Nurturing Your Real Estate Career: Tips for Agents' Success

Real estate markets can get intensely competitive, especially in highbrow cities and areas. The truth is, the average real estate agent SEO strategy involves trying to top search engine result pages (SERPs).

But that's not all: every real estate agent usually does whatever they can to broaden their real estate SEO horizon and get more real estate listings. Things get even trickier nowadays, as you’d have to compete with thousands of other real estate agents in the same niche. 

It sounds like you’ve got your work cut out. Since you serve in a specific local area, the competition may get narrowed down slightly. But it's still anyone's game on search engine rankings. 

As a real estate agency, how do you take the real estate SEO fight to your competitors' doorsteps?

This article examines top real estate SEO tips and how to rank higher on local searches as a real estate agent. You'll also get to see how you can utilize SEO for real estate for your business. Let's dive in!

Boost Your Local SEO: Seven Real Estate SEO Tips for Real Estate Agents

Every month, thousands of prospects look for properties in their city or neighborhood area using a limited set of real estate SEO keywords. The kicker is that no matter the area and keywords used on search engines, there’ll always be a scramble for them all the way to the first search engine result page.

In the long and stiff SEO game, you don’t want competitors getting ahead of you. However, the only way to hold a position in this ferocious competition is by implementing the best local SEO for real estate agents and scraping out outdated ones. 

Quickly, let’s glance over real and helpful local optimization tips that'll aid local SEO for real estate agents:

1. Start With an SEO for Real Estate Audit and Analyze Your Competitors

An SEO audit will help you determine what pages are doing good and where you can make improvements on your SEO real estate website. 

Search engines rely on dynamic requirements that keep you on your toes most of the time. For instance, search engines like Google and Bing change their SERP policies frequently to promote active and information-rich websites. As such, your SEO strategy has to keep up.

An audit also helps in analyzing where your competitors stand. It's perhaps the most essential section of local SEO for real estate agents. For starters, it gives you an idea of how much effort you’d have to put into improving your SEO for real estate listings to get featured on the SERP.

Although performing an audit can get drawn out over an extended period, it serves as a benchmark for progress on real estate SEO strategies. It also gives you the information you need to create a roadmap.

But do you need an SEO audit? Ask these questions to inform your decision: 

• Does your site rank locally?
• Are you getting any organic traffic?
• Are you generating SEO for real estate leads or converting clients?

If the answer to any of these questions is no, then you’d need an SEO audit. When having the audit, examine these critical add-ons:

• The Structure of the Site: XML Sitemap and robot.txt pages redirect. Also, analyze the real estate website structure of your real estate competitors to measure how their posts relate to one another.
• Your Keywords: As you might expect, keywords are quite essential in real estate SEO strategies. Auditing content and keywords optimization level lets you form the right strategy for your own SEO real estate marketing and organic traffic leads. It also helps you discover the keywords ranked by your competitors.
• Page Structure: Your website's structure comprises titles, meta descriptions, headings tags, URLs, and alt tags. 
• Your Content: Content spans across your keywords, link placements, redirects, and duplicates.
• Links: Notable mentions include outbound links, inbound links, broken links, and interlinks.
• Accessibility: This aspect revolves around usability, user-friendliness, and speed.

When you've checked all these areas, you'd begin to see remarkable improvement and get more organic traffic to your site.

2. Try Out Optimized SEO for Real Estate Websites

After you’ve done the audit, it’s time to put all the findings to good use. A great way to go about it is to ensure nothing gets left out. Add the business website and your real estate listings on Google Business, Yelp, Facebook, and other directories. The website is the perfect place for you to educate your clients and provide important resources. 

It’s important you provide information transcending what you currently offer. You can provide real estate SEO strategies and content that can help clients through the buying and selling process. Next, use keywords from your competitors' analysis to optimize your own website. 

Some other nifty steps include:

• Get the Site Mobile-Friendly: Throughout the process, ensure the website is mobile-friendly, hosting rich titles and descriptions. A significant portion of your prospects uses a mobile device to browse the web. As such, they should be able to seamlessly reach your site via a web browser. Also include local keywords to help potential buyers find you when searching for properties in your area.
• Mind the URLs: Your site's URLs must be SEO-friendly to be useful for your real estate business. Thus, pay a lot of attention to your website’s URL structure. Doing so may save you from having broken links that can negatively affect your local SEO for real estate. 
• Link Cleaning and Image Tagging: Log in to your Google Search Console and search for broken links. Also, remove special characters and numbers to make the content more readable. How about the images? Adding images to your website might look pretty easy. But, a lot goes behind that simple task. Each image should be relevant and feature alt captions, texts, titles, and a proper description to define the information they convey.

Lastly, search engines want schema markups on your site. For instance, Google recognizes schema elements like, reviews, star ratings, price, phone, and address. It’s a way to present your website in a structured format to search engines and give users additional information about you before they visit your website.

3. Ensure Your Website Is Accessible to Users and Search Engine Rankings

Your real estate website should be accessible not just to users, but to search engines too. Even if you build a standard website, it won't do well on SERP rankings with accessibility issues. 

Here are a few things to keep in mind for increased accessibility:

• Sluggish web speeds can be pretty annoying. As such, get page speeds up to snuff. Check your webpage load speed on PageSpeed Insights and fix anything impeding peak performance. Other steps that can help include compressing and optimizing your images, reducing your redirects, caching your web pages, and enabling browser caching.
• Drop crawl errors down to a minimum. You can analyze your real estate results from its performance on search engines, identifying any SEO technical issues and gathering link data. Crawl errors like 404s can annoy site visitors quicker than you think. As such, find out if there are any and fix them.
• As a site security rule of thumb, your site should start with “HTTPS” and a lock symbol in the browser for users to trust your website and access it safely anytime. On the backend, use strong passwords, security tools, site backup, and perform regular updates. Also, make sure your site has a Secure Socket Layer (SSL) certificate on it.

4. Get Links and Citations From Relevant Real Estate Sources

Getting links and citations from other relevant real estate sources is just as essential as the other tips we’ve outlined. A handful of links and citations from quality sources would do wonders for your site's performance on search engines. 

But, you don’t have to stop after that. It's important to keep building quality backlinks and citations from as many sources as possible. To do so, embrace these recommendations: 

• Get Quality Links: Quality backlinks are important for your real estate local SEO. Besides competitor analysis, you must do personal research to find relevant publishers, directories, and media houses to form link-building strategies.
• Create Business Citations: A business citation is a business's online reference featuring its name, address, and phone number. Google Business is a great place to have your business listed, so users can access your website locally. An optimized Google Business profile can get you a higher ranking.
• Social Media: Social media is another way to get more traction on your real estate website. Search engines consider certain brand signals when ranking your page for business listings.

5. Leverage on Your Social Proof for Your Real Estate Business 

Great testimonials and reviews can increase your social credibility and boost local SEO for your real estate business. Your Google Business profile can collect most of it. 

Besides that, here are some other things you can do:

• Add Video Reviews: Not everyone remembers to upload a video review in their Google Business profile. If you do so, you'd get to leg up your competitors.
• Interview Other Local Business Owners: Consulting local business owners will give you the opportunity to present a unique point of view to your target market.

Although social media might not directly affect your search engine rankings, it's still important in your social media strategy. Related platforms can drive more organic traffic to your website, reach your target audience, build authority, and increase your business's exposure in the long run. 

Ideally, real estate businesses will have a hard time gaining online visibility without social media accounts. But they provide a broader reach for any content you wish to put out, either as a blog post or tweet. However, it bears mentioning that you shouldn't put too many social media "cooks" in your SEO "broth."

Let's be honest. It’s tempting to be everywhere on social media. However, it’s better to choose a few platforms and do them well than to spread yourself so thin that content quality suffers.

Beyond Facebook, consider Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest as well. Use these social networks to share your blog content, videos, and other important information such as the latest statistics and news. Utilize Instagram, Google Ads, and Pinterest to promote your website's visual and video content. 

When posting on social media, don't forget to use your local hashtags and description with geo-target keywords. Incorporate external and internal links whenever possible as well.

6. Add Your Website to Google My Business and Other Relevant Directories

The more places you have your website listed with your details (address, phone number, etc) the better for your business. You can start with Google My Business and Google Ads. Set up profiles on these directories and keep them updated. 

Also consider adding visuals, such as pictures, videos, etc. Doing all these will make you rank higher on Google searches and online reviews. 

Here's how to add a website to Google My Business: 

• Go to your business profile and select the “edit profile” option
• Click on the pencil icon and select the "manage" option
• On the next page, your existing Google domain will appear
• To confirm the configuration, select connect again
• For website renewal, select visit website.

7. Create a Blog and Publish Useful Content

Running a blog on your website sets you up for additional opportunities in targeting keywords mostly used in your niche on search engines. In today’s world, real estate blog posts should suit any real estate site, giving it the dynamic value required to attract Google Ads traffic. 

For small businesses with few resources to compete with larger competitors, it’s important to pay close attention to content quality. Think of each blog post as a veritable real estate search engine marketing tool, when written properly.

Relatable details local to you can help your blog's search engine ranking significantly. Consider walkability, school, social life, cost of living, etc. 

You can also add visual content to each blog post like images, virtual tours, and live stream video content. These aspects place you as an authority for insights into a specific city or local area, giving prospects a new perspective.

Conclusion

How have you been handling the digital realities of being a real estate agent? Numerous opportunities for growth exist, even with the competition you'll face in your real estate market. 

By implementing the above-mentioned Local SEO strategies, you can optimize your real estate website and business listings for local searches. As such, your realty business will rank higher on Google SERPs and attract more patrons within your target area.

Due to the ever-changing nature of SEO, getting a hold of its latest trends and techniques is non-negotiable. To keep up, subscribe to the Icons of Real Estate Podcast. Our episodes feature revered real estate professionals who deliver tips on what realtors must do to attain online and offline success. Tune in today!