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Real Estate SEO: Proven Guide to Organic Buyer & Seller Leads 

Real Estate SEO: Proven Guide to Organic Buyer & Seller Leads 

This guide will explain the easiest strategies to dominate Google and get buyer and seller leads organically.
Real Estate SEO: Proven Guide to Organic Buyer & Seller Leads 

SEO for real estate is one of the most effective ways to generate inbound buyer and seller leads. Without spending a dollar on ads, you can get tons of traffic from Google and other search engines. For example, Realtor.com gets almost 50% of its 100-130 million visitors from Google. 

realtor.com organic traffic

In this guide, you will learn the easiest strategies that local brokerages are using to dominate Google and beat big companies such as Zillow and Trulia. You will learn about on-page SEO, off-page SEO, technical SEO, keyword research, and much more. While there are believed to be over 200 factors that have an impact on Google rankings, we will only discuss the stuff that really matters and is guaranteed to get you great results in the shortest amount of time. So let’s get started: 

What is SEO for Realtors? 

WHAT IS SEO?
According to Moz, SEO (search engine optimization) is a set of practices designed to improve the appearance and positioning of web pages in organic search results.

Now, you should pay attention to the word ‘practices’ because it’s the most important thing to consider. You may write content day in and day out and publish them on your website, just to find that the content is not ranking no matter how hard you try. If you are unable to get top rankings for your real estate content even after a few months, it means you are doing something wrong.

Also, the above is a general definition of SEO. For Realtors and other real estate professionals, there are certain distinct practices that are proven to get great results.

Here are a few myths about SEO that I would like to bust before getting into the technicalities of the matter: 

  • It’s too competitive: You may be thinking you are too late to start doing SEO in 2023, but let me assure you that no matter how competitive the real estate industry is now, you can still improve the ranking of your website for your target keywords. Even if you are not able to beat Zillow or Realtor.com, you must at least make it easier for search engines and your potential leads to find you. Small things such as mobile user experience, mobile user experience, keywords targeting search intent, URL length, backlinks, and security add up and provide big results. 

  • Only big companies dominate Google: It’s a big myth that Google ranks the content of only big companies in the top results. The reality is that Google is giving more and more weightage to local businesses that provide true value to visitors. 

  • I would need to write tons of content: I know how painful it is to write content. Most Realtors don’t want to do SEO because they believe they would need to create an impossible amount of content. Nothing can be further from the truth. In fact, you can improve your rankings by cutting useless and shallow content from your website. 

  • SEO is expensive: It’s not if you are willing to put in effort and time. You just need to make sure that you are following some best practices on a regular basis. Compared to other marketing channels, SEO is the most cost-effective long-term lead generation strategy. Once your content starts ranking for your target keywords, you will get leads without spending a penny. If you stop paying money to Google or Whatnot for paid ads, your traffic dies down. But with SEO, if you don’t do anything for a whole week straight, you can still continually get traffic.

Step#1: Getting the Right Traffic with Keyword Research 

The first step for you is to do keyword research. It’s the first and most important step because it all starts here. People find content using search terms. When doing keyword research, you need to target those search terms. From your perspective, these search terms are called keywords. 

Now, targeting the right keywords is massively important. If you target the wrong keywords, you might get tons of traffic, but the traffic won’t convert into leads and clients. For example, if you are ranking on top of Google for ‘cheap homes for sale’ keyword, but your target audience is luxury home buyers, the traffic you get from this search term is completely worthless. 

Which tools to use for real estate keyword research? 

Well, the most commonly used tool is Google Keyword Planner, but there are some cons to using this tool. First of all, it doesn’t tell you the search trends. It will average searches from the last 12 months and show the average monthly searches. It also doesn’t filter search volume by devices.

There are many alternatives to Google Keyword Planner including SEMRush, Ahrefs, and Moz. Since SEMRush offers a free 7-day trial, you can give this advanced tool a try. Seven days are enough for you to do a comprehensive keyword search for a single website. 

In this guide too, I am going to use SEMRush to share with you how to do keyword research for your SEO campaign. But before I share the process, let’s talk about the most important thing which is what type of keywords you should target. 

Keyword types

There are three types of keywords: 

real estate seo keyword types

  • Head keywords: These keywords are the worst types of keywords to target because they only have a single word or acronym, for example, houses. If I am a home buyer, I rarely type in ‘houses’ when looking for homes. This keyword doesn’t make my motive or intent behind performing the search clear. These keywords are massively difficult to rank for. Even if you rank for these keywords, the traffic quality will be so low that you will hardly get any conversions. 

  • Body keywords: These types of keywords contain 2-3 words. An example of this keyword type would be ‘luxury homes’ or ‘beach-front homes’. You can see that the searcher’s intent is clearer now. I am looking for a luxury home or a beach-front home. If your real estate website is new and yet to build authority in Google, you should avoid these keywords because they are very competitive. 

  • Long-tail keywords: These are the keywords you should focus on. They contain 4 or more words such as ‘’beach-front home Fort Lauderdale Florida”. Compared to ‘houses’ and ‘beach-front houses’, the intent is way clearer now. The keyword tells me that the searcher is looking for a beachfront home at a specific place. 

Search intent 

I have already explained how specific keyword types make search intent clearer. Now, the question is what search intent exactly is. According to Yoast, search intent (or user intent, audience intent) is the term used to describe the purpose of an online search. It’s the reason why someone conducts a specific search. 

So what role does it play in keyword research

Well, keyword research is all about finding keywords that are relevant to the intent of the user. For example, let’s say that I am using the search term ‘homes for sale in Houston TX’ as a home buyer. What is my intent?

I am looking for home listings in Houston. So my keyword research should be relevant to this intent. If I publish an article on comparative analysis of homes in Houston, it’s not going to rank for ‘homes for sale in Houston TX’. It looks obvious, but you won’t believe getting the search intent wrong is one of the most common mistakes that Realtors make while doing SEO. 

Keyword difficulty

If you take a look at the example of keyword types above, you will find that head keywords are the most difficult to rank for. Body keywords are also very competitive. Most long-tail keywords are competitive, but they are easier to rank for compared to head and body keywords. 

With SEMRush or most other keyword research tools, you can easily find how difficult it is to rank for a specific keyword. It’s called Keyword Difficulty (KD). In fact, the KD score is a metric used to determine how difficult it is to rank for a keyword.

Keyword Difficulty (KD) Score
Keyword Difficulty Score helps you determine how competitive a keyword is and how difficult it is to outrank competitors targeting the same keyword.

It’s important to know the KD score because initially, you would want to go after keywords with low KD scores – in other words, keywords that are relatively easier to rank for. Keywords with a high KD score are extremely competitive, so you might end up wasting your time and resources if you go after them initially. Once your site builds your authority in Google, you can definitely go after keywords with high KD scores. 

Tie it all together

Now that we know keyword types, search intent, and keyword difficulty score, you must be wondering how to use these three things to perform the perfect keyword search.

In a nutshell, when doing keyword research you are looking for long-tail keywords with the lowest KD score and with a search intent that is relevant to your service. Your list of keywords that contain all these three elements is a goldmine that will make you money. This is the gist of keyword research. 

How to use the keyword research tool 

Here is the step-by-step process: 

  • Brainstorm 

Even before you start using a keyword research tool, you need to brainstorm words and phrases that are relevant to you. Now you may say that you are a real estate agent, so you have a business similar to every other Realtor in the world, but nothing can be further from the truth. It’s important how you position yourself online to stand out from thousands of other Realtors in your area.

For example, you can position yourself as a Realtor who only works with millennials. You can specialize in senior living or luxury properties. This positioning will help you come up with specific keywords and avoid the mistake of targeting generic keywords such as homes for sale

So let’s say you are a Realtor in Atlanta. You want to position yourself as a real estate agent specializing in working with first-time home buyers. Now, you need to make a buyer persona and try to find out:

  • The most preferred price range for first-time home buyers in your area
  • The most popular communities for first-time home buyers
  • A list of challenges that first-time home buyers face in your area
  • The solutions that you offer to these buyers. It can be as simple as providing consultation on first-time home buyer grants or mortgage assistance. 

Now let’s say one of the topics that you think is relevant to your audience is ‘first-time buyer grant in Atlanta. Here I am just giving you an example. Atlanta is a large geographic area, so if you want you can narrow it down further and target a smaller geographical area such as a community or county within Atlanta. 

Search for ‘first-time home buyer grant in Atlanta’ in Google and scroll down to the bottom of the page.

Keyword research with Google suggested searches

You will find ‘Related Searches’. Some of them include 

  • Georgia first-time home buyer program 2023
  • Atlanta affordable housing program 
  •  Fulton country down payment assistance 
  • First-time home buyer $7,500 grant
  • $15,000 downpayment assistance ga

These are keyword ideas that come straight from Google so you don’t need to guess whether or not they’re popular. Google is literally telling you tons of people are searching for these related keywords. 

You can dig a bit deeper and find more keywords by clicking on any of these related searches. The idea is to create a list of as many keywords as possible. In addition to related searches, there are many other sources that can help you find easy-to-rank keywords such as Wikipedia, Quota, Reddit, Google Trends, and Google Question Hub. I will cover each of these sources in another guide. 

  • Filter 

You will have a massive list of keywords just by spending 30-60 minutes brainstorming. Now the next step is to filter the keywords. Head over to the Keyword Overview tool in SEMRush and type in these keywords one by one. You are looking for keywords that have:

  • The lowest keyword difficulty score
  • Comparatively high search volume
  • Comparatively high cost-per-click. 

Don’t worry if many of the keywords you filter have only 20-50 searches every month. In the beginning, you need to focus on low-hanging opportunities. This strategy is the best if your website is relatively new and yet to build authority in Google. It will help your site could get some early traction and traffic relatively quickly. You can start to go after more competitive keywords later on. 

In SEMRush, you need to click on the KD percentage button to know the keyword difficulty metric. This will bring up the lowest competition keyword. Next, see how many people search

for the keywords. It is called monthly search volume. 

  • Make a list of 50 top keywords

Make a list of 50 keywords that have low competition, high revenue potential, and high search volume. This keyword list should keep you busy for the next 3-4 months. 

  •  Create real estate content topics & ideas for SEO 

The next and final step is to create content around the keywords that you have found. Here are a few things you need to keep in mind when creating content:

  • Make an editorial calendar. If you can write only two articles per week, you need to make sure that you stick to this schedule. If you can’t write on your own, you can hire a freelance content writer on websites such as Upwork and Fiverr. 

  • Search your target keywords in Google and see what kind of content is already ranking on top. Gather data such as content structure, word length, the number of images used, etc. You should use this data to create a plan for how you can write better and longer content without any fluff to increase your chances of outranking the existing content. 

  • Make sure that you use the keyword in the headline, in the first 100 words of the article, at least a couple of times in the rest of the article, and at least once in a subheadline. 

So this is the best keyword research strategy for you if you are just starting out in SEO. 

Step#2: Fix on-page and technical SEO

The objective of on-page and technical SEO is to make it easier for Google to understand your site from the code perspective. It means how your website is coded is extremely important. Only if Google can understand your website, it will be able to share your content in search engine results. 

Before we go into the technicalities of on-page SEO, let’s try to find out how Google views your website. For this, go to Browseo.net and put in your URL. 

HTML view for SEO

You will see the code and text the way Google views it. It means it doesn’t matter how pretty your website looks. Google views it as plain HTML. So as far as on-page SEO is concerned, how your website is coded is the only thing that matters. 

Let’s also understand how Google displays the search results. Take a look at the screenshot below:

search appearance

You see the title, description, and URL. Sometimes, you will also see site links and the date when the article was either published or updated. 

In order to optimize your website for on-page SEO, you need to do the following things: 

  • Optimize title tag and headlines 

Having an optimized title is one of the most important on-page SEO strategies because it will determine your click-through rate (CTR) in the search engine results pages. CTR is the number of clicks that your result receives divided by the number of times your result is shown (impressions): clicks ÷ impressions = CTR. For example, if you had 3 clicks and 100 impressions in search engine results, then your CTR would be 5%.

The title should not only have the main keyword you are targeting, but also be catchy enough to compel the users to click on it instead of other search results. If you get a higher click-through rate than other listings in the search engine results, Google will start ranking your content higher. 

An easy way to optimize titles is that you should use the main keywords at the beginning of the title, while a catchword – which many SEO experts call ‘modifier’ at the end. For example 

  • First-time home buyer grant in GA: Complete Guide
  • Getting first-time home buyer grant in Atlanta: Ultimate Guide

Other such catchwords could be ‘awesome’, ‘proven’, ‘comprehensive’, ‘must-know’, ‘101’, ‘top’. You can also use the year in the title. For example, ‘Complete guide to first-time home buyer grant in Atlanta [Updated: 2023]’. If you are using the year, make sure that you update the title every year and edit the information that may be time-sensitive.  

Another important thing to know is that title tags are different from headlines. You can have a title tag different from your main headline. The title tag is what people will see on Google search results pages, while the headline is what they will see at the top of the webpage. After clicking on the Google listing, they will see your headline on the page. If it grabs their attention, they will read the article and if it doesn’t, they will bounce away.

 If your site is on WordPress, it’s super easy to have a title tag different from the headline. You can easily do that using a plugin such as Yoast SEO

Make sure that your headline is also very catchy. Take a look at the example below:

  • How to sell your home 
  • How to sell your home effortlessly in less than 72 hours 

Which one of the two headlines do you think is more attention-grabbing? If you use the second headline it will compel the reader to read the rest of your article because everybody wants to get rid of the property as quickly as possible and for the top dollar. Make sure that the content in the article explains how to sell a house quickly. Otherwise, the reader will be disappointed. 

Catchy headlines increase the time that users spend on a webpage. It’s a strong SEO signal. It will tell Google that the users are finding your content useful. Google will start ranking it higher. Another advantage is that if the readers find your content interesting, they will share it on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Linked-in. 

Another important thing to consider is the title tag length. It should not be more than 50-60 characters. Google won’t show the entire title if it’s lengthy. The extra characters will be cut off and it will impact the CTR. 

  • Optimize copy 

Your headline is attention-grabbing but if it doesn’t deliver what you promised, the users will be disappointed. So the quality of your content is extremely important, particularly the first 100-150 words.

Not only the users, but Google also relies on the ‘keywords’ in the first couple of paragraphs to determine where to display the content in search results. So, it’s important that you have your main keyword in the first 100 words of the copy. An important thing to remember is that the keyword shouldn’t be stuffed there just for the sake of it. It should be naturally placed. 

  • Optimize internal and external linking 

When you write content, you should make sure that it is linked to other pages of your website. For example, you can see that I have linked specific phrases or words to relevant pages of the website. 

When I mention ‘Google Ads’ in this article, I will create a hyperlink for this phrase and link it to the article on Google Ads. It has two advantages. First, the users will be able to navigate to other pages of your site. It will boost an important SEO metric which is ‘pages per visit’. Second, this internal linking will make it easier for Google to crawl your website. 

While using this strategy, make sure that you are linking to the relevant pages and avoid stuffing keywords in the anchor text. Anchor text is the word or phrase you used for creating a hypertext link. When users click on this link, they go to the target web page. 

For example, let’s I am creating a hyperlink for the word Google Ads in this article, but I am linking this text to an article on real estate content writing. Google won’t treat it as a natural anchor text and may penalize my site if I overdo it. The internal linking should provide a good user experience.  

Here is the rule of thumb: if you are writing a 2000-word article, there should ideally be 4-5 hypertext links – so at least one hypertext link text every 500 words. 

If your website is new and you don’t have enough web pages to link to, don’t worry. You can always come back to the article and create hypertext links later on once you have linkable content in the future. 

Also, make sure that you are linking out to external websites whenever appropriate. For example, if you are referring to a National Association of Realtors report on the real estate market in your article, you should link to that report published on the NAR website. It will tell Google as well as the users that you are just making up data. This is called external linking. You should only link to trustworthy websites. 

When you link to other websites in the real estate industry, some of these websites will also link back to you. It will boost your backlink profile and tell Google that you are an authority on the subject. Your content will start ranking higher. 

  • Optimize URLs 

The URLs for each webpage on your website should be unique, short, and clean and should have the keyword you are targeting. For example, the headline of this article is Real Estate SEO: Proven Method to Buyer & Seller Leads. But take a look at the URL of this webpage. It’s simply: /real-estate-seo

I won’t use the same URL for any other webpage on my website. It’s short and contains my target keyword which is ‘Real Estate SEO’. If you are targeting a long-tail keyword, make sure that it’s included in the URL. For example, if you are targeting ‘what’s my home worth in New York City’, you can definitely have all these words in the URL. 

Avoid using numbers, marks, and symbols in the URLs. You should never include dates or the year. For example, you are writing an article about the first-time home buyer grant in 2023. The URL shouldn’t contain 2023 because when you update the content in 2024, the year would still be in the URL and it will hurt SEO. By not using dates or years, you will be able to keep the article evergreen

If you have already been publishing articles that have dates and the year in the URLs then you can’t just simply remove them. You will need to create 301 redirects. It’s best to hire an SEO professional before making any changes to your URL structure. 

If you are using WordPress as a website builder, there are permalink options that generate URLs automatically. Make sure that you are using ‘Post Name’ in the permalink structure.

And, when you publish an article, WordPress will automatically create an URL containing all the words that you used in the headline. You should edit the URL when you publish an article and make it short, clean, and SEO-friendly by adding your target keyword. 

Some other tips to follow are: 

  • Use hyphens not underscores between words in the URL.
  • All words should be lowercase
  • Ideally, there shouldn’t be more than two slashes in the URL. Slashes are folders. So for example, if the URL says realtycrux.com/categoy/real-estate-seo-guide, it means the aritcle is in the category folder. Take a look at the URL of this web page, the URL is realtycrux.com/real-estate-seo-guide. It doesn’t have any other folder such as category or tag. There should be a reason why you want to put specific web pages in a folder that will add a slash to your URL. 
  • Optimize security with SSL 

It’s extremely important that all webpages on your site are served with HTTPS. You need to add an SSL certificate to have HTTPS. If you don’t have an SSL certificate, your web pages will be served with HTTP and the browsers will display a warning that the webpage is not secure. It will hurt your SEO big time. 

If you don’t want to invest in a premium SSL certificate, you should at least add a free SSL such as Let’s Encrypt. 

  • Improve readability 

The readability of an article is directly related to SEO. If your content makes it easier for the users to consume the information you are providing or take the desired action, they will stay longer on the web page and interact with it. This will increase the amount of time that they spend on your website, and this will boost your content’s ranking. To improve the readability of your content, here are some tips you can follow: 

  • Make sure your content is easy to understand. Home buyers and sellers are already stressed. They don’t want to read any jargon and wonder what exactly they mean. 
  • Keep the paragraphs short – 2-3 lines max. 
  • Use plenty of subheadings, lists, and infographics for readers who want to consume information in the shortest time possible. 
  • Throw in a few quotes if appropriate. 
  • When posting images, make sure that they are compressed in a way that they don’t lose the quality and at the same time, are easier to load on the page. If you are using infographics, you must make sure that the text is not blurry. Use image dimensions that are easier to share on social media. Try to use custom images instead of stock-free images from Pixbay and other similar sources. 
  • Optimize images and subheadings 

Apart from a featured image, you may use plenty of images and infographics throughout the article to improve readability. But the images should be optimized for search engines. 

Make sure that you use ‘alt tag’ with each image. While the alt tag is not visible to users, Google reads it and determines its usefulness in the article. For example, if you have created an infographic that explains the home buying process for buyers, use an alt tag that say ‘home buying guide infographic’. 

As a realtor, you may need to use plenty of images in your content, so it’s very important that they are compressed. If you are using WordPress, there are plenty of plugins available that will help you minimize the image size without losing the quality. You will also want to the latest image formats such as WebP instead of JPEG and PNG. 

You should also optimize the subheadings by using the main and supporting keywords in them whenever appreciate. However, never overdo this because this will amount to keyword stuffing. 

Subheadings play an important role in optimizing the structure of the article. 

I wrote a detailed guide on how to write SEO-friendly Real Estate Blog Posts. The guide explains how to use H1, H2, H3, and other HTML elements to optimize your titles and subheadings. 

  • Optimize call-to-action 

The main objective of writing content is to get organic buyer and seller leads, right? You won’t be able to achieve this if there is no call to action in your content. 

The call-to-action should stand out from the rest of the article body. You can use a button with a different and attraction-grabbing color or create a form. If the CTA doesn’t stand out, the readers who skim the content won’t notice it. 

The SEO advantage of using a strong CTA is that it increases page views per visit. This will help you rank higher in search because it’s a strong signal to Google that the users are visiting multiple pages on your site after coming from search results and interacting with the landing page. 

  • Embed videos 

While videos may not have a direct relationship with search engine optimization for your textual content, they may help indirectly. If you have a Youtube channel and have published a video that is relevant to the content you are publishing, don’t forget to embed it within the content. This will increase engagement with the content as the users will stay longer on the page to watch the embedded video. 

  • Optimize the content for related keywords 

You should always focus on one keyword at a time, but depending on the search intent, you can add related keywords to the content. This will help you avoid keyword cannibalization. You won’t also need to write a different article for each of the related keywords. 

For example, if you are writing a comprehensive guide on how to sell home fast, you can add related keywords to the content such as: 

  • How to sell your home in 5 days 
  • How to sell home quickly 
  • Sell my home fast for market value

I came up with all these keyword ideas quickly by taking a look at the related searches at the bottom of the Google search page for how to sell home fast keyword. You can be more inclusive by using the keyword research strategy outlined above. 

  • Optimize content for social sharing

I have already mentioned how you can make the headline of the article (that appears on the page of your site) different from the title that appears in Google search results. Make sure that the headline is so attractive that it compels at least some of the readers to share the article on social media platforms. It will help you build social proof. Social proof is one of the signals that Google uses to determine the authority of a website. 

  • Increase ‘time-on-site’ or ‘dwell time’

One of the strongest SEO signals that Google gives significant importance to is ‘time-on-site’. 

It means how long the visitors are staying on your site after coming from search results and how they are engaging with your site. 

If you have followed all the on-page real estate SEO best practices outlined above, you will definitely improve the dwell time. If the users are happy with your content, CTA, images, videos, information, and services, they will stay longer on your site and engage with the content. This will reduce the bounce rate. 

Bounce rate refers to the percentage of visitors that leave your website (or “bounce” back to the search results or referring website) after viewing only one page on your site, according to Search Engine Journal. 

You should try your best to keep the bounce rate as low as possible. You can easily find out the bounce rate of your website in Google Analytics. 

Make sure that your website is connected to Google Analytics. There are plenty of online guides to learn how to connect a site with Google Analytics. If you are not able to do it yourself, you can hire a developer. 

Google Analytics will show you some great data such as

  • Session duration (the amount of time visitors stay on your website on average. You should aim for at least 1-2 minutes per session). 
  • Bounce rate
  • Pages per session 
  • Pageviews 

In order to fix a higher bounce rate issue, you should check out the exit pages in the Behavior tab in Google Analytics. These are the pages that are causing people to leave your website. You should improve these pages with optimized CTA, images, titles, internal linking, subheadings, and other strategies outlined above to lower the bounce rate. The idea is to improve the user experience so that the users stay longer on the website. 

  • Optimize page load time 

It’s one of the most important technical SEO strategies. Your site should load fast for a good user experience. It means when people click on your link in the search engine results, they shouldn’t have to wait a long time for the page to load. Ideally, it should be less than 1 second for both mobile and desktop. You can use the Google Page Speed Insights tool to know the page load speed for any page of your website. 

This SEO aspect involved technical skills. You will need to defer your site’s unused CCS and javascript files, eliminate render-blocking resources and improve server speed among many other things. While you can hire a web developer to do these for you, there are a few things that you can do on your own. 

One of the things is to make sure the images load fast. We have already talked about how to optimize the images for SEO. 

  • Optimize your website for all devices

Google is now focused on mobile-first indexing. In Google’s own words, Google predominantly uses the mobile version of a site’s content, crawled with the smartphone agent, for indexing and ranking. This is called mobile-first indexing.

It means if your website is not responsive, this will hurt SEO because the webpages will provide a very poor user experience. As I mentioned before, user experience is a huge SEO factor these days. So make sure that your real estate website is optimized for all devices including mobile phones of all screen sizes, tablets, and desktops. 

There are plenty of tools online to test how your website looks on different screen sizes. 

  • Improve your site’s architecture 

We have already discussed how internal linking is important for the on-page SEO of your real estate website. Another aspect of internal linking is your site’s structure. The most important pages of your website should not be one or two clicks away from the home page. For example, if the home valuation landing page is important to get seller leads, it should be a part of either menu of the home page. Similarly, if you focus on providing real estate education through blog posts, the blog section should be linked to the home page.

Take into consideration the overall user experience while reviewing your site’s architecture. Try to figure out what parts of your website are most important to home buyers, sellers, or your target audience, and make sure that they are easily accessible and not hidden away deep in your website. 

  • Perform an SEO audit 

If you already have a website, you should perform an SEO audit to see if it has any on-page SEO errors. 

We recently published a detailed guide on how to perform an SEO audit of a real estate website. Make sure you check out this article to learn how to do the audit without even touching the code. 

Alternatively, there are plenty of tools online – free as well as paid – to determine the SEO friendliness of your website. 

I will explain in brief what an SEO audit should cover: 

  • Page load speed: Check how fast your pages are loading and make a list of all the errors.
  • There must be no manual action by Google on your site. You need to have a Google Search Console account to check this. 
  • Use Google site operators such as site:// to check if all URLs are indexed. 
  • Check Google Analytics to see how if there has been any drop in organic traffic. Here is a great guide from HubSpot to learn how Google Analytics works. 
  • Type in your brand name in Google search. The home page must be the first result. See if your site supports rich search results. Here is a Google tool to find out any issues with regard to rich search results. Also, check out this article from Search Engine Land
  • Check the URL structure of web pages. Do they have numbers, dates, signs or weird characters?
  • Breadcrumbs should be enabled for the website. You can use SEO plugins such as Yoast to enable them. 
  • Check if your website is using an SSL certificate. If it does, all web pages will load with an HTTPS protocol. Here is an article on SSL from Cloudflare. 
  • There should only be one version of your website indexed by Google. For example, www.yourrealestatewebsite.com and yourrealestatewebsite.com are two different domains in the eyes of Google. If you are using the www, the non-www version should be redirected to it. 
  • As already mentioned, Google looks at the HTML of your website. So check if there are any errors with regard to the HTML structure, particularly title tags, meta description tags, H1 for headlines, etc. The online tools will tell you if the web pages have any issues in this regard. 
  • Also check all on-page and off-page SEO factors outlined in this guide such as keyword density, content length, image optimization, ‘404’ page.
  • For an off-page SEO audit, you need to check the domain authority and backlink profile of your website in comparison with the websites of your competitors. 
  • There shouldn’t be any dead pages (pages that you deleted but were indexed by Google). Set up a redirect. You should ideally not redirect all broken links to the home page. Check out this forum discussion on Moz to learn more. 
  • Use Google site operators such as site:// to check if all URLs are indexed. 

Step#3: Off-page SEO and content marketing 

Marketing your content and building backlinks from authority websites are the final steps in the real estate SEO process. 

I have not mentioned backlink building as a separate step because if you market your content well, you will get backlinks naturally, provided that the content provides value. 

The content that you publish on your website can be repurposed and used for marketing in many different ways.

  • You can create social media posts from the informative articles on your website and publish them on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other platforms. 
  • Video marketing is a big thing in 2023, so you can create short videos from your content and publish them on your Youtube channel, Instagram, and other video marketing platforms. 
  • Nearly 60 million people listen to podcasts. Turn your content into podcasts and market them through popular platforms like Spotify and Apple Podcasts. 

We recently published a guide on how to build backlinks for a real estate website recently. Make sure to check it out to learn some easy link-building strategies. 

Conclusion 

So these were some basic steps that you need to take in order to get more buyer and seller leads with real estate SEO. The most important thing is not to just think about Google. You need to factor in user experience also. If you create awesome content and follow basic on-page SEO guidelines, you will naturally build backlinks and build authority on Google. 

Another important thing to keep in mind is that you need to be patient and consistent. It’s very difficult to stay consistent when you are not getting results in a few days, or even months. But if you continue creating content and market it property over a long period of time, your website will definitely rank higher in search engine results.