In the past decades, real estate, as an industry, was reserved for those who were able to put their message in front of a lot of people. Think of it as a small group of real estate professionals who could afford to pay for a TV commercial.
The cost to reach large audiences has dropped significantly since – both organic and paid online traffic is available at a fraction of the cost that was needed to advertise on traditional channels, like TV and billboards. And of these two methods (organic/paid), your website visitors who found you by typing a phrase in a search engine are the cheapest online leads you can get.
So, when real estate entrepreneurs think of a way to grow their business, they naturally start from SEO. Google Ads and Facebook Ads bring results, but everyone tries to rank their website high for the keywords they target (“sell my house in X,” more on this below) because SEO allows you to compete with large companies that have big advertising budgets.
If you optimize your real estate website better than the websites of your competitors – you get to be the top result on Google, regardless of the size of your company.
But how can you make this happen?
We have two types of clients: real estate investors who have the time and don’t have the money, and real estate investors who have the money, but can’t spare the time to do SEO. Both can get where they need to go, they just require different approaches.
Those real estate professionals who have more time, prefer to learn about SEO; the other group (those who have money) prefers to hire someone else to do the SEO for their websites. You can also have a mix – some tasks are completed by in-house teams (or solopreneurs), while others are delegated to online marketing professionals. Whatever your actual situation is, you would benefit from checking the breakdown of SEO services that follows.
Oftentimes, real estate websites are very basic or there isn’t a website at all, because the company was recently established. For example, real estate investors used a model that works offline: find a motivated sellers list → send direct mail → get leads→ close deals, so many didn’t even bother with online presence. This means that you are missing out on online leads. And to have a stream of online leads, you need a website with good SEO.
You can build the website from scratch or you can use real estate website templates (some of which are available for free). Alternatively, there are SEO services offering websites that are optimized for search engines from the get go. These websites are great because they are built to provide what search engine crawlers value more highly when they rank websites.
However, this doesn’t mean that you hire such a service and forget about the website. Generic templates and generic content won’t help you rank high because search engines value unique, local, and authoritative websites. So, if you go for these types of websites (like those offered by Carrot), you’ll have to tweak the template to make it more local and original and to build links.
If you already have a website, but you don’t rank high for the keywords in your real estate market, then you have to start with an SEO audit. These audits require technical expertise and can take some time to complete, but once they’re done, you’ll have an understanding about the specific elements of the website that require servicing.
Let’s go through the typical items which are inspected in an audit, so that you can decide whether this is something you can do or if it’s something you’d rather delegate to SEO specialists.
The goal is to determine the amount of organic traffic you’re getting at the moment. Think about specifics:
If you are not satisfied with the answers to these questions, you need to dig deeper. There is a handful of website elements that are important for search engines. It’s a sort of an SEO audit checklist and it covers:
This is just a general overview and the SEO audit checklist can include up to 20 items.
In real estate, keywords are straightforward – they revolve around buying, selling or renting a home. The search phrases and variations are easy to guess. Real estate investors, for instance, target keywords like ‘how to stop foreclosure,’ ‘sell my house without a realtor,’ ‘sell my house cash,’ and similar. Keep in mind, though, that some keywords perform better than others.
That’s where we can help you (don’t worry, it’s free). We’ve spent hundreds of thousands of dollars researching keywords for real estate investors who operate nationwide and we can offer insight on keywords lists. Again, this is not guesswork or a theory, it’s data that’s gathered from real estate businesses active in the real world. You can check out our conclusions about the list here.
Keyword research is a type of SEO service that real estate businesses can use at any stage, be it before launching a website or in order to improve the ranking of an existing site. Actually, keywords are more dynamic than most users think, so it’s recommended to check the latest keywords list every six months. This list and the metrics that come with it (search volume, difficulty, SERP features) can be the basis for the analysis of your content.
Search engine crawlers scan the words on your website to find out what it’s about and to determine its rank, so content matters a lot. This doesn’t only cover real estate blog posts, but every word that is used, including all those tags we mentioned above.
An audit of the content you already have on the website may uncover inappropriate use of title and headline tags. If you optimize them, your real estate website can rank better. Same goes for the post structure, not just the tags.
Good content attracts organic traffic, however, real estate professionals may underestimate the importance of content because they are known for their passion for working with people. If you prefer to close deals (instead of writing for your blog), you can hire an SEO service to develop content strategy and produce quality posts.
Remember, you need original content, which relates to your target audience, and in real estate, this is not a hard task. The actual topics of the posts can vary depending on the type of deals you are after (motivated sellers, investors, renters), however, articles that offer helpful tips, or help your audience make a decision are your safest bet.
There are more ways to make your real estate website accessible to as many people as possible. One is to make sure your website has a responsive design (i.e. is mobile friendly) using a template. These templates allow mobile users to receive all of your content within a neat display on their screen (headers, buttons, text, images, menus).
Other accessibility issues involve poor internet connection. You can’t fix the internet speed of your audience, but you can optimize the content and the structure of your real estate website so that it has fast page load speeds. It makes your website accessible regardless of the device website visitors use or the speed of the network they are using.
The SEO service sector that can sort this out for you is known as user experience or UX professionals. Google is set to introduce ranking algorithms that value user experience, so fixing accessibility issues will improve your SEO.
You’ve probably heard about ‘real estate backlinks,’ it’s sort of a buzzword. A backlink is when other websites link to your website. The more backlinks, the higher your authority. The catch is – if you are a real estate investor, no one wants to link to you, not even colleagues in the real estate industry.
Link building is one of the offsite SEO services which are sought out by real estate websites. Think twice before you hire someone to do backlinks for you, because some of these offers use black hat techniques (or SEO techniques that aren’t allowed by Google) to get the links. Basically, if the offer promises fast results, look for another SEO service. Otherwise, Google will penalize your site for the links.
Backlinks (or inbound links) can be acquired through hard work – there is no shortcut for this. Also, the SEO service company that builds links for your real estate investing website can perform an audit of your internal links, i.e. evaluate how well the content on your website is interlinked. Good content strategy will solve the internal linking problem, and great content will get you backlinks.
The structure of your real estate website can be optimized by a technical SEO service. The ‘technical’ part covers website optimization in terms of: site architecture, indexation, URL structure, site navigation etc. This is done to make it easy for search engines to crawl and index the content on your website, so that Google understands your specialty and ranks you higher as a result.
Technical SEO also overlaps with user experience, so if the person (or company) that does user experience tweaks for you has the know-how, they might be able to tackle the technical stuff as well.
Use every opportunity to share your company name, telephone number and the physical address in real estate registries. Google My Business is probably the most important, because it allows you to make your company information local. However you can create profiles at many relevant real estate directories like RedFin, Realtor, Mashvisor, or Yellow Pages.
This is one of the SEO tweaks you can do without hiring a service.
Chances are, you are already using at least one of the popular social networks for online marketing (like Facebook Ads). Real estate websites usually have accounts on LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, and other networks. This is great for digital marketing, but it also sends a lot of traffic to the website, especially if you engage your social media audience with the right content.
Social media boosts your SEO too, and even if you might not consider a social media management agency as someone that works on boosting your SEO, think again – because it does.
While there is nothing wrong with choosing an SEO consultant who does website optimization in many industries, we would recommend going for someone who knows how real estate works. We work with real estate investors nationwide and over the years, we have amassed a wealth of data and deep insight into real estate SEO.
When you choose an SEO company that specializes in real estate websites, you are likely to get advice on lead tracking, conversion, and digital marketing, too. They will not only help you rank better, but it will also help you to capitalize on having the top position in search results for target keywords in your real estate market.
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