The highly competitive real estate agent market poses business challenges for newcomers and veterans alike. It is not feasible to just sit back and watch new clients pour in the door or the inbox. Getting the slightest bit of an edge in this struggle can mean the difference between stagnation and growth in your business. With a larger and larger share of home buyers seeking their next agent through search engines, getting the edge you need can be as simple as boosting your local Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for real estate ranking.
How would you feel about increasing traffic to your website to levels several times higher than what you are currently receiving? Getting your website on the first page of search results in your local market would do just that. It will require some learning and some elbow grease to boost your ranking through SEO but it is doable! Here are a few of the best ways to get the ball rolling.
4 Ways to Boost Your Local SEO for Real Estate Ranking!
1- Backlinks are a Significant Element of SEO for Realtors
In order to really boost your real estate SEO you must get other websites to link to your website.
That is my simple advice but as with most things the devil is in the details. There are lots of websites that have very low rankings so a backlink from them to your site won’t push the needle. What is really helpful is for significant websites to backlink in reference to your website. When you can get several backlinks from reputable real estate websites you can get a real boost!
Work on securing natural backlinks for your agency from some of the options listed below and you can improve your local SEO:
A) Take Advantage of Your Free Broker Site
Ensure that all information in directories, bios, and agent pages through your broker or franchise have all the correct information. This becomes a foundation of reliable information that Google will use to cross reference with the information on your own website. Be sure to regularly update this data so the information remains reliable– especially your NAT – Name, Address, and Telephone. Google relies on giving searchers correct information so it scans regularly to check for alignment of information. When it finds informational alignment, Google is more confident in your site, and boosts your rankings!
B) Real Estate Publications
Getting backlinks through articles written for local and national real estate publications are not easy to procure but the efforts will help boost your ranking!
C) Newspapers
When you build and nurture relationships with news reporters in your area and help them with quality content, quotes from the experts you can get a lot of backlinks through local publications by working together.
D) Community Organizations
These organizations all have websites where you can have a link. It may require some work for the Chamber of Commerce or volunteering for the Lions Club or Rotary. But getting these links can more than make up for the volunteer time you give.
2- Blog Comments
Blog commenting can really help you build traffic to your own blog. In fact it is possible to build some great referral traffic when you simply make some quality comments on high profile blogs in your real estate area.
If you want to, you can comment on this blog and get the ball rolling.
I know it seems strange, why would it benefit you to make blog comments? It is very simple, Google rewards websites with more SEO traffic when they register that you are receiving a greater amount of traffic from other sources. If comments you post at Inman, Easy Agent Pro, and other real estate websites result in a boost in referral traffic, then Google will also reward you with more SEO traffic.
Again, it is vital that you are posting regular blogs with quality content on real estate issues interesting to your locale. It is also important that each Blog article addresses an important topic with the repeated use of specific keywords and keyword phrases from your list of keywords so that Google’s crawlers will continually identify your website as important and raise its ranking.
3- Reviews
Reviews are super vital for online businesses. If you doubt that premise, ask yourself; Why does Amazon.com stress them so aggressively? All of the top online businesses ask every single one of their customers to give a review on their purchases. And not just once but repeatedly! Client reviews will be helpful for you in real estate SEO too. Realtors who implement a followup system and are able to get consistent reviews from previous clients will turn those reviews into more future business!
Good reviews on the main websites like Yelp and Google Places are of course important because every local business uses them. But it will be just as important for your real estate SEO that you get reviews on websites like Trulia and Zillow that are Realtor-specific.
A) Google Reviews
Of course the biggest fish will be Google Reviews. They will play the greatest role in getting you ranked highly in local SEO for Real Estate. There are two primary factors for Google.
1) You need a lots of reviews and
2) You preferably want reviews that are more than 300 words. These types of reviews help to raise your Google ranking higher.
What getting a lot of reviews does for you as well is, it raises your online business status. The more people you get to review your website; the more people will do business with you.
Send clients to your Google+ About page and ask them to click, “Write a Review.”
B) Getting Yelp Reviews
These are like treasure, they are hard to get but when you can get them they are valuable. The fact is that Yelp pages rate very highly in search results, so the rewards for having a lot of Yelp reviews are bountiful. They just require some extra elbow grease.
C) Testimonials in Your Website
This is an important element in your website design. Testimonial reviews are great for SEO because including locations and cities with a client’s name tells Google where you are doing business. Besides, visitors to your website will want to see these testimonials to feel confident working with you.
4- Internal Linking
Linking is a vitally important part of SEO for realtors. Internal linking just means that throughout your website, in your newsletters and blogs, and through your images you are linking what you write with other blog articles, webpages, other sites blogs, or social media posts.
Linking information from your web pages and blog posts with at least 5 other pages or blog posts is ideal. Why? Because these links help visitors to more easily locate further information about the topics they are searching. And for optimization purposes it creates clear pathways for search engines to see how helpful and relevant your website’s information is while also connecting to your older blog posts.
The key to this strategy is to use the keywords from your article to link with other text on your webpages, your own blogs, as well as articles, images or blogs from other websites where the same keywords are used. For instance, when you blog about Puget Sound Real Estate, you want to link your blog article with as many other quality posts using the text “Puget Sound Real Estate” as possible.
Identify the neighborhoods where you most want to sell real estate and link your new blogs posts to these neighborhood posts (or pages). Those older established neighborhood posts have a long rooted history that your new posting with the new information you provide will now be linked to. This gives your blog credibility in that local neighborhood with the search engine crawlers. Just make sure that you anchor your new text properly with the old text (same keywords) and correct text linkage.
Since the purpose of linking these posts is to show how you are the real estate expert for these neighborhoods it is necessary for you to write high quality blog posts with relevant information and plenty of text (1200-2000 words for each neighborhood with 3-4 keyword phrases repeated 2-4 times is great)! Your posts should be well written, helpful, knowledgeable and include photos, graphs and links as often as possible. Then when you consistently connect your blogs with internal links to other pages and sites Google’s crawlers identify your website as important by raising your ranking.
Final thoughts
When it comes to using SEO for Realtors, taking these steps is easier said than done. The good news is that you have options. You can implement these ideas yourself. You can hire a marketing guru for your business, to lead this process and contract with a team of marketing experts who will carry out the step by step strategy. Or, you can approach a full service marketing agency with your goals in mind, and work with them to design and implement an overall plan for SEO that is tailored to the cities, towns and neighborhoods you work in. This puts the expertise of your marketing agency to work developing and growing your quality inbound leads through SEO.
Here at zo agency we work to build long term relationships with our clients. We call it Tribe!
We will work diligently to discover your vision, your passion, your needs, your hope sand dreams for your realty office and then will put an SEO plan together that meets your needs and fits your budget. Another great thing is that we can meet any or all of your marketing needs Visit us today at www.zo.agency
