PROPERTYSPARK ARTICLE
How to Leverage Local SEO for Real Estate
The real estate industry is a challenging one, known for fluctuating demand in an ever-evolving local business landscape. But now that property markets are facing historically low interest rates, it’s the ideal time for new players to penetrate their local real estate markets and connect with prospective homeowners. Doing so won’t always be easy, however, as real estate businesses also have tight competition. Companies will need to surpass increasingly savvy competitors who are also looking to attract property hunters within the area.
This is where search engine optimization (SEO) comes in. Given that we live in the digital age, players in the real estate space must learn how to pivot and maximize what the online world has to offer. This includes the use of search engines, which have the power to help popularize listings in the local market.
Studies have shown that localized searches can greatly influence buyer decisions, so it only makes sense to invest in strategies that boost local search visibility.
Top rankings in search engine results pages (SERPs) offer real estate companies great potential to generate quality leads and drive conversions in the local property market. In this article, let’s discuss how to maximize this potential and utilize SEO to stay ahead of the competition.
Reassess Your SEO Performance
Optimize Your Website
On–site SEO plays a big role in how online users discover your property listings in SERPs. Search engine algorithms favor well–optimized websites, particularly those that adhere to Expertise–Authority–and– Trust (EAT) indicators. The main goal of search engines is to boost the visibility of trustworthy websites, so you’ll need to ensure that your website offers useful information for local property buyers. Knowing this, you need to check if the information on your site is accurate and up to date. To strengthen your site’s value, it would help to include accolades, awards, certifications, and reviews.
Aside from content, you’ll also need to consider user experience (UX) when optimizing your website. Sites that are quick to load and easy to navigate perform well in terms of UX, as users tend to spend more time on the site to find what they need. You may want to improve site accessibility and mobile–friendliness, too, as this improves UX and reinforces the belief that you are a legitimate and trustworthy real estate business.
Localize Your Approach
The advantage of focusing on hyperlocal markets is that you’ll be able to directly target buyers who are actively searching for properties in the area. To increase your chances of generating leads, you should consider a localized approach to your marketing. You can start by adding or updating your listings on databases such as Google’s My Business directory.
In addition to joining business databases, you may also need to do keyword research for high–ranking keywords in your area and incorporate them into your content. For example, you can add phrases such as “homes for sale in [your area]” in your property listings to target queries in your intended city or region. It will also help to generate backlinks, or hyperlinks back to your page, by producing keyword–rich content for local sources such as blogs and media outlets. To effectively localize your content, you may want to consult an SEO expert to determine keywords with a high search volume as well as long–tail keywords that are less competitive, but more specific.
Produce Fresh and Relevant Content
You’ve probably heard of the phrase “content is king,” and such is the case even in the real estate sector. To gain and sustain the attention of potential buyers, make sure to regularly produce high–quality content that’s relevant to users’ search journeys. Good examples of relevant content include neighborhood profiles, travel blogs, infographics, and other forms of informative content that target what customers want to know before buying a property. On top of your website, you should also consider utilizing social media to fully maximize your reach.
It would be wise to focus on your visual content, too. Visual content includes virtual open houses, photos, livestreams for buyer Q&As, feature–style vlogs (interviews with local residents, etc.), and other forms of content that are not largely text–based. And of course, don’t forget to optimize your content by incorporating geo–targeted keywords into your meta titles and descriptions, URLS, alt text, and even your hashtags.
The Bottom Line: SEO for Local Real Estate Requires Consistency and Adaptability
With all that being said, it’s important to remember that SEO is not a one–time thing and should be consistently monitored so that it can achieve desirable results. Real estate can be a precarious landscape, so you must continually monitor the latest SEO trends in the area of your choice and make adjustments as needed.
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