SEO For Real Estate Website: The Ultimate Checklist
SEO for a Real estate investors website can be pretty confusing.. Whether you need to optimize your GMB, your listings, or your landing pages – this checklist will ensure you have gone through EVERY step of the process. Once you have completed these steps correctly, you should start seeing SEO results for your website in 90-days.
SEO For Real Estate Website Checklist
Here are the key things to check when doing SEO for a real estate website:
- You have found suited keywords
- You have optimized your GMB
- Your website is mobile-friendly
- Your on-page SEO is right
- You have a good internal linking structure
- You Are Only Building High-Quality Links
- All Your Lead Gen Forms Are Working
To give you a bit more guidance on these points, we have explained them in more detail below.
#1 You Have Found Suited Keywords
Before you can optimize your listings for SEO, you need to find some suitable keywords.
Instead of just guessing what keywords you want to use on your real estate website, you need to research them.
Some standard keyword research tools include:
- Ahrefs
- SEMrush
- Mangools
How To Find Keywords
To find keywords, you can use one of the following methods:
- First, check out your competitors’ URLs and put them to the keyword research tools. It will show you the keywords they rank for.
- Start typing in keywords that you think you would want to rank for. The tool will then also show you related keywords.
- Check the keywords your website is already ranking for. Then add those to your list.
Analyzing the Competition
When you want to rank for a keyword, you need to outperform your competitors in the ranking factors. To do this, we recommend analyzing both their content and link profile which will give you an idea of how much content or backlinks you need.
To analyze their backlinks: Head over to your preferred SEO tool, add in the URL and start looking at the quality and quantity of links.
To analyze their content: Look at how long the content is, how well it’s written, and where they have used their keywords. From there, you can create similar but better pages.
2# Registered and Optimized Your GMB
Getting yourself listed on Google My Business will help you show up for more local terms. It’s also free to do and will let you get on more directories as well. Our recent guide on real estate SEO strategy explained this in much more detail, so feel free to check that out.
Besides getting listed on GMB, it would also make sense to localize your website content. For example, by having your landing pages specific to each area and your blog posts (Ex: Sell my house for Cash + Location)
You can do this by adding the city into your headings and other parts of your content.
#2 You Have Fixed All Your Technical SEO Issues
Next, we need to fix all the technical SEO issues with your real estate website.
Technical SEO is probably seen as the least fun part of SEO, but it’s absolutely crucial. The reason is that it either hurts Google from understanding your site, or it can cause user experience issues.
Common errors include:
- No SSL certificate
- Broken links or listings
- Broken images
- Crawlability issues
- Site Speed
If you want to fix your technical SEO issues, you can request a free website audit from us.
Site Speed
Site speed is a huge issue, especially since the core web vitals started rolling out last month. Ideally, your website should only take around 1 second to load, but 2-3 is also acceptable for a real estate website.
You can test your website speed using:
- GtMetrix
- Pingdom
- Core Web Vitals
Their reports will also give you actionable steps that you can follow to improve your site speed.
Besides SEO, improving your site speed should also have a hugely positive effect on your conversions.
User-friendliness
Another critical issue with many websites is that they aren’t user-friendly. Whether it’s bad formatting, wrongly-sized fonts, or a bad layout overall… Google will realize that visitors are having a bad experience on your website and will send them elsewhere.
Likewise, it will actually hurt your website’s conversions – and your website will generate fewer leads.
3. Your Website Is Mobile-Friendly
Although this is actually a part of technical SEO, we wanted to walk you through this separately.
DON’T: Test your website on one or two devices.
DO: Test your website on several devices, including different operating systems, tablets, etc.
4. Your On-Page SEO is Right
On-page SEO is hugely important, and it’s probably the most important set of ranking factors.
Here is our quick on-page SEO checklist:
- Your main keyword is in the title tag
- Your main keyword is in the URL
- Your keyword is in one or more alts
- Your keyword is in one or more headings
- You have satisfied the user intent
- You have used internal & external links
5. You have a good Internal linking structure
For most real estate investor websites, we recommend having a SILO structure that looks like this:
This is mainly for your pages, but you don’t need to worry about it as much for blog posts. When creating blog posts, make sure to create internal links toward your landing pages and related posts. And most importantly, ensure that they would be helpful to your visitors.
From there, your visitors will find it easy to navigate your website, and Google will value those internal links highly as well.
Bonus Tip: The more important a page is, the more internal links it should have.
6. You Are Only Building High-Quality Links
The next thing you should check is the links that you are building. Again, you must be building links that are HIGH-QUALITY. Otherwise, you may risk a penalty, which would be harmful to your business.
Add Your GMB & Website To Directories
Again, you’ll need to set up your GMB for this. There are endless local business and real estate directories that you can add to your website. These directory links, also known as citations, aren’t necessarily the most powerful, but they will show Google that you are a real business.
And it’s also very natural to have these types of links going to your website.
Create Resource Pages
Besides directories, you can also get some high-quality links by creating resource pages to help your users. For example, these could be definitions or guides that help with a certain part of the selling process. Often, other websites will link to them, and then you boost your authority for free.
Real Estate Guest Posts
Guest posts are known as one of the most powerful links in SEO.
As a real estate investor, you can gain these by guest posting on real estate-specific websites or even some general business ones. On our packages for real estate investors, we build these for our clients. If you are interested in our services, you can also book a free consultation with us.
Or, if you are doing it yourself, you can find lists of real estate guest posting websites on Google. From there, you can start creating a schedule (for example, once per month) where you make these guest posts and link back to your website.
7. All Your Lead Gen Forms Are Working
The final check is that all your lead gen forms are working. Believe it or not, there are ENDLESS real estate websites out there that haven’t checked this, which leads to losing valuable leads. So go to all your pages, and double-check that the forms are working.
If they are, great! But if not, then you should fix those before you start generating organic traffic.
SEO For Real Estate Website: Final Thoughts
That’s it! We hope you have enjoyed this SEO for real estate website guide. If you did, make sure to check out some of our related links below.
Quick links:
Recent guide: The Bullseye Method For SEO powered content marketing