Real estate is one of the most competitive fields in the business world and SEO marketing, is really a conscious effort to improve your website to position you higher on search engines. So what is SEO for real estate? Simply, if you can be easily found by the right people, the quantity, and the quality of traffic to your website will improve.
SEO for real estate websites is now more than ever more about serving customer needs, in ways that adhere to the guidelines and best practices of the big search engines, Google and Microsoft. Anticipating user intent, providing the content that they are expecting to see, and delivering the best answers are what makes good SEO. All huge, considering your website acts as a customer research tool and a sales channel for your business.
The key to this is being able to put both the technical and strategic elements together, and to meet the needs of your customers and search engines.
Benefits of SEO for your real estate website
1. Getting in front your target audience
SEO is uber useful for real estate agents or agencies, to be front of mind for localised property clients, whether they have intent to buy, sell or rent. Of course, you could spend to acquire traffic, but a solid organic standing delivers a perception of trust amongst consumers, not to mention the leads being acquired through passive channels.
An effective local real estate SEO strategy will help deliver ‘relevant’ web pages to a ‘relevant’ audience when using search queries that are identified as being pertinent to your business. As they are already looking for what you have to offer, organic visibility drives high-quality traffic to your website without attempting to entice or persuade them.
As an example, a real estate agency services customers who are either buying or selling, two distinct audiences. SEO for real estate allows you to reach each audience via intent-driven keyword research. Without being too specific, to reach both audiences, separate service pages would be created, one targeting the keyword phrase “suburb homes for sale” and the other targeting “real estate agent suburb”.
Delivering relevant content to those with genuine search intent, builds a perception that you are one of the highest if not the highest sought-after option to solve their problem.
- Attracting Sellers
In a property market where demand is higher than supply, ensuring that you are well positioned to be found is paramount, however they are searching.
Despite the size of the property market in Australia, the area that you serve is likely focused on a few suburbs and surrounds. Having the ability to target keywords based on your locality means that you are only competing with others in the local area.
Be sure that local customers can find you online by optimising for local search and consider that sellers are using the search term ‘near me’ as much as a suburb itself. - Attracting Buyers or Tenants
Attracting buyers is all about the quality, value and demand of your listings right? Even so, buyers still need to be able to find the listings. Paid promotion is one option, but whilst you won’t be challenging realestate.com.au for top spot, ranking on the first page of Google is necessary to be seen by customers.
Having a single property listing ranking well will be difficult, given its relative shelf life and competition but there are ways to ensure that your listings can be found organically, and even assist with the rankings of future listings.
Your website, and specific pages, can be optimised to focus on localised terms and keywords for those with specific search intent to find. To do so, understand the search queries and search volume that will uncover opportunities.
2. Generating leads without needing paid advertising
An effective real estate SEO marketing strategy results in organic traffic, rather than what can be costly paid advertising.
It’s true, SEO can take time to gain traction for specific search terms but is favourable due to its ability to deliver ROI in the long term. Paid advertising can have an immediate impact, but also has a sustained fixed cost which is directly related to traffic being drawn to your website. The use of both means should depend on the position of your business.
Paid advertising and SEO do work well together though, in the way that an optimised website has increased credibility and trust with search engines. Trusted websites and pages will be prioritised and favoured whether via organic or paid channels. So even if your preference is to focus on paid advertising, if SEO builds trust in your real estate website with Google, picture what impact it is having on your users.
3. SEO Optimises user experience
Getting users to your website is important but ensuring that those with genuine search intent are finding the right information, even more so.
Google has learned how to interpret user experience online, and a positive user experience has become a pivotal element to the success of a real estate website’s SEO.
As an example, a user who clicks into a website and is met with a poor user experience, such as poor mobile responsiveness, will probably leave within seconds. This would see a higher bounce rate, which tell Google that the web page is not valuable for the user, often resulting in lower rankings.
Google started evaluating and prioritising user experience as a ranking factor in 2021, considering Core Web Vitals and page speed to help determine if you are providing a valuable interaction.
For businesses, this just means that you need to focus on the needs of your customers and by doing so, you stand to rank better, keep users on your site, and convert them. The more this occurs, the more authoritative your site will be, and the cycle continues.
How to optimise your real estate website for SEO
Google users have an expectation to be delivered relevant and valuable content first, and it does so by prioritising websites based on a series of on-page and off-page signals.
But before you can figure out where you’re going, you need to figure out where you are. An SEO audit can help to determine which pages are doing well and where improvements can be made.
An audit can be onerous, but it gives you the information you need to create a roadmap and acts as a benchmark to evaluate your progress. Identify a list of keywords and decide which are most relevant to your business, what search volume there is for each, and what your competitors are ranking for.
Key areas to focus on in an SEO audit include:
• Content: Whether keywords are on topic and localised, using logical layout and images.
• User Experience: Assessing Core Web Vitals for improved function.
• Site Structure: How the website content is organised, e.g. sitemap, robots.txt, redirects.
• Page Structure: Checking titles, headings, Meta descriptions, URLs, and alt tag quality.
• Links: Whether outbound and inbound, internal links, are live and impactful.
SEO for real estate websites focuses on a lot of different areas so when you apply improvements across these areas, you can expect to see an increase in your organic traffic.
SEO Tools Worth a Look
There are plenty of resources that will help you identify areas for improvement.
There are free resources available that can assess website performance such as PageSpeed Insights, with the Mobile-Friendly Test tool being specific to user experience.
Google Analytics is a useful tool for insight into which pages are performing and how well. Google Search Console identifies issues that are directly affecting site performance and your user experience. Both will provide a better idea of how people are finding you, what you’re ranking for and you’ll even be able to assess your site health, such a crucial element of user engagement.
In an industry as competitive as real estate, organic website rankings build a perception of trust or sustainability that cannot be attained through paid advertising. As the user’s and Google’s requirements continue to evolve, applying sound SEO amongst your digital strategy will serve you in the short and long term. If you want to work with a real estate digital marketing agency with serious SEO credentials, contact Property Hype today.