As a real estate agent, you look for any advantage you can to get more listings and buyers. That’s a big reason why SEO for real estate agents can give you a big advantage in your business.
When you’re on the top page of listing results, you have a chance at getting some traffic. When you’re in the top three, you can get up to a third of the clicks for a particular search.
SEO can make that much of a difference for your business. You can be sure there’s a ton of competition in your area. Here’s how you can beat it and rank ahead of them.
Know Your Target Market
Who is your ideal client? Knowing and understanding your ideal client will help you reach them more effectively.
When you incorporate SEO into your marketing, you want to be sure you’re targeting the right keywords. What are the right keywords? The ones your target market uses.
When you search for something online, do you think you use the same search phrases as your parents or grandparents?
Probably not.
You have different life experiences, terminology, a different way of thinking. At the heart of SEO for real estate agents is knowing exactly how your target audience searches for real estate. Sellers will search for things differently than buyers.
It’s also a way to set yourself apart from the competition. You can bet your home that every real estate agent is jockeying for the best position for “homes for sale (location)” and “selling a home in (location)”.
What about searches for “home buying for millennials” or “FSBO vs real estate agent”?
Take the time to think outside the box and jot down ideas and potential search terms you can target.
What Really Matters in SEO for Real Estate Agents
What are the things that really matter in SEO? As a real estate agent, you’re considered to be a local business because you work within a particular geographic location.
The exact number of factors which make up Google’s algorithm is unknown, but it’s said to be over 200. You can’t possibly optimize your site for all 200 factors, but there are a few key ones you can improve upon to rank higher:
- Backlinks
- Business listings
- Keywords
- Fresh content
- Social signals
- Reviews
- Internal links
These are the main things you want to focus on when you’re doing SEO for your real estate business.
Business Listings
Do you have a business listing on Google? Is it optimized for your main keywords? Do you have images and tell a little bit about your brand story?
If not, you better update it.
The reason why business listings are so important is that Google displays search results according to your location. The closer you are to a person searching on Google, the more relevant you become to them. The more relevant, the higher the search rankings.
Go to Google Business and fill out your profile completely. When you’re done with Google, you can do the same with Bing Places to make sure you’re covered there, too.
Keyword
When you were thinking about your target market, you came up with a list of potential keywords. Now what you want to do is see how people are searching for them. You can use this free keyword research tool to see search volumes for each keyword.
The more, the better.
It’s not enough to take one keyword and stuff it into a page as many times as you can. Search engines are relying more on semantic search. Semantic search is a way to tell the user’s intent. If someone searches for a Home Buyer’s Guide for Millennials and the top result has the title of The Millennial’s Guide to Buying a Home, that is a semantic search result.
Google knows what the person is looking for – a home buyer’s guide targeted towards millennials. It will show what seem to be the results which are most relevant to the user.
Your job doing SEO for real estate agents is to pick one main keyword and a few other keywords like the main keyword and rank for them all.
Reviews
Google’s job is to give people the search results which are most relevant to them. When your agency has reviews and a lot of positive ones, Google takes that as a signal that your business is worth showing higher.
Fresh Content
You want to let search engines know your site is providing the most up to date information. You want to give users a reason to come back to your site.
A blog can be very useful in accomplishing both. You can use more keywords and be helpful to potential buyers and sellers.
Your blog doesn’t have to be all about the real estate market, either. You can talk about things like replacing attic insulation before selling your home.
This gets people thinking about your business and how you can help them sell their home.
Learn from Other Industries
As you do more to improve your site’s SEO, you’re going to have to learn to keep up with changes and think outside of the box.
Google makes changes to its algorithm often. Some changes are small and not noticeable. Then, Google will roll out a huge update which can have a big impact.
You need to prepare for those changes. Keep up to date by reading SEO journals and blogs.
Learning from other industries will help you get ideas to optimize your real estate site. You can get ideas and inspiration from security companies and SEO for restaurants, just to name a few examples.
Start Improving Your Site’s SEO
Real estate is a highly competitive business. Depending on your location, you could be competing against hundreds of real estate agents for buyers and listings.
SEO can be a way to set your business apart from the rest of the agents out there. When you start to incorporate SEO for real estate agents, you want to be smart about optimizing your site and your time.
You don’t need much time to make a difference, but you need to be consistent. You also need to remember that results will happen over a period of time. It takes patience to see the results SEO has to offer.
Want more amazing SEO tips? Check out our SEO blog for great tips that will make you an SEO expert in no time.
