The Internet plays an integral role in generating real estate leads that convert into sales. A website must attract targeted traffic to get leads. It takes more than having an appealing website to bring clients to your site. Effective search engine optimization (SEO) strategies turn your website into a lead-generating resource. Discover five real estate search marketing strategies to boost your site rankings and sales.
Conduct Real Estate Keyword Research
Keywords describe your business. When people look for something online, they enter words into the search engine box. Find out what words they use to find your business. Start by defining your target market and what you do for it. Then conduct keyword research to determine which words attract search engines and visitors.
Useful keyword research tools include Google Analytics, Moz, and Keyword.io. Use a mix of short-tail keywords and long-tail keywords. Short-tail keywords are two or three words that describe your company. Long-tail keywords are up to five words that further define what you do. Infuse relevant keywords into up to 2% of your web content but don’t overdo it. Keyword stuffing can lead to penalties that downgrade your website ranking.
Get to Know Localized SEO
Once the preliminary keyword research is done, localize your approach. Determine the towns and cities where you sell, list, and rent real estate. Do further research to add local terms to your keywords, such as the names of surrounding areas. Localized SEO attracts neighborhood people to your website. Many people search for real estate on-the-spot. Your site should be easy to view on smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices.
Verify your website is mobile-friendly. Go to the Google test for mobile-friendly sites and enter your website URL to find out. And most real estate agencies use IDX to post recent real estate listings. Everyone has these listings, so implement no-follow and no-index links on these pages. This strategy helps maximize your original content, which is less competitive, to rank well on the search engines.
Check Website Performance
Checking your real estate site performance is often referred to as a website audit. Many real estate agents add a large volume of content and images to their site to showcase available properties. However, this can slow down the time it takes your site to load. Users may grow impatient and surf away. Google offers a tool to check your page speed, which should be 80+ for optimum performance.
Duplicate content and broken links may also slow down your site and reduce its ranking. Use a resource such as Siteliner to check for replicated content and dead links. Give your website a boost by getting rid of duplicate content and broken links.
Use Metadata To Attract Search Engines and People
People might not realize they are looking at metadata, but they do it every day. When your mouse hovers over a site’s URL, small text appears. This text is the metadata, or code, describing the site to search engines. Web pages and blog entries need optimized metadata to improve your site rankings.
Go to your list of relevant and localized keywords. Add these descriptive keywords to your page URLs, titles, and meta descriptions. Remember to optimize your images by adding keywords to the titles and ALT tags.
Build Relevant Links to Your Website
Links to your website at other relevant sites are like votes. These links give your site authority, which improves its ranking. The words you link to are called anchor text. Use semi-optimized anchor text for the best results. An example is a keyword with two additional descriptive words before or after it. There are a few easy ways to add your site link to high-profile sites.
Create business social media profiles at sites such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn. Fortune magazine just reported Instagram stories just got easier to mass upload with plenty of images and local tagging to showcase new listings. Establish accurate business profiles on Google+ and Yelp, where clients can leave reviews. Include your business on quality local directories, such as Localeze. Publish informative guest articles at industry-specific websites. Add internal links to your site in your blog articles. Use SEMRush to find your current backlinks and determine how many top keywords are incorporated into your site content.
These five real estate search marketing tactics will improve your site’s ranking over time. SEO requires patience, research, and ongoing attention to detail but the rewards are great. Ranking well on the search engines makes your company more recognizable and strengthens its brand. And as website traffic increases, you will generate more leads and increase your profits.
