The National Association of Realtors states that forty-four percent of buyers, at the initial stages of their journey to buying property go to the internet to search for listings. The most likely scenario is that your prospective buyers are either in your area or doing searches in your area. This is why it is sensible that brokers and real estate agents emphasize local SEO.
Competition in real estate is brutal, with every individual and corporation seeking to gain visibility and increase their listings. That’s why you need to boost your website’s SEO to be dominant in local searches. Some of the ways you can do this include:
1. Perform an SEO audit
An audit can help you to determine which pages of your website are performing well and what areas require improvement using Google Analytics. The audit might take time, but it creates a benchmark for your progress while offering you the information necessary to develop a roadmap. It gives you essential feedback on whether or not your site has a local ranking, if you are getting organic traffic, and if you are converting clients or generating leads. The Google Search Console can help you to identify issues that need fixing. The audit should focus on site structure, page structure, content, links, and usability.
2. Generate a keyword list for local real estate
Tools such as Google Keyword Planner will help you build the best keywords list that you can use in your local SEO plans. You can use location-specific keywords like realtors, buying a home, condo prices, best real estate agencies, and apartments for sale.
3. Ensure accessibility to your website
You should incorporate links where PDF documents or files from media players can be downloaded and notify users upon entering invalid information. Besides, ensure the website is not reliant on color, have alt text on all images for easy reading by screen readers, and have text captions for video content and the like.
4. Make optimizations for mobile devices.
52% of internet traffic globally emanates from mobile devices, which makes it mandatory that you make your websites run well on tablets and smartphones to satisfy your customers and search engines. The key focus should be on page speed, responsive design, homepage, hosting speed, usability, site search and navigation.
5. Enlist on social media
Social media has no direct impact on your rankings, but it is a vital tool for any digital marketing strategy. It helps connect with the target audience, build trust, awareness, and authority, increase exposure, and generate more traffic to the website. Being on a few well-managed platforms are better than being on every platform. You will find out that having a presence on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest is enough.
6. Improve the user experience on your website
A website that is not user-friendly will cause visitors to leave without having taken any action, which has a terrible outcome for SEO and your real estate agency. SEO metrics such as bounce rate, time on site, and CTR can give you a good picture of listing pages getting more inquiries. You can add their characteristics to the low-performing pages to improve user experience and reduce bounce rate.
7. Generate and optimize a profile on Google Business
A Google Business Profile is an essential factor in SEO ranking. When including your local geotags and important keywords, the most important selection is your Google Business listing category. You should not pick categories more than necessary, as you will water down keywords, which are vital for your real estate business.
8. Encourage client reviews.
Online reviews generate social proof for your real estate website. Google is keen on the number of reviews, review keywords, ratings, and how often the reviews are posted. It would be best to encourage customer reviews by sending Google Business review links but make sure you abide by the platform’s policies. Response to all reviews, both the positive and the negative, indicates your attention to customer feedback.
9. Generate backlinks
It is an indirect vote of confidence when other websites link to yours since no one will intentionally link to an awful website. This can take time as you need to contact other website owners and convince them to allow a link to your business. These can be easily found in associations or organizations with a website that you belong to or have links in the press releases sent to the local media. You can also analyze your competitors to determine where they obtain their links and have content and tools on your blog that are so good that every other website wants to refer to it.
10. Generate local citations
To give you a good ranking, Google goes through your online directory listings to validate your real estate website information, in which completeness and accuracy are the rating standards. Using tools such as brightlocal or Moz Local takes care of general directories. Some of the websites specific to real estate are Yahoo Homes, RedFin, Realtor.com, and Neighborhood Scout.
