What is SEO in Real Estate?

As mentioned above, SEO stands for search engine optimization, and refers to your ability to be found in the search results when someone searches for something on Google, Bing, or another search engine. 

SEO for real estate agents can involve some fairly specific pieces, because most agents only serve a small geographic area. Because of this, the search strategies that you use need to be local (or hyperlocal) to that area as well.

But, the rewards for getting it right can be astounding. Think about it this way:

How do people find you? 

Google searches for “sell my house” reached an all time high increasing by 147% in 2022. What if your realtor website was the first result in Google for the phrase “sell my house”? Can you imagine the impact that would have on your business? 

While that’s a somewhat unrealistic expectation, it’s the reason why real estate SEO is important. 

People are using Google to find homes to buy and realtors to sell their homes. If the new generation of homeowners cannot find you on the internet, you can’t expect them to hire you. 

Why is SEO Important for Real Estate? 

I wanted to include a screenshot of these two statistics to really drive them home. These are direct from the National Association of Realtors website. 

97% of all generations of homebuyers use the internet in their home buying and selling process. That’s more than 9.5 out of 10 people. How could you possibly conduct real estate business if no one can find you on Google? 

This is why SEO is so important. Real estate search engine optimization increases the chances of someone finding you when they look you up, look for a home for sale, look for a home within a certain area, and much more. 

Years ago, people found homes in newspapers, billboards, flyers, and mailers. Today only 1% of homebuyers find their home in a newspaper. 

51% of homebuyers say they purchased a home they found online and 28% found their home through a real estate agent. Where do you think they found that real estate agent? 

Take a look at the example above. The phrase we’re talking about is “homes for sale in Clarks Summit PA.” 

This phrase gets approximately 530 searches per month. Clarks Summit has a population of 4,882. 

That would mean that 6,360 people search for homes in a small town with less than 5,000 people each year. 

These are the organic search results. If you or your real estate agency could show up on this page, you could get a share of those thousands of searches.

Types of SEO

SEO is broken up into four main areas each of equal importance. Understanding how all four of these impact SEO for realtors will help you develop a strategy to increase your rankings and get more traffic to your real estate website. 

Keep in mind that all four of these types of SEO are broken down in further sections below where I provide tips and actionable steps to improve all of these. 

On-Page

On-Page SEO refers to anything that is actually on your website. This can be content, pages, graphics, videos, images, and more. 

It’s important that your site has actual valuable content on it that shows people you’re a professional and you’re actively doing business. 

If someone lands on your real estate website and finds nothing more than a phone number and a few listings, they’re not going to take you seriously because they may think that you’re not reliable. 

Keep in mind that the younger generations pay attention to your online presence so if you have a full website with content, explanations of who you are, what you do, what areas you serve, and contact information; you’re increasing your chances of having them contact you. 

Providing alternative methods of contact is important as well. 

75% of millennials prefer to avoid phone calls because they think they’re too time consuming and stressful. Having contact forms, email, text, or live chat may help get them to actually contact you about a real estate interest. 

That said, keywords above all else are the most important on-page SEO factor. The reason certain sites show up on the first page of Google is because they’ve optimized their page for the right keywords and they know what people are searching for. 

If we go back to our previous example and click realtor.com which was one of the first search results, we can see that “homes for sale” and “Clarks Summit, PA Real Estate” are right at the top. 

These are keywords that people search and phrases that you would want to rank for as a real estate agent in this town. Having them on your real estate website would help. 

Off-Page

Off-Page SEO refers to everything that happens off your actual website. There are things you can and cannot control. 

Link building is one major off-page SEO factor that all real estate agents should pay attention to. 

Backlinks are links on other people’s websites that send traffic to your website and they’re a major ranking factor according to Google’s John Mueller. 

He states in a 2021 interview with Search Engine Journal:

“I don’t think we differentiate like that in our systems. From my point of view, I would tend not to focus on the total number of links to your site, or the total number of domain links to your website, because we look at links in a very different way.”

He’s not saying links aren’t important, he’s saying that the total quantity of links doesn’t matter if they’re not good quality. 

This means that a link from some random website isn’t going to impact your SEO as much as a link from a high-quality site related to real estate. 

For example, 

This is a site called Agenttrend.com. They sell links and will allow pretty much anyone to write for them.  

You could apply for a guest post or a link insertion on their site right now and have a backlink in 24 hours if you wanted to. 

Here is a report on the quality of their site according to the industry leading SEO tool, Ahrefs.com.

The site gets five visitors per month and went about four straight years without any traffic. It also has a domain rating of 8 out of 100. This is a score used to determine how trusted and respected a website is.  

Do you think 100 links from this site would have a positive impact on your rankings? Maybe 15 years ago, but not today. 

Here’s a report for another really similar site called realtytimes.com that supplies links and guest posts for real estate agents but look at the difference. 

It has a domain rating of 77 and gets over 12,000 visitors per month. 

One link from this website would be worth more than 1,000 links on agenttrend.com. 

Backlinks are an incredibly important ranking factor so be sure to spend some time and resources on them as well. I’ll cover some tips on how to maximize your efforts below. 

Technical

Technical SEO refers to many of the algorithmic steps involved in ranking a website. These include factors such as:

• How well your website works on mobile
• How fast your website loads
• How easy the website is to navigate
• Security of your site

These are all factors you can control as well. Having an SEO expert handle this part would be helpful but you can do it yourself with a little research and time. 

For example, if you sign into your Google Search Console and access a section called “Core Web Vitals,” you can see various technical SEO factors that are impacting your sites rankings. 

More to come on this in the “technical SEO tips section.” 

Local

Local SEO is incredibly important for real estate because it’s a local business. Local search engine optimization for real estate targets local search phrases that will only display for people who live within a certain proximity of you and where you conduct business. 

General search phrases like “how to plant tomatoes” can provide results from websites anywhere in the world. 

Local search phrases like “homes for sale near me” will yield specific local results based on where you live. 

You want to make sure you’re showing up in these local results and factors like Google My Business pages, local citations, contact information, and about us pages can impact the localization of your website. 

Again, all of this will be covered in my local SEO tips section below so continue reading. 

SEO vs PPC 

Understanding the difference between real estate SEO and PPC (pay per click) is critical. This is something that a lot of real estate agents don’t understand. 

If I google, “real estate agents in Chicago” on desktop, this is the page I see. 

At the top, there are three real estate agents with their picture, reviews, hours, and information about their experience. 

This is super helpful, right? 

If you look at the little red rectangle, it says “sponsored.” This means that these people paid to jump the competition and ensure that they show up first on top of Google. 

They’ll pay every time someone sees them and every time someone clicks their picture. This is called “PPC” or paid advertising through Google. 

If you look at the following section, these real estate agents are here organically through the use of SEO. They also have reviews, business information, hours, etc. 

Does this mean that the realtors at the top are better than the other ones? 

Of course not, it simply means that they paid to be there. 

So, is one method better than the other? 

Let’s take a look at how investment and ROI work between the two. 

For SEO, the investment is high upfront with a low ROI on the front end. As your site begins to rank and people start buying and selling through you, the ROI starts to come around. 

Where the benefits of SEO outweigh PPC is on the backend when your site is ranking and you no longer need to invest in the website anymore. 

Now you’re making money from your rankings without having to constantly pump money into it to generate that ROI.

PPC on the other hand requires that same initial investment but can provide an immediate ROI. As soon as you start putting money into your rankings and showing up on the first page of Google, people can start contacting you. 

The downside is that you need to continually put that money into those rankings otherwise they’ll fall off. This means that as you start making money, your backend ROI will remain the same unless you increase the amount of money you’re putting into your exposure. 

So, what’s the better option? 

Neither one is better than the other, it depends on what your budget and timeline is. SEO is always worth building regardless of how you do it but if you have some marketing budget reserved for paid advertising, I would recommend doing them both simultaneously. 

Best SEO Tools for Real Estate

To develop a real estate SEO strategy, you need a little help. There are a number of great tools out there to help you maximize your SEO efforts and to also better understand traffic, impressions, visitors, and all of the terminology that goes into it. 

Rankmath

Rankmath is a WordPress plug-in that you can add to your website and it’ll provide you with data about how your site is performing. It’ll provide information about keywords you’re ranking for, how well your site is optimized, how many people have seen your site, and the amount of people that convert. 

This tool is also incredibly helpful for writing titles, title tags, and meta descriptions which are important on-page factors to think about as well. 

Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a non-optional tool that anyone with a website should have. It provides data about your traffic, technical SEO issues, link data, and how Google views your site. 

You can find reports here on how your site is performing, broken links, warnings, and more. 

Best of all, this data comes directly from Google so if you wanted to know what you’re doing wrong, who better to listen to then the big G him (or her) self? 

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is another non-optional tool that anyone focusing on SEO needs to have. This provides you with a lot of the same info as GSC but goes a bit more in-depth.

It will tell you the percentage of people who view you on what device, what your most visited pages are, and how many people are converting on your site by filling out contact forms or calling you. 

You can also find information here about bounce rates and even see how many active users you have on your website at the time you look. 

This information is important for real estate SEO because it provides insights into what is being well received by your audience and what isn’t.

Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest is a great free keyword research tool. While I highly recommend purchasing a premium tool like Ahrefs or SEMRush, Ubersuggest offers more than enough to get you started when producing content for your website.  

This is a keyword research tool that allows you to input a phrase and it’ll spit back a number of related searches with information about them. 

In the example above, I searched “homes for sale Chicago” and it gave me other phrases that I could include on my website. 

It also provides data about how difficult it would be to rank for that phrase and as you can see, most of the phrases have a high SD (search difficulty). 

Keyword research is crucial because you need to include the right keywords on your website if you expect Google to increase your rankings. Google needs to know what your site is about and what you’re trying to do on it. 

Having relevant keywords will help. 

4 Real Estate SEO Mistakes to Avoid 

We’ve talked quite a bit about all the real estate agent SEO things you can do to help grow your site and increase your traffic.

What about mistakes and pitfalls? 

Let’s talk about some of the things you want to avoid doing in SEO because there are a lot of gray areas where mistakes can be made and it can permanently damage your ability to rank your website. 

1. Improper Keyword Research and Usage 

If you want to rank for the keyword “homes for sale in New Orleans” why not just include that keyword 50,000 times on your website? That’ll sure tell Google what you’re all about, right? 

Unfortunately, these types of strategies don’t work anymore because Google is a lot smarter than it used to be. Not only will doing that not help you rank for that phrase, Google will likely penalize you and make it so you can never try again. 

Some examples of improper keyword research and usage include: 

Irrelevant Keywords – You never want to include keywords that don’t belong in an article or on a page. If the page focuses on factors to consider before selling a house, you shouldn’t have keywords about saving money on closing costs because the two aren’t exactly related. Not only does it confuse Google but it will confuse readers as well. 

Keyword Stuffing – Don’t include too many keywords and make your pages hard to read. All your articles should flow nicely, read well, and come off as if they were written by a real person. If you’re stuffing keywords into every sentence it won’t sound natural. 

2. Poor Link Building Strategy 

We talked about this a little already but I want to elaborate on specifically what can go wrong with bad link building. 

I used the example of a bad site with no traffic and a low domain rating and in fact, these sites can actually hurt your ability to rank. 

Another thing you want to avoid is link farms and personal blog networks. These are generally the same thing so I’ll treat them as such. 

A link farm is a series of websites that are created with the sole purpose of linking between one another. 

The owner of a link farm might have 10 websites within the same niche that all link between each other and each one sells links to other people. 

These are terrible for SEO, they don’t work, and all you’re doing is wasting your time and money. 

3. Thin or Misleading Content 

Believe it or not, the quality of the content on your site actually matters. I’ve talked so much about the more technical side of SEO that you might think you could pretty much put anything on your website and it’ll rank as long as your SEO is good. 

This is false and Google is cracking down on this more and more. 

In a 2021 interview by Search Engine Journal, Google’s John Mueller stated: 

“I know it’s been said before that making technical improvements is less important to SEO than having quality content.”

“When it comes to the quality of the content, we don’t mean like just the text of your articles.

It’s really the quality of your overall website.

And that includes everything from the layout to the design.

Like, how you have things presented on your pages, how you integrate images, how you work with speed, all of those factors they kind of come into play there.”

These quotes tell us that content is just as important as everything else. In fact, it’s all important. 

You need to have a lot of great content on your website that provides value, enlightens, teaches, and informs people of something. 

The content also has to have a target audience in mind. If people are landing on your website and clicking away because the content is misleading or inapplicable, Google will pick up on that and your rankings will drop. 

4. Duplicate Content 

Last but not least, another cardinal rule of SEO is to avoid duplicate content on your site. Not only does it waste Google’s time when crawling, it confuses the algorithm because it doesn’t know what page to rank. 

Google tells us that it determines the primary content of a page when it indexes it. If Google finds that two pages have the same information, it’s going to choose the one that is most complete. 

So, having two pages that offer the same or even similar information may not hurt you, but it’s not going to help you. 

4 On-Page SEO Tips

By this point you should be well versed on all the formal SEO information. You know what it is, why it’s important, how it makes an impact, and what you need to get started. 

Now let’s talk about some of the actionable things you can do on and off the page that will make a difference in your real estate business. Here are my best real estate SEO tips. 

1. Get Good at Keyword Research

If I had to pick something to learn first, it’s keyword research. You can pay someone to make you a simple website that works well and gets the job done. 

It will cost you a ton of money to pay a good SEO to do keyword research for you. It’s best that you learn it yourself in the beginning, figure out what keywords you need on your page, and get them on there. 

People are out there everyday searching for real estate, you just have to make sure they find you. 

2. Focus on Long-Tail Keywords First

One great way to capitalize on keywords with a new website is by focusing on long tail keywords. 

Long tail keywords are phrases that contain three or more words. But, over 70% of queries are long tail. 

These keywords are also easier to rank for because they’re less competitive. 

“New Orleans Real Estate” is four words, but it’s super competitive and would be difficult to impossible to rank for. 

If we tried to rank for “Garden District New Orleans Real Estate,” it doesn’t get as many searches but is much less competitive and more focused on a specific neighborhood so we might have a more targeted audience as well. 

3. Write Amazingly Valuable Local Content 

I’ve stressed it a little that the value of your content actually matters but what about the local nature of it? 

Since real estate SEO focuses primarily on a local audience, you want to make sure that your SEO speaks to the nature of the local market. 

Inform, educate, and engage people in the local area with content that interests them. A great way to do this is by spying on your competition using a tool like Ahrefs. 

For this example, I used homeandgardens.com and went to the “top pages” section to see what pages get the most traffic and rank the best. 

If these pages get a lot of traffic and this is a competitor of your website, you may want to see what content they’re doing to determine what searchers want to know more about. 

4. Create a Web of Internal Links

An internal link is when you link from one of your own pages to another page on your website. This is important because it helps Google crawl the site and further solidifies you as an expert in the subject. 

Think about it this way. If you have an article on “how to sell your house,” that’s a pretty broad subject and doesn’t necessarily speak to your expertise. 

But, if within that article, you’re linking to other articles you have on staging, pre inspections, finding qualified buyers, etc – it’s showing Google that you know everything about the subject and are prepared to provide every bit of information necessary to help the reader understand. 

2 Off-Page SEO Tips

Now let’s talk about everything that needs to happen off the page for you to master real estate SEO. These factors are also important but remember that they all need to work together in perfect harmony.

1. Building Backlinks 

You need to build backlinks and there’s no way around it. A site without any backlinks cannot rank so there are a few steps you’ll want to take to get links:

Pitch Websites

You want to find websites that allow you to guest post or that accept links and pitch yourself to them. You can use a tool like Hunter.io to look up email contacts on websites and send them an email explaining who you are and what you’re trying to do. 

In many cases, you’ll have to pay for the link but don’t be afraid to do that. A lot of people have valuable content so it’s not always enough to get the link. 

Offer a Link Exchange 

If you have another website you could offer to include a link on that website to the person you’re reaching out to. This feels more fair to a lot of recipients because they see it as an equal trade.

But, for this to work, you have to have another website with a decent amount of traffic and a high enough domain rating. 

Broken Links 

There are a number of tools out there that will help you find broken links. A broken link occurs when someone links to something that no longer exists or the site doesn’t work. 

If you can find a broken link on a website that you want to pitch. Consider making a piece of content similar to what they were linking to and offer yours as a substitute. Most website owners will appreciate this and likely give you the link. 

2. Stay Active on Social Media

In addition to link building, social media can have an impact on your SEO as well. It’s not a direct impact but it can support it. 

If you’re active on social media you could send people from there to your website and vice versa. It’s important that Google sees that you’re a real person and more and more evidence points to the fact that trust signals like this can help increase or at least support rankings. 

3 Technical SEO Tips

Technical SEO is the way your website functions in terms of speed, reliability, performance, and so on. There are some factors you can control and some you can’t. I want to focus on what you can control. 

1. Understand How Core Web Vitals Work

We could spend an entire article talking about this alone but it’s important to at least familiarize yourself with core web vitals. You can find them in your Google Search Console as I’ve said a few times now and there are three main components: 

LCP (large contentful paint) – This is how long it takes your entire website to load

FID (first input delay) – This is how long it takes the first element on your site to load

CLS (cumulative layout shift) – This is a rating based on how many elements shift or move around as things load

These three factors will impact your site’s ranking as a whole and can be quickly and easily adjusted by removing elements that slow your site down and limit the amount of complex media you have on the site. 

2. Optimize for Mobile-First

58% of internet users primarily search on their phone so that means the majority of people use smartphones when searching on Google. 

What does this mean? 

It means that your site should look just as good if not better on the phone than it does on the computer. Years ago, we used to build a site on the computer and then optimize it for the phone but this should be flipped. 

Your real estate website should be made with a mobile-first priority. 

3. Optimize for Voice Search

This is another topic that we could spend an entire 5,000 word article on and it’s something that not enough people are talking about. 

People are using Siri, Alexa, and Bixbi to make real estate searches. 55% of people use voice search on their smartphone. This means that you need to keep voice in mind when building your real estate SEO strategy. 

Questions and conversational keywords are important. Questions like “how do I find someone to buy my house for cash” or “what do I have to pay at closing” are both conversational questions that you can easily answer with a blog post. 

Keep local search in mind as well. Target local towns using micro long-tail keywords that only have 50 or fewer searches a month. This hyper-focused audience is asking the questions you know you can answer and finding a few of these people each month can have a dramatic ROI. 

3 Local SEO Tips 

Now let’s talk about some of the local things you can do to make a difference in your SEO strategy.

1. Get a Google My Business Page 

Setting up a Google My Business page is incredibly important because it will allow you to display your business information like the examples above. 

When someone searches for a real estate agent or realtor in your area, you want to make sure you’re one of the top people to come up. 

This is done through keywords on your website, reviews, location, and account completion but having the Google My Business page makes it all possible. 

This feature makes it a lot easier for people to contact you or check out your website. 

2. Update Your Local Citations

Citations are one of the most essential local SEO ranking factors. You want to make sure that your business name, address, phone number, and website is accurate across everything. 

Directories like Factual, Localeze, YellowPages, and more are all working like a web to provide information to Google. If you have inaccurate information on any of these sites, it can make it more difficult for Google to crawl and when there are accuracy issues, Google won’t be able to validate the data. 

3. Prioritize Reviews 

Make sure you’re getting reviews on your Google My Business page and keep track of the quality of them to ensure that people are seeing a positive star rating when they look you up. 

As we scroll down the GMB listing for “real estate agencies New Orleans,” we immediately notice that the star ratings get lower. 

These listings still make it on the page, but they’re not ranking at the top plus it looks bad immediately when you’re surrounded by other companies with a higher rating in the same city. 

Developing a Real Estate SEO Strategy 

Let’s recap. There are four main types of SEO:

• On-Page
• Off-Page
• Technical
• Local

All of them need to work together in perfect harmony and if you’re lacking on any one of them, your chances of ranking number one for your ideal keyword is reduced. 

Make sure your content shines above all else. Create the highest quality content using relevant keywords that people are searching for. Make sure the content on your site is relevant and the keywords are used properly. 

Reach out to websites in your niche by emailing them to work out link deals whether you have to pay for one, write for free, or offer a link exchange. 

Get your local business pages set up and try to get as many reviews as you can to build trust in people searching for real estate agents in your local area. 

If you do all of these things and gradually work on some of the other small stuff, you’re sure to have success with real estate SEO!