It’s not surprising to find a lot of real estate websites all over the internet and more get added on a daily basis. With this, the market is open for stiff competition among real estate agents to reach out to online prospects and ranking high in search engines becomes an essential requirement.
This is where Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) comes into the picture.
Why do you need SEO?
It is important to learn and understand the basics of search engine optimisation (SEO) before you start developing and working on your website content.
Take advantage of online tools such as the Google Keyword Planner to determine trending and best keywords for your target market. Do not forget to consider long-tail keywords and short keywords to help you enhance your presence in organic search results.
Using SEO is always a winning solution to organically promote your website to gain good natural traffic and rank high in the search engine results pages (SERP).
For instance, you can focus on keywords with a low level of competition but have a high search frequency when developing your blog posts to get it more noticed on the search results pages.
You may strategise effectively by adding these keywords to meta-descriptions, titles, headings, and content body. You may also include images or videos related to your content and include the keywords in the picture or video title tag and alt tag.
Real estate agents are aware that ranking in search engines is important for their websites to get more traffic on top of running marketing and advertising campaigns on Facebook, Instagram, and other social networking sites to enhance their website’s visibility and relevance in the market.
Investing in SEO is a critical component in ensuring that your real estate website gets the visibility and ranking it needs to stay competitive in the market. Today, launching a website alone is not enough since you need to strategise your targets and actions to achieve your desired results. Without careful planning and proper SEO strategies, you can expect your website to rank at the bottom.
However, SEO is not a fix-all solution and is a generally a dynamic technical tool that focuses on specific fields of specialisation and desired targets. For instance, SEO for restaurants work differently with SEO targeted for health and wellness, and so on.
For the real estate industry, strategies need to focus on the components, needs, peculiarities, and demands of the real estate market.
There are key elements that work together when employing SEO for real estate and one of the major ingredients is content. The internet has become the most convenient source of information for any business, which goes the same for real estate. The more informational and useful the content in the site, the more it becomes relevant to your site’s visitors.
When people need something such as information related to real estate they go to search engines and type in the keywords, after which websites containing these keywords appear on the search engine results page (SERP).
However, it’s not that easy getting to the top since search engines are programmed using algorithms that determine- among other things but not limited to- websites with content that are most relevant to the chosen topic.
Optimising sites with SEO strategies greatly increases chances of your site ranking and showing up among the top-ranked websites for those search terms.
But as mentioned before it is not just limited to topic relevance, since there are other key factors that come into play in SEO other than compelling content and trending keywords.
Images – Visuals are critical in the real estate industry and play a key role in presenting property before a prospective client. Making use of striking, vibrant, and colorful images can help attract more potential buyers to visit or frequent the websites, as well as help boost site rankings through SEO.
Images can also be a good starting point for stir the interest of visitors in reading the articles through.
Keywords and search terms – Being aware of the latest keyword and search terms can help greatly in optimising websites for SEO. This means that your website is adaptable to the dynamic keyword variations that are incorporated into the content of the websites. Remember that what may be trending the previous month could be different for the current month, so it is important to always check online tools for the latest terms that can be used in your website’s content.
Do take note that keyword stuffing does not work in Google since current search algorithms have been designed to detect it and relegate websites at the bottom or get penalised for attempting to cheat the rankings.
Adjust the keyword variations to fit in your content without changing the meaning of the topics discussed to retain the consistency of your website content and get recognised by the search algorithms.
Outbound and back links – Pay attention to using backlinks and outbound links as you do with keywords and search terms. It allows visitors to your site to have access to other sources of information or related materials without having to leave your site. This is particularly essential when you need to provide more details related to your website’s content, such as other websites that support your claims or supplementary material for your products or article topics.
Incorporating these links in your content will make your readers stay locked in to your website, help you get more traffic, and boost its credibility.
Videos – Having videos inside your website content can prove helpful, especially for discriminating visitors who need more visual content. Ideally, video plug-ins should be limited to 45 – 50 seconds in length and need to be of good visual quality, informative, and entertaining. For real estate websites, videos of 360-degree angles or drone shots of the property can help boost the visual appeal of the property and support SEO strategies.
Internal links – Another key ingredient in effective SEO strategy is using internal links that redirect visitors to other pages within the site such as informational or blog articles. It helps guide the journey of the visitor within the site and prevent them from leaving your website especially when they are engaged by your content topics.
These are just some of the major items that need careful attention when it comes to SEO to help boost your site up the search rankings. It will help you generate more traffic, gain new visitors, and engage your target audience. Once you have the right recipes from SEO, you can be confident your website would rank among those at the top.
