Major shakeups have hit the real estate market over the past year–a landmark lawsuit against the National Association of Realtors, inflation soaring, and baby boomers deciding to stay put. The real estate market is competitive, and capturing the attention of buyers and sellers can strain marketing budgets.

How can you compete in this market without breaking the bank on advertising? Three words: Real Estate SEO.

What is Real Estate SEO?

Real estate SEO is search engine optimization designed specifically for real estate. SEO for real estate is a strategy that increases visibility on search engine result pages (SERPs). Optimizing your real estate website can include strategic keywords, adding metadata, link building, social media content marketing, and analytics. We’ll cover these areas in depth.

The Importance of SEO in Real Estate

Why should you even care about SEO in real estate? You’re in this to sell homes. Selling more homes is always the top business goal of a good real estate agency. And with the wave of changes hitting the real estate market, you can’t afford to ignore SEO.

Benefits of Real Estate SEO

What are the benefits of SEO for real estate agents? The results of a real estate SEO solution done correctly bring organic traffic to your website. Traffic you aren’t paying to find–Targeted traffic that is looking for a real estate agent to help them on their home buying or selling quest.

Improve Brand Awareness

Ranking on SERPs puts your brand in front of homebuyers and sellers. You’ll have more credibility as an organic search result than as an ad.

More Listings, More Buyers

By making yourself easier to find, buyers and sellers are more likely to discover you, leading to more listings and buyers.

Local Authority

SEO drives targeted website traffic, so an SEO for realtor who knows the area and can be an authority is crucial. Buyers and sellers are looking for an expert. Be that expert with real estate SEO.

How to Build Your Real Estate SEO Strategy in 2024

Don’t dive into SEO for real estate websites without an action plan. What should you focus on in your SEO strategy?

Identify KPIs for Your Real Estate SEO Strategy

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are signals that your SEO efforts are successful. Track these KPIs:

• Organic traffic: the number of people who visit your website
• Keyword ranking: which keywords are driving traffic
• SERP visibility: how easy you are to find in organic search results
• Click-through rate: how many people click on your listing
• Bounce rate: how many came to the page and left without taking any action
• Backlinks: links from other sites that point to your site
• Time spent on page: the average time users spend on any one page
• Conversion rate: how many successful visits (leads or other desired actions)

Your KPIs might differ depending on your goals, but generally, these are the progress areas you should watch. You can monitor these SEO performance indicators using Google Analytics. More on that later.

Conduct Comprehensive Keyword Research

Keyword research is what it seems: researching and analyzing real estate terms your target audience is typing into search engines. Keyword research guides content creation, which can affect your existing site infrastructure.

Analyze Your Site Structure

Is your site made with the user in mind? User experience (UX) is important in SEO. Google search penalizes a poor UX but rewards a good experience. Here are five tips to improve your site’s user experience:

1. Create intuitive and useful navigation. Be logical. How would a user search for information on your website? Make navigation easy.
2. Include relevant links in your header and footer. Link your privacy policy and terms of service in your footer. Include search functions in both the header and footer.
3. Include an “About” page. This provides content as well as establishes you as an authority and expert in real estate. Add a link in both the header and footer.
4. Provide a contact page with all contact information. Link to the contact page in the footer and header.
5. Create an XML sitemap for Google. XML sitemaps are designed for search engine “crawlers,” and Google loves them.

Find and Analyze Your Competitors

No website is an island, nor is your real estate agency. You need to be aware of your competitors and how they’ve positioned themselves in your market. To begin, search each of your target keywords one at a time on Google. Who ranks in the top 10? These are your SEO organic competition. Now, you can replicate their winning strategies, discover their weaknesses, use their success as your SEO expertise benchmark, and discover new keywords and backlinks.

Perform a Comprehensive Technical Audit

A technical SEO services audit will further enhance your UX and is an important part of your real estate SEO strategy. Don’t neglect this audit or risk flying blind with your realtor SEO. Use this checklist monthly to make sure your site is ready to go:

• Compress large photos to improve loading speeds.
• Find and fix duplicate content and broken links. (ScreamingFrog offers a free tool.)
• Check your site’s security with an HTTPS certification. The S stands for “secure.”
• Include the correct schema markup (this is the code that describes the website and elements to web crawlers) using RealEstateListing schema.
• Submit your XML sitemap to Google.
• Create an SEO-friendly site navigation system for easy indexing.
• Improve website and page loading speeds.
• Check your HTML/Text ratio. You should have more text than code.

If you find issues, be sure to correct them quickly.

Best Practices for Real Estate SEO

Here are 12 areas to focus your strategy on for better SEO results.

Create Separate Landing Pages for Each Keyword Cluster

Instead of one landing page for everything, create multiple landing pages optimized for specific terms and topics associated with different keyword clusters. For instance, real estate investors will seek you out for other reasons than a first-time homebuyer. If you offer commercial and residential real estate, create different pages to improve your website’s relevance and performance in search engine results.

If your site has only a general “real estate” landing page, this is your chance to target audiences. Consider adding landing pages for each type of real estate: condos, townhomes, multi-family, single-family, land, commercial, and more. Optimize each page with SEO. For realtor pages, add keywords that pertain to their specialty.

Create High-quality Content Optimized for Keywords

Content is king in SEO for real estate. This is your chance to show website visitors and Google that you’re the authority on real estate in your area.

Content can include starting a blog, emails, digital newsletters, social media posts, podcasts, offering an ebook, or creating videos. Some of these are optional, but if you want to rank high on SERPs, at the very least, you need a blog.

Please note that your content needs to be fantastic. There is no need for award-winning writing, but you should focus on content for people. What are homebuyers and sellers interested in? Write about those topics in an informative and beneficial way.

Ask yourself these questions when writing content:

• Does the content provide original information?
• Does the content provide a complete and comprehensive description of the topic?
• Does the content provide insight beyond the obvious?
• Does your content draw on other sources?
• Does your content copy or rewrite those sources instead of being original and add value?
• Is your content clickbait?
• Do readers want to bookmark, pin, or share this with a friend?
• Might other authoritative sites want to share your content?
• Is the writing full of errors or style issues?
• Is your content well thought out or slapped together in a hurry?
• Is this content mass-produced and spammy?

Google will ask these questions, and so should you.

Improve your E-E-A-T Factors

Google gives more weight to content that aligns with experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. The E-E-A-T.

• How was the content created? Was there research involved?
• Who created the content? AI or a person? Add a byline that leads to more information about the author.
• Why was the content created?

Be sure to add target keywords to your content in a natural way. The sentence “Dallas real estate market is booming, and finding Dallas real estate deals or Dallas real estate listings can be challenging without the right Dallas real estate agent.” is awkward when jammed full of keywords that disrupt the natural flow. A sentence should read smoothly, with fewer keywords stuffed in there. “The Dallas real estate market is booming, but you can still find a great deal with the perfect Dallas real estate agent guiding you.”

Make Your Website as Mobile-Friendly as Possible

The majority of homebuyers use their phones to house hunt. In 2018, more than 52% of all online traffic came from smartphones, which is a significant number of mobile users.

Google prioritizes the mobile experience over desktop and laptop, which is called mobile-first indexing, making the mobile experience vital to your real estate SEO plan. There are two types of experiences you can give your users: a responsive design, which is preferred by Google, or a dynamic serving expertise, which can show users the wrong version. Responsive design is easier to maintain, avoids having a separate URL, loads faster, and doesn’t require redirection. Dynamic would require a separate URL, such as m.yoursite.com and the m. standing for mobile.

Fix the Errors Found in the Technical Audit

If your technical audit reveals any problems, be sure to address them as quickly as possible.

Focus on Local SEO

“Location, location, location.”

This is true for SEO for real estate. By focusing on real estate local SEO services, you have a better chance of ranking for more narrowed keywords. Remember who the expert is in your local market. You.

By focusing on local SEO, your keywords would change from “real estate agents” to “[Your city] real estate agents.” Include local metadata keywords in title tag optimizations, meta descriptions, meta keywords, and the Schema markup.

Create your Google Business Profile with your photos, offers, posts, and more. Help buyers find you by updating your company information. Each agent should have their business profile, and be sure to create a landing page for each agent. Let people know the areas where you sell, how sellers and buyers can reach you, and all the services you offer.

If you’re a bit rusty on digital marketing for real estate best practices, be sure to read up on any changes and advancements.

Get Backlinks from Authoritative Websites

A surefire way to build trust and credibility for your website is through backlinks. Backlinks are links on other websites that direct back to your website. Backlinks improve visibility, organic traffic, and higher rankings on SERPs. Not all backlinks are equally weighted by Google. Let’s explore some dos and don’ts of backlinks.

Develop Effective Internal Linking

Your on-page optimization is just as important as your off-page optimization. On-page real estate SEO optimization includes page titles, content, tags and meta descriptions, and any internal links, like your navigation or About page.

Optimizing your on-page SEO helps users navigate your site, find relevant information, and improve their UX. It also happens to increase your page ranking. Search engines can better understand your website content and identify its relevance in search results.

Implement Micro Markup

Micro markup is structured data in the code that tells search engines exactly what your site is about. Here’s an example of what that code might look like:

In the image above, you can see that this page is for a spacious townhouse. The context, type, name, and brief description all explicitly tell Google the purpose and content of this page. Google doesn’t have to guess. Some include an author and date published.

Including structured data on your site will produce a little blurb underneath search results and further links within your site. This gives homebuyers a preview of what to expect when they click your link.

Start a Blog to Promote Informational Keywords

We’ve mentioned a blog as a great way to add quality content to your site. Blogging also provides more opportunities to promote keywords through helpful information. Search engines love people-first content. This should benefit the “Your Money, Your Life” topics discussed in E-E-A-T.

Here are a few guidelines to keep in mind:

• Content should be several hundred words written for humans.
• Target keywords in a natural way in your writing.
• Keep the content high-quality.
• Optimize your title with keywords.
• Structured headings with text directly beneath can be featured as a snippet under search results.
• Add a meta description and title tag. This HTML summarizes the content and tells search engines what should be displayed in SERPs.
• Include visuals with alt text. This benefits web crawlers and readers who may be using assistive technology.
• Use internal links to other parts of your website.
• Always add at least one call to action.

Use High-quality Images and Optimize Them

For real estate SEO, images feel obvious, yet many real estate sites save the images for listings only. Adding high-quality imagery to your content creates a richer UX. Images draw homebuyers in – they want to imagine themselves in that home. Make that easy for them with well-lit, clear photos of the properties and any other images you share within blog posts. Don’t neglect agent photos. Show users their new area expert who will guide them during the home buying or selling process.

Add alt text for SEO and accessibility, using keywords, concise yet descriptive language, and providing context.

Use 360 ​​Virtual Tours to Improve Your SEO Ranking

One of the most confusing parts of searching for homes online is understanding a property’s layout. How does one room connect to another? Help users while positively impacting the time spent on pages. Adding 360° virtual tours can positively affect user behavior, leading to more time spent on your site and more internal links receiving traffic. Time spent increases SEO rankings.

Real Estate SEO Tips from Brand Intimate

As you develop your SEO strategy, be sure to incorporate the following SEO tips for real estate to increase the effectiveness of your efforts.

Monitor Important Website Metrics Regularly

Check your Google Analytics regularly. Adding analytics to your website optimization is fairly straightforward, and if you are currently running any ad campaigns on Google, you should be connected.

There are two types of analytics to check: Metrics and Dimensions.

Metrics are measurements that quantify how much or how many, using a number value.

Dimensions are the rest, those measurements that don’t use a number value. Dimensions track the 5 Ws: who, what, where, when, and why.

Select a reporting period, such as “Previous Week” or “Last Month,” and remain consistent when monitoring your analytics. Here are the analytics you should track:

• Sessions – The total number of individual visits to your site, beginning when a user arrives and ending after a period of inactivity or when they leave.
• Users – The number of unique individuals who have visited your website during a specified time, such as one day, the previous week, etc.
• New users – The number of first-time visitors to your website within the selected reporting period.
• Returning users – The number of users who have visited before and returned within the reporting period.
• Views per user – The average count of the number of pages viewed by each user during their sessions over the reporting period.
• Average engagement time – Measures the average duration users actively interact with your website during a session.
• Engaged sessions – Sessions of over 10 seconds, a conversion event, or a minimum of two page views.
• Engagement rate – The percentage of all sessions where the user had an engaged session, as defined by Google.
• Entrances – The number of times visitors entered your site through a specific page, making that page the initial point of a session.
• Exits – The percentage of times a specific page was the last in a session before the user left the site.
• Bounce rate – The percentage of all sessions where users viewed only one page and triggered no other events, indicating they were without any interaction.

Monitor the Impact of Google’s Updates on Your Website

The March 2024 Google Core Update cracked down on spam and targeted clickbait content. The goal is to improve the quality of search results by reducing poor-quality, unoriginal content. If you’ve noticed a drop in visitors, you need to up your real estate SEO game pronto.

Each Core Update will cause fluctuations across SERPs, and it’s your job (or that of your real estate digital marketing agency or tech department) to monitor how these updates affect your rankings. Stay focused on high-quality, original, people-centric content.

Adjusting the SEO Strategy Based on the Data Received

Now that you’re tracking analytics and Google’s updates, what do you do with that information? Use it to improve your SEO strategy.

As you regularly track data, you’ll begin to notice patterns in user behavior. If a particular page has a higher bounce rate, you can examine that content and the keywords associated with it. The wrong keywords could lead to increased bounce rates if users came for different content. Alternatively, if you find one page leads to more conversions, you could share that content more.

Identify the ranking signals that enhance your SEO strategy. These signals are evaluated by search engines to determine your website’s placement in search results. Signals include:

• Google Business Profile listing
• Backlinks
• Company and agent online reviews
• Domain authority, keywords, and content
• Mentions of you or your business
• Anytime users interact by reading reviews or blog posts
• Local users and how they interact with your company online
• Social media shares, likes, and views

Use Social Media for SEO

If you have a happy client, ask for a review. Most clients don’t think about reviewing a business unless something worth mentioning happens – like their worst experience. Reach out to your satisfied customers and ask for a review or testimonial. Ask customers to tag you on social media. Retweet kind remarks that mention the company or particular agents. Ask customers to share their photos and tag the agents that helped them sell or buy.

If you know your avatar (your ideal customer, whom you should know like the back of your hand), you know where they hang out online. You need to know your avatar as you will write content for them.

Your ideal customer will be reflective of your specific market, but some data points will be the same. Regardless, YOU need to know who your ideal customers are, what they need, where they spend time online, and how you can attract them to your site. The content you create should be catered to capturing her attention online. The posts you share on social media should appeal to her.

The majority of homebuyers and sellers fall into certain demographics (age ranges), and based on those demographics, you should target them on social media. You don’t need to join every platform. Instead, focus your energy on 3 or 4: Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and possibly Pinterest.

Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn are realtors’ favorite social platforms.

• Facebook is by far the most popular, with a demographic ideal for agents. Facebook offers business features, including reviews, chat, public listing updates, and the ability to call or book appointments right from the app.
• Instagram is a very visual platform, and pictures of homes are incredibly popular. The top real estate hashtags of 2024 are:
  • #DreamHome – 19.7M posts
  • #HomeForSale – 5.6M posts
  • #PropertyListing – 274K posts
  • #HouseHunting – 12.4M posts
  • #DreamHouse – 3.2M posts
  • #HomeSweetHome – 71.7M posts
  • #LuxuryLiving – 11.5M posts
  • #RealEstateForSale – 1.6M posts
  • #NewListing – 5.4M posts
  • #HouseofTheDay – 544K posts
• LinkedIn is a great place to network with other real estate agents, keep up with real estate and SEO industry trends, and read content written for real estate professionals.
• Pinterest may not be your first thought when listing homes, but I will argue that homebuyers dream BIG on Pinterest. Share your content on Pinterest with articles that appeal to homebuyers, such as the best neighborhoods in your city for families, professionals, or nightlife. This is a good, free way to add backlinks to your site.

Actionable Steps to Take Now

Here is an actionable checklist you can use to start. I’ve included a few bonus tips at the end to keep your content high-quality. For more in-depth information on any step, scroll back up to that section.

• Make a list of your KPIs.
• Research relevant keywords. Use a spreadsheet to keep track of keywords, keyword clusters, and long-form keywords.
• Research your competition.
• Audit your site and check your analytics. Take steps to fix problems.
• Create content with a focus on YMYL.
• Optimize titles with H1 tags, meta titles, and metadata.
• Infuse keywords into content already on your site.
• Check your navigation for issues to improve the user experience.
• Add internal links.
• Reach out to blogs, forums, and niche-specific sites to add backlinks.
• Add more visual content, including 360 virtual tours– don’t forget to optimize the alt text.
• Apply the schema markup in.
• Make sure your site is mobile-friendly.
• Index pages and submit an XML sitemap.

Bonus items

• Check your loading speeds.
• Don’t overload your titles with keywords. Let the metadata do the heavy lifting.
• Don’t over-optimize your real estate SEO. Think of the people reading your content. UX comes first.
• Inform, don’t sell. You are the authority, the expert. Your content should engage, not enrage, with constant marketing.
• If you use AI to create content, edit, edit, edit. Large language models like ChatGPT tend to use “give away” phrases that immediately identify them as AI. “Synergy,” “groundbreaking technology,” “discover elegance,” and “in conclusion” are all phrases that immediately scream AI.
• Add keywords to AI-written content in a natural way.
• Use easy-to-read fonts.

Lead Your Clients Straight to Your Door: Real Estate SEO by Brand Intimate

Let the SEO experts from Brand Intimate take the reigns of your SEO strategy. Brand Intimate has services designed to boost your online rankings for the long-term success of your real estate business.

Conclusion

With the right tool, you can save time and money. Paid advertising will only take you so far. Ads are expensive and draining, and the conversion rate is low. Direct mail is a waste of budget as most homeowners chuck that in the trash. Ads, direct mail, A/B testing…it all siphons the budget with little to no return on investment. Once you stop paying for ads, the leads vanish. There are no affordable prices for PPC campaigns.

Setting up a strategy saves money, and your SEO plan continues to produce leads long after the initial setup. And the leads are warm: homeowners– buyers and sellers– who need your expertise as they navigate the real estate market.