Real Estate SEO

Real Estate SEO is key and king of all lead generation strategies. I do not care if anyone disagrees because, from personal experience, it works! You yourself, , must understand it, as you cannot just hand it to a company and hope it all works out. If you have no plan, you plan to certainly fail. Leaving it up to a company to plan your business is not the way to go, particularly if they do not understand real estate.

The problems with hiring a standard SEO company for Real Estate

Most generalist SEO companies are not going to understand real estate. They may think they do, but they do not, just like the general consumer. They think we are out there all day trying to sell and lease houses when actually, we need the houses first. We need people who need to sell and want their investment managed. This is just the start of the journey where it can go wrong if you yourself do not have any direction with what you want to achieve. Let’s break it down so you have an idea that makes 100% perfect sense by the end of this.

How to develop a Real Estate SEO strategy?

Okay, let’s start —the keywords or the search terms you want to be found with when someone in your local area searches. Think of it this way. If you could take a bird’s eye view of the area you service, and speech bubbles popped out of the houses with what was in their head, what would you want to see? All of these could be very different, as some of the following, depending on what circumstance that person has:

How do I sell my home fast?
How do I get top dollar for my property?
How do I prepare my home for sale?
What websites can I advertise my home for sale on?
How do I sell my home without an agent?
What is my home worth?
How much is capital gains tax?
How much does a Real Estate Agent charge?
How long will it take to sell my home?
What is the average commission for a Real Estate Agent?
Do I need a conveyancer when I sell my home?
How do I choose a Real Estate Agent?
What are the property management fees in my area?
Who is the best real estate agent near me?

Long-tail keywords for Real Estate

Imagine if you could actually see these questions just popping out above the houses. All you had to do was to land in the living area and answer the question. This is SEO. However, the issue is you do not get the chance you need to answer all of those questions with great written content laid out on an optimised page that can easily be found. All of those queries to Google are long-tail keywords. They will be searched less, but you will convert more if you can address those answers through your content.

If we keep the scenario of being able to see speech bubbles pop out of the top of houses, the other things that you may see might be more general. General keywords tend to be shorter in some searches as they are not ready to be specific yet. These are called short-tail keywords, and they are made up of a maximum of 3-4 words. Let’s look at some examples of the queries that people may search on Google.

Real Estate (Suburb)
Real Estate Agent (Suburb)
Real Estate Agent Near Me
Realtor Near Me
Realtor (Suburb)
Property Manager (Suburb)
Sell Property
Sell without agent
Sell home fast
Let my home
Find tenant fast
Best Agent (Suburb)
Sell my property
Compare Real Estate Agents
Property Investments (Suburb)

Short-tail keywords for Real Estate

These are short-tail keywords that will generate a load more traffic if you can get it right, but I can tell you, it is not easy. SEO for Real Estate Businesses is a long game strategy. If you are the type that needs instant gratification, run Google or Facebook ads, but get ready to open your wallet. SEO is the long game. As a business owner, you should already be able to delay gratification, like in the marshmallow test. Do not eat the marshmallow. We have gone through all the research now; however, that it is only the beginning. I have made it easy for you, but what’s next?

Real Estate SEO: playing the long game!

Okay, get ready because here is the hard work. Content time—so get your fingers ready or find someone whose fingers are. Each of these terms will need an article written about it and an individual page created for it.

For example, let’s take this one long-tailed keyword: “What’s my home worth?”

There are 8,100 people per month in Australia who search this term. Not all of them are going to be in your area. However, the good thing about Google is it will show the results in a localised way. Meaning, if they search that question in your area and you answer best to the query, you will be shown first.

Now, you need to write this article. The best way to do so is in your natural style, so it is unique. What are the steps you can take to establish the value of your home? Pretty simple, so just write it.

Once you have come up with the content, what do you do next?

Now, you have to have the page designed. The best way to do this is to have the most important information sitting in the first fold, meaning the screen they land on before they scroll down. We will talk more about this later as it is another topic on its own. For now, all you need to know is to make sure you follow these steps:

• H1 Heading is the keyword
• Next action must be placed carefully on the first fold
• Content is optimised with H2 headings for other major subjects

Once the page is designed, you need to make sure all the metadata is correct also, so that when Google crawls the article, it knows what it is about. You do not have to think too much; here are the fundamentals:

• Page Title must have the keyword at the start
• The slug or URL must only be: “yourdomain.com/your-keyword”
• In your meta description, you must mention your keyword in the first sentence
• You must mention your keyword 4 + times throughout the article
• You should have 2-4 outbound links to other pieces of content from the page
• Name all images on the page based on your keyword

The above are the fundamentals of getting it right. Google algorithm may change, but with these as the key focus, you will be pretty right, well, mostly.

You are nearly there, haha! This is where the real hard work begins. The good news is, if you follow these steps, you will start to rank these links organically. However, if you want them on the front page, which is the only page to be on, you need to give them a nudge. By nudge, I mean to write a tonne of guest posts to high DA websites where you can get your website backlinked.

This article is essentially what you need to do. Let’s say I was writing this article for my For Sale By Owner website. I would do just what I did right there. You need to link the text and URL back to your site. It is really not that difficult. We are starting to stray from SEO to Real Estate Guest Posting, which we have written about, and you can have the opportunity, as well, if you would like to write for us.

If you got this far through the article, I hope you can see that it is not an easy strategy, but one that will service you well for the amount of time you put in if you are committed. I am passionate about this, as it makes sure that I do not need to worry about leads in business. I just need to worry about the rest, which is a good feeling.

If you got some value from this article, please feel free to share or leave a comment if you have any questions. Last advice, play the long game!