your real estate SEO.
Recommended Platforms: Bluehost, HostGator, GoDaddy
2. Generate an XML Sitemap
To ensure that your web pages get listed on Google and other search engines quickly, you should generate an XML sitemap for your site. This sitemap contains a list of all of the links on your website that you want to get indexed by Google.
But how can you generate an XML sitemap?
If you’re using WordPress, you can use a plugin like Yoast SEO or Rank Math to create an XML sitemap without much effort.
Once you’ve got the XML sitemap, you should upload it on Google Search Console to start the indexing process. The search engine robots will regularly crawl your website using this sitemap to find new pages.
For instance, here is how we’ve used Yoast SEO to generate an XML sitemap for our website:
Image via Attrock
Recommended Tools: Yoast SEO, Rank Math
3. Get Your robots.txt File Right
The robots.txt file of your site is meant for search engine robots and explains which pages they should crawl and which ones must be excluded. And that’s why it’s a critical file that must be present on your website and be appropriately developed too.
But why?
Wouldn’t you want all of the pages of your website to be indexed?
No, there may be certain pages like checkout pages or account pages that you may want to keep off the search results. These pages must be specified in your robots.txt file.
Additionally, it’s important to be selective about the pages you want to get indexed as the search engine spiders have limited crawl budgets. If they end up spending those on pages that don’t need to be indexed, they might miss out on the ones that need indexing.
Local SEO Tips for the Real Estate Industry
Local SEO is an important part of real estate SEO as you may be selling or leasing properties in particular cities or neighborhoods. By leveraging the right local SEO tactics, you can grow your visibility in specific regions and even get featured in Google Maps listings and Knowledge Graphs.
Here are the most important local real estate SEO tips you should use to rank higher for local searches:
1. Create Your Google My Business (GMB) Listing
When it comes to local SEO, there’s nothing that comes quite close to Google My Business. It’s a must-have requirement for local SEO. You should create a Google My Business listing for your local business to maintain an active presence on the platform.
It’s important to fill out all of the important information such as your contact details, address, website, work hours, etc. You should also consider uploading photos and videos of your real estate company office there.
But why?
When you get a GMB listing for your business, it’ll show up as a Knowledge Graph or as a listing in Google Maps results, which can help improve your company’s search visibility.
2. Get Citations
Citations are also important when it comes to real estate SEO. The best sources for these would be real estate directories and aggregators. You should look for the best possible real estate directories and get your business listed.
However, make sure you thoroughly check these directories to ensure that they’re legitimate and not spammy.
3. Ensure That Your NAP Information is Consistent Everywhere
NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number) is yet another crucial factor that influences your local SEO. This is because these are the various modes through which people can identify and contact your business.
So, it’s important to ensure that this information is not just correct and updated on your GMB listing but also everywhere else. This includes the likes of your social media accounts and website.
But why does this information need to be consistent everywhere?
The goal of a search engine like Google is to provide the most accurate information to their users. If you’ve mentioned conflicting information at various places, it weakens your credibility as a company.
On the other hand, consistent NAP information adds credibility to your brand and helps boost your real estate SEO efforts.
FAQs
Q1. What does SEO mean in real estate?
A. SEO stands for search engine optimization even when it comes to real estate. It’s an important part of the marketing strategy of any real estate agency or company, and aids in improving your search visibility.
Q2. How do I do SEO for my real estate website?
A. Doing SEO for your real estate website includes optimizing your site and content for on-page, off-page, technical, and local SEO ranking parameters.
Some of the best real estate SEO tips that can help you improve your authority as a real estate agent or company include:
- Conducting keyword research
- Segmenting your keywords
- Structuring your website well
- Starting a real estate blog
- Creating landing pages
- Building backlinks
- Using HTTPS
- Getting your robots.txt file right
- Creating your Google My Business listing
- Ensuring that your NAP information is consistent everywhere
Q3. How can I get more real estate clients?
A. Some of the best ways to get more real estate clients are:
- Leverage real estate SEO tactics.
- Use social media marketing.
- Take advantage of paid promotions.
- Partner with influencers.
- Use email marketing services.
- Create videos that display your real estate properties.
- Hire real estate seo experts
Q4. What is the best home search site?
A. The best home search websites are:
- HomeFinder.com
- Realtor.com
- ForSaleByOwner.com
- Zillow.com
- Trulia.com
- Homes.com
- Roofstock.com
Q5. How can I grow my real estate business faster?
A. Some of the best ways to grow your real estate business faster are:
- Creating a website
- Strengthening your real estate SEO
- Creating an email list
- Using social media marketing
- Launching paid ad campaigns
- Starting a blog
Q6. How can I get real estate listings fast?
A. Here are the best ways to get real estate listings fast:
- Leverage real estate SEO tactics.
- Contact developers.
- Make your presence felt on social media.
- Use cold calling.
- Contact as many real estate agents or agencies you know.
Q7. Why do most real estate agents fail?
A. One of the biggest reasons why real estate agents fail is that they miss growing their brands online. Numerous property searches now begin online and if you don’t have enough online presence, you might fail to grow your business. That’s why it’s essential to invest in real estate SEO.
Q8. Can I do SEO on my own?
A. Yes, you definitely can do SEO on your own, but it’s nothing short of a full-time job. Additionally, you might find it challenging if you’re new to the field. That’s why it’s a better idea to leave SEO for real estate to the SEO experts.
You can hire our SEO experts for real estate SEO services to get your website ranked on the top search engine results page. We know how to optimize your website content and other parameters for improved search visibility.
Q9. Is SEO worth paying for?
A. Definitely,real estate SEO is one of the most effective ways to market your real estate business online and generate new leads and conversions. It’s also a reliable long-term marketing strategy and is definitely worth investing in.
Q10. How much does SEO cost per month?
A. The cost of real estate SEO depends on your requirements. It could be as little as a few hundred dollars and can even cost you thousands of dollars in case you want to implement an aggressive SEO and content creation strategy.
Final Thoughts
A lot of property searches begin online and if you don’t have a good web presence, you’re likely to miss out on them. That’s why it’s essential to leverage the right real estate SEO tips to rank for relevant search terms.
How can you achieve that?
You need to optimize your website for all of the relevant on-page SEO factors like page loading speed, mobile-friendliness, and more. It’s equally important to get your off-page real estate SEO right by acquiring high-quality backlinks and brand mentions.
What’s more?
You also need to take care of the technical aspects of your website such as generating an XML sitemap to further improve your real estate SEO performance.
Finally, as a real estate agent or company, you should also ace your local real estate SEO strategy by getting your GMB listing.
Do all of these search engine optimization strategies sound a bit too difficult? Don’t worry. We’re here to help. Contact us today for free consultation on how to improve your web presence.
Disclaimer: This content contains some affiliate links for which we will earn a commission (at no additional cost to you). This is to ensure that we can keep creating free content for you.
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