Is your real estate agency struggling to get noticed? Is your showcase website falling behind in search engines? Before giving up on your professional career, do you know the importance of the SEO for a real estate website ?
SEO or natural referencing is the guarantee of good visibility on Google’s results pages. Today, your client and future property buyer browses websites before stepping through the doors of real estate agencies.
So, to generate quality traffic and improve your online reputation, follow our advice!
What are the benefits of SEO for a real estate website?
The SEO (Search Engine Optimization) it is the optimization of your website for search engines. Concretely, behind this acronym is a whole range of techniques that will allow you to appear in the top results search of Google.
Before seeing how to use SEO for your real estate site, you need to understand what optimizing your agency’s site will bring to your business.
You boost your visibility in the SERPs
It’s a fact: 80% of potential clients will visit real estate agency websites before going in person, and 75% of them don’t go past the first page of search engines.
With very strong competition in the real estate sector, your website must appear in the top 3 results to generate clicks.
The only way to improve your ranking in the SERP, is to implement an effective SEO strategy and to focus particularly on local SEO.
You increase your brand awareness
Internet users believe that if Google trusts you enough to rank your website well in its search engine, then they can trust you too. A good ranking therefore signals a good reputation!
You increase your conversion rate
This is a direct consequence of a relevant SEO strategy: the more you work on your online presence, the more your conversion rate improves. Once visitors are on your site, all that remains is to turn them into customers!
You get a better ROI than with SEA
SEO is a long-term marketing strategy and, although it doesn’t generate as many immediate results as paid advertising campaigns (Google Ads or Facebook Ads), it is much more profitable. Concretely, the return on investment from good organic SEO is on the order of 200 to 300% while it is around 50 to 150% with online ads.
Good SEO for a real estate website improves user experience
Beginners tend to think that SEO is limited to content optimization, but it is far broader than that.
As a reminder, theoptimization of a website, is:
- On-site SEO: researching relevant keywords, writing meta and title tags, quality content, internal linking…
- Technical optimization: UX design, web page load time, URL optimization, handling 404 error pages…
- Off-site SEO: acquiring backlinks, online reputation on social media…
And every aspect of SEO is important.
The loading speed of your site pages, for example. If your visitors have to wait more than 3 seconds for a page to load, you already lose nearly a third of them. Beyond 6 seconds, they have all gone to a competitor’s site!
Your site design is also extremely important! Your photos should of course be very high quality and the usability of your pages flawless. Would you imagine selling a house or an apartment that wasn’t tidy and welcoming? The same applies to your real estate sales website.
How to optimize your local visibility with real estate website SEO?
Here are a few ideas that will help you to stand out from the local competition and improve your ranking in search engine results:
Create a blog
To cope with a highly competitive sector, having a showcase site is not enough to rank well in Google results. Creating a real estate blog is crucial for your SEO and for attracting local visitors.
A blog will allow you to:
- To be ranked for a larger number of keywords.
- To publish fresh content regularly.
- To demonstrate your expertise by writing articles that interest your target audience.
- To have content to share on social media
Create city pages
To attract visitors in the towns of your area, the trick is to write a specific page for each town, with geolocated queries and unique content (beware of duplicate content, which is penalized by Google!).
Fill in your Google My Business listing (soon Google Business Profile)
Google is changing the name of its local offering and access via the smartphone app will be stopped in 2022. But aside from these few changes, your listing remains an essential element for promoting your activity locally.
Optimize your property listing pages
Navigation must be smooth and your property pages must be within a click's reach (no more than 3 clicks from the homepage). Take care with both presentation and substance. While the quality of visuals is important, the quality of the information provided is just as important. It is therefore necessary to detail your listings as much as possible with well-referenced data.
Make a responsive website
The vast majority of your customers will visit your real estate site from their mobile devices. Check that it adapts well to all screen resolutions.
Why outsource your real estate website SEO?
You might be tempted to do your Google SEO yourself. However, the SEO remains very complex. To succeed in breaking into the real estate sector, here are 3 good reasons to delegate your SEO to an SEO expert:
Only a professional masters all SEO techniques
Are terms like HTTPS protocol, structured data, link-building, PageRank, keyword density, semantic field, etc., completely unfamiliar to you?
Yet, they are part of the essential knowledge to have to meet Google's SEO criteria.
You're a pro in real estate sales, the SEO expert is a pro in web SEO — each to their own area of expertise!
You protect yourself from a Google penalty
Again, the SEO professional knows the SEO best practices and will spare you penalties in case of a breach.
Among the mistakes often made by site owners:
- Keyword stuffing.
- Duplicate content.
- Buying low-quality inbound links.
- Over-optimizing anchor text.
- Broken links…
You save time
A real estate agent's schedule is already full. Between client calls and property viewings, it can be difficult to find time to:
- Writing your blog posts.
- Optimizing your real estate listings.
- Social media posts.
- Checking the site's performance…
As you can see, theSEO optimization takes time and that's less time to satisfy your clients!
What is the benefit of an SEO audit for a real estate website?
If your digital strategy isn't taking off, before doing a complete overhaul of your site, start by carrying out an real estate website SEO audit.
Analyzing your site will highlight the weaknesses in your SEO. You may be unknowingly suffering from a Penguin or Panda penalty. Your site architecture may not be SEO-friendly. Some of your external links may need to be disavowed…
In short, only an SEO audit can assess the friction points, provided you delegate this task to an SEO expert. They alone have the skills and the right tools to analyze your real estate site.
Our tip to develop SEO for a real estate website
As you can see, entrust your Real estate website SEO to a freelance SEO consultant or SEO agency is essential. It is, in fact, the only way to properly rank your site and gain qualified traffic.
If you want to stand out from your competitors and boost your local SEO, Redacteur.com offers you two solutions:
- Either hire one of our professional web writers to delegate the writing of your SEO content.
- Or choose one of our SEO strategy packages which include, among other things, a semantic audit, the creation of topical clusters, analysis of the site structure and the writing of textual content, all supported by a dedicated SEO expert.
So, to make your real estate agency visible both on Google search results pages and on Google Maps, contact us!
