Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most popular areas of digital marketing, thanks to its ability to help your business move up the rankings on the search engine results page. The real estate industry is extremely competitive, making this an even more important element to incorporate into your marketing. If you’re looking to take your digital marketing strategy in a new direction, try implementing an SEO strategy for your real estate business. The following tips will help you make a significant difference to the online visibility of your business.
Create Fantastic Content
The best place to start when it comes to SEO is to create fantastic content. Google has bots that crawl websites and they index all the information about the content on a web page. When a user makes a search query, Google will then look through that indexed information to find the websites that are most suitable for the user, and rank them in the search results accordingly.
If your website has relevant, interesting and to-the-point content that your target audience will want to read, Google will see your website as a good result and rank you higher. The main goal is to create content your customers will love, and if you achieve this, search engines will value the content, too.
Focus on Targeting Qualified Users
When it comes to your SEO strategy for your real estate business, not only is great content needed, but it has to target the right users. The more relevant your content is to the customer you are targeting, the more likely you are to attract qualified users to your website. A qualified user is someone who is likely to buy a product or enquire about your service when visiting your website, as opposed to someone who will just browse and then leave. This is absolutely essential in real estate, more so than other industries, as it is so competitive and a lot of companies offer similar services. You need to identify your niche and use SEO to highlight it to qualified users as that is how you will succeed.
To draw these qualified users to your website, understand the kind of terms your audience are searching for and create content that will offer insightful information in relation to the key search terms. For example, if your target audience were searching for ‘Luxury Homes New York,’ you could write a series of blog posts about the most expensive properties in cities across the country, including New York, as a subtle means of highlighting your keyword in relevant content. You can find key search terms through keyword research, which we will discuss later. Most importantly, regularly update your content to keep things interesting.
Optimize Your Website
Once you have some great content, it is time to optimize the rest of your website. Optimizing your website involves using a range of different strategies to enhance the performance of your entire website in order to improve the user experience. Google can also pick up on websites that are optimized, making it good for customers and search engine results.
There are so many different ways that you can optimize a website, including making your website load quickly, ensuring it works effectively on mobile devices, optimizing alt tags on images, having focused and relevant content and using structured data. In relation to real estate, many people use their mobiles when they have a few spare minutes to look for properties, so optimizing your website for use on mobile devices would be a logical step. Even better, you could look into app development to simplify the process even more for your users. These are just a few of the things you can do when getting started. Once again, don’t try to improve the website just for the search engines. User experience should be key.
Do Your Keyword Research
The next step in an SEO strategy for real estate is conducting keyword research. Keywords are the words or terms that users enter into search engines to find what they’re looking for. This is one of the most important things about SEO, as if you don’t know what your target audience are searching for, it will be really difficult to rank highly. If your content isn’t focused around the things your potential customers want, Google won’t see your website as a good result, so finding your target keywords is essential.
There are plenty of different keyword research tools available such as Google’s Keyword Planner or Moz Keyword Explorer that will help you find the keywords that the demographic you’re targeting will search for. It will offer you both high and low competition options, with high competition options being harder to rank for.
For example, ‘real estate California’ will be high competition as lots of people search for it, yet ‘realtors St. Helena’ will be low competition as it is far more specific. It is no use having a keyword if it doesn’t relate directly to your services, so this should be prioritized. If you’re just starting out, targeting low competition keywords will be the best place to start while you find your feet.
Start Link Building
Once you’ve done your keyword research, you can start link building. This involves writing content for other websites containing links back to your website. Many blogs accept this type of content, known as a guest post. This is beneficial for the other website as they gain high quality content for their blog. Most importantly, it will benefit your website as if you gain a follow link, some of the authority from the website you are guest posting for will come back to your own website. This will help to boost you up the competitive real estate rankings for your keyword.
A follow link allows authority to go to your website, whereas a no-follow link doesn’t enable that to happen. It will depend on the blog as to whether they allow a follow link or not. The most important thing to know here is that you should not spam lots of different sites as it is likely you will either come across lower quality websites that could damage your site, or you simply won’t get replies. Take time to find interesting and relevant websites that you genuinely think would be suitable for real estate content. Use tools such as Moz and Majestic to see what the trust flow and domain authority for the websites are, so you have an idea of whether it will be beneficial.
So there you have it! An introduction to creating an SEO strategy for your real estate business. This is only a guide of how to get started and you’ll soon discover there is much more to the world of SEO than this. It can be so valuable for your business when done right, so make sure to take advantage of it!