The real estate industry is very competitive, especially in urban areas and major cities. From small realtors to the juggernaut national companies, everyone will do everything they can to increase their visibility and get more listings.
Since the internet is now a key part of our daily lives, many people are also using it to buy their next home. Today, around 90% of home buyers look up listings online. Thus, the realtor who will stand to benefit from this digital shift is the one who has mastered SEO.
These are some of the best SEO tips for your website.
Perform a DIY SEO audit with free online tools
An SEO audit can help you determine if your content is doing well or if you need to make improvements. Although it takes a long time to finish, it can be a benchmark for your website’s progress. Plus, it will give you data that you will need to make a roadmap.
You need to answer these questions when doing an SEO audit:
- Does your website rank locally?
- Does it get organic traffic?
- Does it generate leads or conversions?
If you answer no to any of these questions, there’s a reason for it, and doing an SEO audit can help you fix the issue.
You can use free software tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console to perform an SEO audit. The former will help you see which pages need the most optimization, while the latter will find issues that you should fix immediately. From these tools, you can also find the Mobile-Friendly Test and PageSpeed Insights tools to further improve your site’s compatibility with smartphones and to optimize loading times, respectively.
When doing an SEO audit, you need to focus on these areas:
- Content: Structure, visual elements, keyword and link placement, redirects, duplicates, and canonical tags
- Site structure: Sitemap, XML, robots.txt, and redirects
- Links: Inbound and outbound links, broken links, and interlinking with other pages on your site
- Page structure: Titles, meta-descriptions, heading tags, alt tags, and URLs
- Usability: Mobile compatibility, site speed, and accessibility
Check your H1 tags
One of the most challenging tasks done by search engines is getting the context of web pages. So, to do it faster and more efficiently, they utilize data from several signals. Among these signals are the page title and the H1 tag.
When going through a page’s content, search engine spiders read the HTML code and look for sentences that are enclosed in heading tags (e.g., <h1>, <h2>, etc.). They usually consider this a sign of the page content. So, when you use keywords in your H1 tag, you help search engines understand what your web page talks about.
Another benefit of using headings is that it makes it easier for visitors to navigate through your web page. They can see what the content is about just by looking at the H1 tag. The other headings also provide clear signs to the user about what to expect for each section.
Install Yoast SEO, a WordPress plugin
Yoast SEO is a WordPress plugin designed to make on-site SEO easier for users of the CMS. One of the main features that most users love about this plugin is that you don’t need to learn how to code to use it. Yoast walks you through each step and uses easy-to-understand color-coding to show your content issues. After detecting the problems, it then tells you how to fix them.
There are two versions of Yoast—one is free, and the other is a paid version. If you’re still building up your real estate business’s website, the free version will suffice. But if you own a larger or more technical website, the paid version will work wonders for you. Using this plugin is one of the best SEO tips in this list because it will make creating and posting content easier, especially for beginners.
Include alt texts in images
Sometimes called “alt descriptions” or “alt tags,” an alt text appears if the image on your page fails to load. It is also a valuable accessibility feature for visually impaired readers as screen-reading tools describe images to them using this feature. It also allows your content to be more optimized and rank highly on search results.
If you want to improve your real estate business’s performance by using SEO, optimizing your website’s alt text is one of the keys to improving your visitors’ user experience, regardless of how they find you.
Research the correct keywords
You can get the right keywords by doing keyword research to find and analyze search terms that people type into search engines. By doing so, you can use the data that you have gathered to optimize your website or marketing. Keyword research can also help you identify questions to target, their popularity, their ranking difficulty, and more.
Doing keyword research gives you valuable information and insight into queries that your target audience is interested in. The information you can gather from these search terms can also help you form a content strategy and your broader marketing strategy. However, the keywords themselves are not the be-all and end-all in SEO. You can use this strategy simultaneously with other tips on this list to increase your website’s chances of success.
Take note of keyword density
Keyword density measures how many times a target keyword is used on a webpage. But there is no standard set for how many times a keyword should be used on a page. Also, search engines don’t provide a percentage of the target keyword density. Moving forward, you must use your judgment and follow the best practices when making your future content.
Most SEO experts recommend that the ideal keyword density should not exceed 2%. Your target keyword, then, should appear around one to two times every 100 words. By following this tip, the keyword appears enough times to let search engines know what your page is about without falling into the trap of keyword stuffing.
Four strategies for good keyword density are:
- Make readable content before inserting keywords. You need to write naturally and find ways to use the keyword in your content organically.
- Add variation to your keywords using keyword stemming. Keyword stemming is a search engine’s ability to identify and associate similar words/phrases connected to the target keyword. This process usually involves adding a prefix, suffix, or pluralization to a keyword. Search engines can still recognize these words, so you should use them in your content to add variety and support your target keyword.
- Give context and support your keyword using semantic keywords. You should use terms that are variations, synonyms, or contextually related to the keyword. Search engines use semantic SEO to gain context and rank pages, so you need to find related keywords and utilize them in your page to support your on-page SEO.
- Avoid keyword stuffing. Once you’re done writing your content, use an on-page SEO checklist or Yoast to check your keyword density and other factors before posting your content. Make sure you used the target keyword enough times to signal to search engines what your page is about without keyword stuffing, which can put your website at risk for penalties.
How can a real estate SEO agency help you?
If you think doing SEO by yourself is too hard or you don’t have enough time, you should consider hiring a team to help you accomplish it. You should do a quick Google search and learn about SEO for real estate agents because experts in the field already have proven strategies that will make your website dominate search results.
However, most agencies do require a mid- or long-term commitment of around 6-12 months to help you get results. You should also consider the stiffness of the competition of the real estate industry in your area as it will take longer to see the results if your business is in a very crowded market. You will still see great results on every point, though.
Also, you need to collaborate with the agency every step of the way. You shouldn’t just sit on your desk and relax because you’ve found the help you need. You need to tell them what your vision is for your website and suggest ways to achieve it.
Conclusion
What do you think? Aren’t these SEO tips easy enough to do on your website? If you haven’t tried doing SEO before, the most important thing that you should remember is the best way for your website to get found is by creating content. Any kind of quality content will do! If you like videos, shoot them. If you love writing, write blogs. Whatever you think will help your business get noticed, make it, and be sure that it is about your local area–and you’ll be found.
Developing and executing a great SEO-optimization strategy, though, can be a little more complicated. To make it simpler, read this blog post to learn more about how digital marketing can help your business.
