While local SEO is effective – it’s also something that many businesses get wrong. And if you don’t take care of your website and GMB listing, you’ll quickly be one of them.
That’s why in this article, we’ll run you through our best local SEO tips for real estate.
So you can start dominating your local keywords.
The best local SEO tips for real estate are:
- Do proper keyword research
- Claim your GMB & Optimize it
- Create location-specific pages
- Ask your clients to leave reviews
- Don’t neglect your regular website
- Don’t neglect link-building
- Get Social
- Optimize for mobiles
Below, we’ve walked you through each of these local SEO tips for real estate individually.
-
Do proper keyword research.
Our second tip is to put effort into keyword research and not just try to guess the keywords. Why?
Because by guessing the keywords, you could miss some of the most profitable ones. And keyword research is something that you could get a real estate SEO company to do for you.
To do keyword research yourself, just use one of the industry-standard keyword research tools like:
-
Claim your GMB & Optimize it
An unclaimed GMB listing will look like this:
(Insert screenshot)
As you can imagine, this turns customers off because they naturally wouldn’t trust the business as much.
The good news: It’s easy and free to claim your GMB listing via the Google my business manager.
From there, you’ll want to add all the information while keeping it as keyword-rich (but also natural) as possible.
-
Create location-specific pages
Location-specific pages will help you dominate the SERP. Why?
- You’ll build more relevance for local keywords
- It will help your GMB in the local SERPs
- It will increase conversions because your customers will see that you are in their city.
Ensure to do this for all the cities you want to rank in to give you the best results.
-
Ask your clients to leave reviews.
Reviews are a key ranking factor for your GMB too. However, we don’t recommend spamming your listing with a ton of fake reviews from newly created profiles because Google is quite intelligent in recognizing these.
Instead, just create an automated system that asks your customers for reviews.
-
Don’t neglect your regular website’s SEO
While some businesses think that their GMB is the primary tool to rank locally, this isn’t the case.
It’s the #1 tool you can use to show searchers why you are better than competitors. For example, you can show off previous projects, testimonials, your free offers, or whatever else you have to show visitors.
Besides, not a lot of clients will choose their real estate agent based on a GMB… But will be based on a website.
To optimize your website:
- Find keywords
Look for local real estate keywords via your preferred keyword research tool.
Ideally, you will want to target some that are a good mix between profitability and competition. Some of the key metrics you can use to determine this are the CPC, alongside the keyword difficulty scores and volume.
However, make sure to analyze the competition in lots of detail – because the metrics inside of tools are 3rd party metrics.
- Do on-page SEO
When it comes to on-page SEO, many businesses overcomplicate it. So we suggest, you just use this little checklist to ensure your pages are matching the main keyword:
If you have several keywords you want to target with a single page, try to put them into the subheadings based on their importance.
Example: An important keyword in the H2, while another less important keyword may go in the H4.
- Do off-page SEO
Off-page SEO is a pretty long topic, and we’ll get to this one separately… But it is a CRUCIAL part of the process.
- Ensure your technical SEO is right
Your technical SEO is something that most businesses also over-complicate.
What we recommend is that you try to see this as a checklist, with most of the main points being:
- Everything is crawlable (i.e no Robots.txt file blocking it)
- Your site speed is fast (1-2 seconds max)
- You have submitted a sitemap
- No broken links
- No duplicate/thin content
Otherwise, you may spend too much time on it, for little results.
-
Don’t neglect link-building either.
Our next tip is crucial too; DO NOT NEGLECT LINK-BUILDING.
There are endless people in local business groups who will scream that links don’t work, but even Google says they are among the most important ranking factors.
It’s simply one of the most effective ways for Google to determine the authority of your website.
Bear in mind: It’s not about the number of links, but more about the quality.
If you have links from some of the top real estate directories, and maybe some high-quality business sites that will be endlessly more valuable than having 1000’s of random links.
Types of Backlinks You Can Build
The main types of backlinks that you can build for a real estate website:
Directories: Most large real estate companies have directories where you can get listed. Some are free, some are paid, but they can help you get traffic and count as citations.
Citations are when a business’s name, address, and phone (NAP) number are mentioned on the internet.
Guest Posts: Guest posts are one of the strongest links you can build because you can almost choose the websites you post on. You reach out to them, find a topic that provides value to their audience, and get a link from their website.
Not only does this improve your SEO, but you can also get traffic from it too.
Other Natural, Outreach & Networking:
A lot of the links you get as a real estate company or investor will be natural. For example, if you get your listings up somewhere, you’ll usually get a link from it – even if sometimes it’s a no-follow.
Besides, you can get links from reaching out and sharing your resources with others in your network.
-
Get Social
Next to SEO, social media also has endless opportunities for generating traffic to your real estate website.
Plus, as we have seen in our article on Local SEO ranking factors, social signals are a ranking factor for SEO.
Some of the best platforms for real estate agents include:
- Facebook (including Groups)
- YouTube
Expert tip: Use Facebook groups to drive traffic to your listings. Share them, and add a link with more information – this creates positive social signals and will have a slight impact on your rankings… While also driving targeted traffic.
-
Optimize For Mobiles
According to Hitwise, almost 60% of all searches come from mobile devices. And as you can imagine, this number may be even higher for “near me” and local lead generation keywords – as you don’t call a real estate company from your PC.
So make sure that your website is mobile-friendly – because there is no use in a beautiful website if it has a horrible user experience for your visitors.
Final Thoughts
We hope you have enjoyed these local SEO tips. If you would like to work with a real estate SEO company, make sure to get in contact with us for a free consultation.
You can also learn more on our blog, where we have more resources to help you rank in search engines.