What Every Real Estate Agent Needs to Know About SEO

Search engine optimization or SEO is how you rank on Google. Ranking well is essential for your real estate business because this is how clients are most likely to find you. Think about how many new clients you could get if you had thousands more visitors to your website every month.

The real estate industry is competitive, and putting attention on your SEO strategy is a way to stand out amongst everyone else.

While best practices for SEO are pretty in-depth, the basics you should learn to start include the following:

Have a Professional Do an SEO Audit Of Your Site

If you have a website already, you should invest in having a professional do an audit to see where you’re doing things well and where you can improve.

Someone doing an audit can focus on the more technical components of on-page SEO. For example, they can look at your site structure, page structure, content, and links to determine where you might be able to make improvements.

They’ll also determine how usable your site is regarding speed, mobile-friendliness, and accessibility.

Local SEO

Local SEO is a subcategory of general search engine optimization that’s not relevant to all businesses, but it’s highly relevant to real estate professionals. If someone has an online-only business, then local keywords aren’t going to be something they need to consider.

As a real estate agent, everything you do is driven by location, meaning that local SEO is one of your best paths to set yourself apart because it’s less competitive than general SEO.

Think about how your potential clients are most likely to search. They might use a long-tail keyword like “real estate agent in Atlanta” or they could get even more specific with something like “realtor in Buckhead.”

As part of local SEO, you also need to optimize your Google My Business Page. Then, when possible, clients are looking for a realtor in your city or town, they’ll see a map that features Google My Business pages. It takes just a few minutes to fill yours out, and it’s free, yet it’s something a lot of realtors don’t do.

Create Locally-Driven Content

Creating content is what’s going to help your site rank above pretty much everything else you do. Your content will primarily be blogs and articles. You should be adding content to your site regularly because Google likes to see fresh information rather than stale sites that haven’t been updated lately.

When you’re creating content, along with using locally-driven keywords, make sure it’s compelling and engaging.

Your content doesn’t have to be a hard sell, and in fact, it shouldn’t be.

Instead, you might blog about local community events and things happening in the area, real estate trends, home design, and décor or anything that will be informative for your audience.

If you aren’t sure where to start, look at other real estate agent’s sites for inspiration.

Use Videos

Videos are a great format for real estate agents, and they’re good from an SEO perspective. In fact, research shows that video marketers get 66% more qualified leads annually than those who don’t utilize video.

Along with video tours of properties, get creative. You can, for example, record yourself giving tips or local market updates. Put it on YouTube and this is good for SEO because the video site is the second-largest search engine in the world behind only Google.

Creating video content is also a good way to get links back to your site, and a strong link profile indicates to Google that your content is high-quality, so you’re more likely to rank well.

Optimize Your Images

Finally, real estate marketing is heavily dependent on images. With that in mind, you want to optimize all of the images you use for search engines. For example, if you create a page or blog post and you’re adding images, you should fill out a few fields. These are alt text, caption, title, and description. Each one should include the keywords you’re targeting for the page or post and describe the image.

You can get up to 37% more clicks from your images on Google, and it takes just a few minutes to optimize them.