Check out this post on local link building too: SEO for Real Estate: a Definitive Guide to Local Link Building. 13) Get mentioned on convention & visitors bureau sites. This is a tool most real estate agents overlook far too often. On-Site SEO for Real Estate Agents (Tips #5-15): On-site SEO refers to the optimizations you make to a website’s content to help Google understand its relevance to a specific search term or topic. This includes things like titles, body copy, links, keywords — all of the things under your direct control on the website. The Best Real Estate SEO Blog: If you’re looking for the best seo tips, you should really check out Backlinko. We touch on SEO tips here. But they are SEO experts. About real estate seo company’s and real estate seo services: We do have an SEO program in addition to our LeadSites at Easy Agent Pro. Local SEO Guide for Real Estate Agents: 5 Tips to Improve Your Google Rankings Real estate agents face constant challenges in attracting new customers. Although you may get a few referrals, most prospects just search in Google and contact the first agent or two on the search results.
The first step for people looking to sell or buy a home is to complete an online search. This is a trend that’s growing among millennials and older generations alike.
In fact, a full 90% of people interested in completing a real estate transaction are looking online for agents to help them. This means there are a lot of clients out there, but you have to find a way to stand out to them.
Otherwise, you’re pretty much leaving money out there for your competitors to grab.
So, how does a single real estate agent stand out in a place as big as the internet? Your posters and business cards are great, but you have to use some local SEO strategies as part of your marketing. This is where the true turnover will happen.
If you’re new to SEO or don’t even know what it is, this article will help you tremendously. Keep reading and we’ll tell you how to use SEO for real estate.
The Significance of Local SEO
The main point of utilizing local SEO strategies is to optimize your website so that your business is among the first to appear when a potential customer Googles a service or business like yours. In this case, the business is real estate.
You are competing with all the real estate agents in your area. If you don’t use local SEO techniques, you can miss out on locking down the trust of new clients and generating the revenue that comes with them.
For instance, think about the times you may have needed to search for a local business. Maybe you were in the mood to try out a new sushi restaurant. So, you Googled “sushi restaurants near me.”
The restaurant that showed up in the top position of that search had the best local SEO ranking. This may not seem like a big deal, but it is. Allow us to explain further.
When people do searches like these on Google or Bing, they rarely scroll through their findings. More so, they hardly ever click to the second page of search results. In one survey, a solid 75% of people admitted to this.
Searches like these are more common than any other online search method. They are even used more than social media by 300%.
Using SEO for Real Estate
Now that you understand why local SEO is such a big deal, you’re probably wondering how you can apply it to marketing your real estate business. A local SEO consultant can definitely help you. But believe it or not, you don’t have to be a marketing genius to get the local SEO game down pat.
Here are some best practices you can start implementing today.
Don’t Get Lost in the Shuffle
It’s easy for your content to be overlooked on the internet. After all, new websites are popping up every day. The internet has become the number one marketing tool for professionals of all types.
You can keep yourself from getting lost in this shuffle though. To start, you need to understand why you should specifically use local SEO and not just general SEO.
General SEO strategies will help you catch the attention of internet users worldwide. This overgeneralization is a marketing mistake many business owners make.
If you are operating an online store that sells items that are easy to ship like hats, attracting customers in different states or even countries will be a smart move on your part. But real estate doesn’t work that way.
You will typically want to reach people in your town or even the next town or two over. But trying to do business with clients in other states and countries won’t be beneficial under most circumstances.
So, the first step in generating your SEO plan is to gear everything you do toward attracting local clients.
Research Powerful Keywords
If you are strategic about the keywords you use you will stand out against competing real estate agents. Keywords are known to change by location, so it’s important to see which ones your customer base are most likely to use.
Once you know which keywords are strongest, you can design the pages on your website and your advertisements around them. A good place to start is to use keywords that are representative of the location you’re working in.
Also, what actions are your ideal clients wishing to take? Are you a buyer’s agent or seller’s agent?
These factors should all be taken into consideration, but you should also find out what other agents in your area are using to drive attention to their sites. Is there a common keyword?
9 Local Seo Tips For Real Estate Sites For Beginners
There are tools that will help you do your keyword research. This way, you won’t spend hours upon hours spying on your competition trying to see what works.
Try using the Google Adwords Keyword Planner which is 100% free. It can help you find the keywords that will do best based on searches in your local area.
Mind Your Headlines
Regardless of a page’s location on your website, the headlines used on it will always show up in search results. This is one of the most important places to put the keywords you find.
You should make sure every headline or page title you use has a:
- Total of 70 characters or less
- Little controversy
- Clear purpose
- WIIFM (What’s in it for me) Me is the reader
- Conversational tone
Additionally, the placement of the keywords you use in your title matters. The closer the keyword is to the beginning, the better it will perform.
Publish Thought Provoking Content
When you post content on your website, you aren’t trying to sell yourself to new customers. You’re solidifying your authority and expertise as in your field.
A potential client may Google something like “How to interview a real estate agent” or “Tips for pricing my home.” If your website comes up with the helpful content the person was looking for, they may contact you directly for more questions or advice.
This initial contact proves the person’s interest and can make it easy for you to convert them into a paying client. If you aren’t the best writer, you can work with a freelancer who can help you build blog content.
Also, keep in mind that as time goes on, certain information that was previously published on your site can become outdated and lose its relevance. To keep yourself ranking high in your local SEO, you will have to look over your content every once in a while and update information that is no longer true.
Especially, if it pertains to real estate laws or guidelines.
What’s Your SEO Score?
Enter the URL of any landing page or blog article and see how optimized it is for one keyword or phrase..
Keep Everything Up to Date
There are plenty of websites and business directories that your contact information might be published to without you realizing. You need to search for yourself on platforms like Yelp, Google Maps, Superpages, and Google My Business.
Not only can past clients leave reviews on these pages that can potentially influence new clients, these sites are free advertising channels for your business. Make sure all of your contact information is up to date and consistent across all these platforms.
Doing so will help your local SEO and ease any suspicions potential clients can have about your credibility. Also, make sure you are claiming your business on these sites and link your website to them.
Optimize Your Bio Pages
You should have your bio listed on a few websites including Trulia, Zillow, and your brokerage’s site. If you aren’t optimizing your bio on these pages, you’re missing a very simple, yet potent SEO opportunity.
Not only should your location be listed, but you should optimize your name too. When people are shopping around for real estate agents, they will certainly Google your name.
This is especially true if they’ve seen your advertisements around town, heard about you from a previous client, or are trying to choose between you and another agent.
You may not realize it, but your name is your brand. Other ways to optimize your name for SEO are to:
- Develop a presence on social media
- Own and publish a website that is your name for example www.johnsmith.com
- Optimize photos for search engines
- Sprinkle your name throughout your website instead of using an About Me page make it About John Smith
You should also be using your bio pages to share your contact information and a direct link to your website.
Follow Us
Using SEO for real estate is one of the best ways to thrive in your area. When you start using the methods discussed in this article, you will begin to see a change in the way your advertisements are received.
Follow our site to keep yourself up to date on new SEO and marketing practices. And don’t hesitate to contact us with questions.
There are a lot of tips out there for boosting local SEO for real estate investors, but what actually works and what doesn’t? Should your keyword density be 4% or 7%? How many local citations should you actually be on? What’s the deal with linking?! Don’t worry, we’re going to go over all of that. Ranking your real estate investing business in local Google searches will be as easy as 1, 2, 3.
Why Local SEO for Real Estate Investors is Important
First and foremost, you need to understand why local SEO is important for your real estate investing business. I know, I know, we talk about this a lot. But we do it because this is crucial for ranking your real estate investing business in Google searches. Remember, organic ranking is the cheapest way to get the best quality leads for your business.
Not only is ranking organically the cheapest way to get leads, but being found in local searches leads to a higher conversion rate. HubSpot found that in 2017, “76% of local searches result in a phone call.”
That mean the majority of local searches results in that person reaching out to the business they found. Because you’re a real estate investor, all of your business is local regardless of what kind of real estate investing you do. If you’re not showing up in local searches, then you’re missing out on 76% of potential leads!
Now that you’re convinced that local SEO is important for real estate investors, let’s talk about how to show up in more search results. Remember, the majority of leads go online to look for businesses like yours to solve their house problems.
1. Your Google My Business Address CANNOT be a P.O. Box
This might sound obvious, but you’d be surprised how many real estate investors list a PO box as their business’s address. The short answer is: do not do that. Let’s talk about the long answer.
We understand that most real estate investors don’t have an office that they work out of. Most investors are working out of their home. Understandably, you wouldn’t want to be putting your home address out there for people to find you at. It puts your personal life, your family, and your personal assets at risk. We get that. Especially if you’re sending out mail and getting angry threats from people who think you’re trying to cheat them out of their house. You definitely wouldn’t want your home address right there so they can find you.
However, just because you don’t want to give your home address doesn’t mean a PO Box is a clever work around. Google’s business guidelines clearly states:
“Use a precise, accurate address to describe your business location. PO Boxes or mailboxes located at remote locations are not acceptable.“
9 Local Seo Tips For Real Estate Sites Near Me
There’s no tricky wording that you can find a loophole in. It’s stated in black and white on their guidelines page. But why are PO Boxes not allowed? Let’s talk about that.
Remember that you’re trying to rank your real estate investing business for local SEO. When Google is ranking your local business, the algorithm wants to know that you have a brick and mortar location that people can visit when they search for your services online. Yes, the algorithm knows what a PO Box address is.
You need to also keep in mind that when someone searches for a local business they are engaging in a micro-moment search. They want someone they can go to for help. If they see your business address is a PO Box, they’re less likely to think your business is serious because they can’t physically visit you. This is why ranking high in local SEO for real estate investors means you need a brick and mortar location.
You don’t have to go get an entire office building. In every city’s business district there are small office blocks you can rent, some of them are just a few rooms. If your real estate investing team is you and maybe two others, that’s all you need! Plus, rent for small office blocks isn’t that much. If you want to rank high in local searches, getting a physical location is absolutely worth it.
2. Each Business Needs Its Own Phone Number
Duh, right? You wouldn’t want the same phone number for a pet shop being used for a furniture store. The same goes for your different real estate investing businesses. Most successful real estate investors don’t just focus on one type of investing. You’ll find investors who fix and flip houses, birddog houses, wholesale houses, and buy and sell land. Every different type of real estate investing you do is a completely different type of business.
Think of it this way: would you market your wholesaling services the same as your house buying services? No, because each type of service functions differently. That’s why each different type of real estate investing needs its own website (we talked about why you need a wholesaling website in this article). On each of your dedicated websites needs to have a contact phone number on the page. Why?
When Google indexes websites it reads all of the information on the page. If there are different websites with the same contact phone number, Google will think there’s something fishy going on. If Google gets suspicious of a business, it won’t rank it high in searches. If you’re trying to boost local SEO for real estate investors, you need to have different information for each type of business you conduct.
We realize that you don’t want to have 4 different phones or phone numbers for your business. That’s a little ridiculous. Don’t worry, we have a simple solution for that. There’s a feature that’s included with LeadPropeller called “Local Numbers” – we have an entire article about it here, so we’ll do a crash course right now.
The LeadPropeller local numbers feature helps improve local SEO for real estate investors because it allows you to have an unlimited amount of phone numbers, with local area codes, forward to any phone of your choosing. That means you can have a different phone number appear on your wholesaling website, house flipping website, and so on all forward to one device. Awesome, right?! You can have local business phone numbers to make Google happy, but in reality you’ll still only have your one business phone. Pretty nice, right?
3. Don’t Stuff Your City Name Everywhere
Well, unless it’s in the name of your company – that’s a little different. If your real estate investing business is named something like “San Fransisco House Flippers“, then you can’t avoid putting your city’s name everywhere. That’s ok, that’s a different situation.
9 Local Seo Tips For Real Estate Sites Free
What we’re talking about here is jamming your city in places that it shouldn’t be. For example, you don’t want to have every page on your website read “About Us in San Fransisco”, or “San Fransisco Contact Us”. This is just as bad as keyword stuffing. Google will see it, and Google won’t like it.
Instead, use your local city sparingly. Put it in appropriate places and make it feel organic in sentences. For example, in your “About Us” page, your first paragraph can read something like this:
We buy houses in San Antonio and surrounding areas. We’re from San Antonio and take pride in helping homeowners sell their house fast and without hassle. Since the beginning the focus has been on helping people by providing a fast sale of a home. This opens up a lot of options for people that have felt stuck and unsure of what to do or who to turn to. If you’re in the San Antonio area and need to sell your house fast, give us a call!
This opening paragraph uses the local area, as well as important relevant keywords such as “sell your house fast”, “we buy houses”, and “fast sale of a home”. By having your business keywords organically written with your local area, Google will know that your real estate investing website accurately represents your business. Practicing keyword density like this is a sure way to boost local SEO for real estate investors and get to the top of search results.
This is all SEO – I Don’t Have the Time for That
At the end of the day you’re a real estate investor, not an online marketing expert. Yes, ranking in local SEO for real estate investors takes time. Time that you just don’t have, if we’re being honest. Your time is much better spent contacting leads and closing deals. We understand that.
9 Local Seo Tips For Real Estate Sites For Real
At LeadPropeller, we have a team of highly skilled professionals who specialize in ranking your business in local SEO for real estate investors. Our SEO service will make sure your website is optimized for local searches to make sure you get the best quality leads! Have a question about how our services work, or want to get your SEO service? Give us a call at (210) 999 – 5187, we’d love to talk to you.
'Avoid These 10 Biggest Mistakes Most Investors Make When Trying to Generate Motivated Seller Leads Online'
What you'll learn:
- How to avoid screwing up your real estate investor website so that you can generate more leads and deals
- How to avoid repulsing motivated sellers and instead having them want to do business with you instead of your competition
- How to *capitalize* on the trend of people searching for services on their mobile devices
- How to 'shut out' your competition from getting the same leads as you on the internet
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