WordPress is the most popular CMS to build real estate websites. Apart from being easy to customize, WordPress also comes with powerful ‘out of the box’ SEO features that can help you get more organic traffic and leads. Plugins extend the functionality of WordPress, so if you want to further optimize your website for SEO, there are a few plugins that can help you achieve this with just a few clicks.
In this guide, I am going to share a list of free WordPress plugins Realtors and real estate investors should use for SEO in 2021:
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Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO makes it extremely easy to add on-page SEO elements such as meta titles and meta descriptions.
These appear in search engine results as shown in the screenshot below:
You can also:
- Submit advanced XML sitemaps
- Set up basic schema mark up for your real estate organization
- Control breadcrumbs
- No-index pages that you don’t want to appear in search engine results
- Add canonical URLs for duplicate content
- Set focus keywords and get real-time suggestions on keyword targeting
- Get a readability score to improve the copy of a web page
The premium version comes with many other powerful features. You can check out all the features by visiting this page on Yoast.com.
Yoast SEO is the most popular SEO plugin with 5+ million installs followed by All-in-One SEO. Both have powerful free versions that you will ever need to boost your real estate website’s SEO.
Site Kit by Google
The Site Kit Plugin is the official WordPress plugin from Google.
This plugin allows you to integrate Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Google Tag Manager, and Page Speed Insights with your WordPress dashboard.
Most Realtors and real estate investors don’t know how to integrate these essential Google tools by manually editing or adding code snippets. For them, Site Kit makes it extremely easy to manage everything from the WordPress dashboard.
- Google Analytics allows you to see where your site visitors are coming from and which pages they are visiting. You can set conversion goals and track visitors.
- Google Search Console helps you measure your website’s performance in search engines. You can see which keywords are driving traffic to your website, what the click-through rate (CTR) is, and what the average position of your website is in Google search results. You can also submit sitemaps and see if you are hit by a manual penalty.
- PageSpeed Insights is a Google tool that allows you to see how fast your website pages load on mobile devices and desktops. The tool provides you with suggestions on how to improve page load speed. Page load speed has become an important ranking factor.
- You will need to place tags (snippets of codes) on your website to integrate Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Google Ads, and other tools from Google. It can be overwhelming for you to add all these tags. Google Tags Manager makes it extremely bringing it all together. You don’t need any coding skills when you are using Google Tags Manager.
Site Kit also lets you set up A/B tests to optimize your website. Needless to say, this is one of the most powerful SEO plugins for your real estate website.
Autoptimize
As I already mentioned, page load speed has become an important ranking factor.
In order to speed up your website, you may need to take certain steps such as minifying the code (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) files, reducing image sizes, and removing elements that slow down page load speed.
Autoptimize is a free plugin that you can use to do all this without touching code. Autoptimize already has 1+ million downloads and is one of the most popular plugins among webmasters looking to optimize their websites for search engines.
Configuring and setting up this code may require some technical knowledge. You can hire an SEO professional to help you with this.
WP Super Cache
With 2+ million installs, WP Super Cache is definitely one of the most popular page caching plugins that can boost SEO for real estate websites.
Page caching is a method to render static HTML versions of a page. It reduces requests to the database which results in improved page load speed.
Most hosting companies provide page caching, but you can use WP Super Cache on top of this to speed up your website.
However, you should know some hosting providers don’t allow third-party caching plugins, so make sure WP Super Cache is compatible with your hosting service. Don’t worry if your hosting service doesn’t allow it. It’s not an indication of their quality of service. This could be a security measure.
TablePress
As a real estate agent or investor, you are probably publishing a lot of data about property markets, locations, and demographics.
What if there is a way to leverage this massive amount of data to boost user engagement as well as SEO.
You can display this data in form of tables and for that, TablePress is the best WordPress plugin.
Displaying data in HTML markup for tables improves your chances of getting featured in Google’s Featured Snippets. Other types of markups that get featured include lists and paragraphs.
With our 800,000+ installs, TablePress will make your data easy-to-consume and understand for the visitors and also optimize the content for search engines.
Smush
Images and videos of properties is one of the most essential features of a real estate website. While the visuals boost engagement, a downside is that images and videos slow down page load speed due to their size.
Smush is one of the most popular plugins to optimize images with awesome features such as lazy load. The plugin will compress images without any significant drop in their quality.
Conclusion
Implementing SEO doesn’t have to be expensive. All the plugins mentioned above are free. Some of them have premium versions, but you don’t them in most cases.
These plugins will start optimizing your website for search engines as soon as you install them.
If you want help with SEO or setting up these plugins on your real estate website, get in touch with us today!
