Real estate Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of optimising your website so it improves visibility on Google, Bing, and other search engines. It helps you reach the right audience that are searching for a home or want to sell or rent out their homes, along with finding local agents and house information.
As of 2024, close to 100% of house buyers use the internet when searching for a property. The Genie Crawl team have created this guide to help real estate agents start with SEO, helping you improve online visibility, driving organic (free) traffic to your website. So let's get started.
On-Page SEO
On-page SEO is ensuring your website content is available for your visitors to read. You need to optimise your content using specific targeted keywords, offering proper website structure, along with engaging multimedia.
On-page SEO requires regular updates and changes, ensuring that your content remains up to date with the latest trends. This involves:
- Keyword research – the foundation to your SEO efforts. Identifying terms used by buyers and sellers online. The keywords you select must be added naturally to your titles, headings, URLs, and content, helping search engines understand the context
- Incorporate long-tail keywords – these are longer phrases with higher intent, such as “real estate agent in London,” rather than a broader term, such as “real estate.”
- Create high quality and valuable content – in order to maintain online visibility, you need to create content that answers your audiences questions, aligning with their search intent
- Publish blogs and guides – regular blogs and guides help to improve your authority, positioning you as a market leader.
- Use logical structure and headings – use H1, H2, H3 headers to make your content easier to read for visitors
- Optimise your page titles and meta descriptions – this is the first impression on Google, ensure you add your main keywords naturally. Titles should be no more than sixty characters and meta descriptions, no more than one hundred and sixty characters
- Include conversational keywords to align with voice assistants
- Optimise images – include alt text, captions, and titles, along with descriptions for your images
- Add internal links and call to actions (CTAs) – internal links guide your visitors, along with search engines through your website, distributing SEO value, while CTAs encourage your visitors to take the desired action.
Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO focuses on the outside of your website, such as acquiring backlinks from high domain authority websites. These are links from trusted sites that point back to yours, boosting your authority in your industry. This involves:
- Partnering with real estate blogs and providing guest blogs
- Social media engagement
- Publish your business information on industry and local directories
- Collaborate with real estate influencers
Technical SEO
Technical SEO is essential to ensure that your website performs well online. When search engines cannot crawl or index your pages, your web pages will not appear in results. To achieve technical real estate SEO, we recommend:
- Improve page speed – ensure pages load within three seconds, you can check your page speed in Google's PageSpeed Insights, where you will identify how to improve page speed
- Ensure your website is mobile responsive – over sixty percent of home buyers and sellers use mobile devices. Google has also introduced mobile-first indexing, meaning that the search engine crawls and indexes the mobile version of your website
- Optimise URL architecture – ensure URLs are well-structured and clear, helping search engines and visitors understand your site
- Fix broken links and eliminate duplicate content – search engines struggle when they find two pieces of content that is the same on one website, negatively impacting your visibility, while broken links can increase bounce rates
- Set up SSL – ensure your website is HTTPS secure
- Include XML sitemap – this helps search engines discover and index your pages effectively
Local SEO
As you know as a real estate agent, location is important and the same applies to an effective real estate agent SEO strategy. If you want your website to be visible in searches, such as “houses for sale near me,” or “houses to rent in Plymouth,” for example, you will need to:
- Create or claim, verify, and optimise your Google Business Profile
- Encourage and respond to online reviews, the positive and negative
- Create local citations on local directory sites
Conclusion
A strong online visibility with measurable results starts with the right SEO strategy. This means ensuring that your website is fully optimised, helping search engines crawl and index your site, while ensuring you are visible when a potential client is searching for real estate services in your area. SEO is an ongoing process that requires regular optimising and updating, ensuring you align with the latest trends and SEO best practices. Do you need help improving your online visibility in real estate searches in your area? Contact Genie Crawl now to find out more.