15 SEO Tips For Real Estate Agencies & Realtors

Property rates are shooting sky high and what accompanies them is the competition in the real estate industry.

Realtors are going above and beyond the call of duty to procure highly qualified leads. But, the targets look all the more intimidating at the end of each quarter. 

That said, the only strategy that promises a regular flow of qualified estate leads is SEO.

90% of consumers automatically switch to Google to purchase new estate properties.

Moreover, 44% of homebuyers started their property search online. 

So, if you ace real estate SEO, you have all the odds in winning qualified real estate leads. 

But, what tricks the equation a bit is the daunting online competition among realtors. 

And therefore, here we created a rundown of 15 SEO tips for real estate agencies & realtors that you must follow: 

1. Win BIG with Good Local SEO Presence as a Realtor

For any realtor or real estate agency, a significant amount of leads come from a local audience. That said, you need to optimize for the local search and local business popularity. 

Start with creating and optimizing the GMB listing for your real estate business. Update it with the latest information about: 

• Your business location on Google Map (preferably local office)
• Website (updated with NAP consistency)
• Opening hours 
• Telephone number and other contact details
• Gallery (Photos of your business, property listings, clients, etc.)
• Real Estate Categories (Residential, Commercial, Buy/Sell, etc.)

Ensure that you use the same NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number) across GMB, other listings, and your site. NAP consistency plays a crucial role in defining your business’s authenticity. 

Up-to-date GMB presence and abounding positive Google reviews grow your local SEO value. And these parameters help you rank for the Local 3-pack Results on Google. 

If you are an individual agent, you can also opt for a practitioner listing on GMB. It must be separate from your business listing to get good visibility. 

2. Draw Crucial Citations for your Real Estate Business

As you build your local presence, you must get citations from popular real estate business directories. 

These citations act as your rank signals for better performance in the SERPs.

Moreover, real estate directories and listing aggregators witness huge traffic regularly.

Therefore, your listings will also source qualified leads through these sites. 

Some of the popular real estate directories include: 

• Realtor.com
• Trulia
• Zillow
• Homes.com
• Movoto
• Homes and Land
• LandWatch
• LANDFLIP

Also, list your real estate agency or practice on aggregators like:

• Infogroup
• Factual
• Localeze
• Yellowpages
• Foursquare

Also, ensure that your listings follow a NAP consistency and provide authentic data. To gain popularity on these platforms, encourage positive reviews from your clients. 

3. Establish a Prominent Social Proof for your Real Estate Business

National Association of Realtors reports that 41% of home buyers connect with realtors based on recommendations.

Moreover, social proof has a say in your SEO performance. So, if you don’t wish to pound the pavement for leads, consider establishing good social proof.

You must start with earning positive reviews from previous clients. 

For instance, 

If you have helped a client procure a property deal despite all odds, he can give you a positive review. 

You can connect with him by email to congratulate him on the deal. And you can request him to share his experience of working with you. 

Showcase this positive experience on your site. And also connect with other clients to gain similar reviews.

Adorn your site with important social proof like:

• Text testimonials with clients’ photos, video testimonials, and even case studies. 
• Significant trust signals like – No. of Properties Sold, No. of Happy Clients, Years into Business, etc. 
• “Featured In” section to show your business mentions in popular PR sites and Real Estate News.

Encourage your clients to submit their reviews on your GMB listings as well. This will have a significant effect on your SERP rankings and visibility for local searches. Google also gauges your local social proof while crafting the local 3-pack results. 

Moreover, 5-star ratings on your directory listings also help you gain better visibility. Google considers these ratings & reviews as ranking signals for your real estate business. 

4. Dive Deeper Into Your Real Estate Keyword Research 

As aforementioned, 90% of buyers start their property search experience with Google. So if they start with typing a relevant search term on Google, are you ranking for it? 

For instance, 

If a user searches “condo in Los Angeles,” is your site visible among the first five results? Because the top 5 results on SERPs share over 60% of the organic search traffic. 

So, while you improve your real estate SEO, you need to rank for real estate keywords.

And you can scrutinize and choose relevant keywords by using Google Keyword Planner.  

So, for example, 

You need search terms relevant to “apartment for sale in California,” you can generate the list through Keyword Planner. 

However, you must consider creating various relevant keyword categories. Some crucial keyword research categories for your real estate business may look like: 

• (location/area/city) realtors
• Best real estate agency in (area/city)
• Buy a home in (area/city)
• Condo for sale in (area/city)
• Apartment for sale in (area/city)
• (area/city) Real estate listings 
• How to buy a house in (area/city)
• Condo prices in (area/city)

Generate keyword lists based on these categories and optimize for the same. Add these keywords to your content to rank for relevant search terms.

5. Address Crucial Long-tail Real Estate Keywords

While you wish to attract leads from organic traffic, different users might have different intents. And therefore, they are likely to use different types of search terms. 

That said, you must use long-tail keywords to grow the relevancy of your content. The long-tail and LSI keywords will help you define the intent of your content piece. It can be informational, navigational, or transactional-based on the keyword combinations. 

For instance, 

Targeting a primary keyword – “California realtor” can have different intents based on different keyword combinations. 

Here is a demonstration:

Each of the above keyword combinations can have different search intent. That said, by using the long-tail keywords, you can rank for the relevant search terms. 

6. Fine-tune Your Real Estate Site for Lead Generation 

While prudent SEO efforts source you qualified traffic, you need to optimize the site for lead generation. 

Video content works amazing for real estate businesses. As per MarketingSherpa, video content can earn you 200% more site traffic for your real estate site. 

Also, video-accompanied real estate listings earn 403% higher inquiries.

That said, if you are not adding video content on your real estate site, you are willing to miss out on leads.

Use property listing videos, client testimonials, video interviews, informational videos, etc.

Other crucial considerations include: 

• Adding chatbot, direct call support, popups, and crisp contact forms
• Including social proof, trust badges, testimonials, etc. 
• Creating a proper navigational panel to browse through various property offerings 

7. Bring Competitor Analysis into the Picture

The online real estate market is highly competitive. But while the competition is daunting, you can leverage good value from it. Sounds astonishing, right? 

For instance, 

Your competitor is drawing huge traffic on his guide – “Best Way to Find Condo for Sale in Chicago.” Now, you can check the traffic source and the main referring domains for the guide. 

You can create a similar (and even better) guide to targeting the same keywords. And maybe you can steal good backlinks on your guide.

“This skyscraper technique can bring you qualified traffic and leads”, says Ross VP of Marketing from Red Houston SEO

Similarly, there are competitor analysis and marketing techniques that you must follow. Use tools like SEMrush, Ubersuggest, or SE Rankings, etc., to do profitable competitor analysis. 

• You can check top competitor keywords and employ them
• You can check the backlink opportunities via competitor analysis
• You can even check the content and pages that are drawing the highest leads for your competitor. 

8. Do Not Forget to Add Schema Markup

Schema markup code becomes all the more crucial for a real estate website. It allows search engines to comprehend the content of your webpage intuitively.

Your listings page has details like price, location, and dimensions of a property. So, schema markup allows bots to understand these details easily on your page. 

Google is likely to use these details as rich snippets for your SERP listing or as instant answers. This grows your SERP visibility and click-through rate (CTR). 

In fact, pages with schema markups can expect about 20-25% higher CTR,

As a realtor, you must mark up your name, address, phone number, opening hours, etc. 

And you must add a product schema mark up for your listings. It can include the listing’s name, price, location, etc. 

If you haven’t added schema markup yet, take help from your developer to do it today!

9. Optimize Your Real Estate Site’s Speed 

Real estate, akin to e-commerce sites, use abounding images, video, and other media elements. 

And, this practice is likely to take a toll on the site’s speed and thus its SEO performance. 

Google has been urging webmasters to keep their site’s loading time up to 1 second. And it uses site load speed as a ranking factor.

Therefore, if your real estate site isn’t optimized, you cannot rank on the 1st page of Google. 

So, the first step must be to optimize the media files on your site. You can use a good image optimization plugin for the same. 

Also, check issues with your site’s speed using Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool. And fix the issues that the tool points to with the assistance of a developer. 

Other crucial speed optimization tips include: 

• Enable Gzip compression
• Allow asynchronous loading of JavaScript
• Minify JS, HTML, and CSS 

10. Improve Site’s User Experience and User Metrics to Gain New Leads

Google appreciates the efforts you make in optimizing your site’s experience. Moreover, an impressive UX makes up for positive user metrics and better SEO performance. 

Use Google Analytics and Search Console to analyze the user metrics and top-performing pages. Also, analyze the pages with high bounce rates and exit pages.

See which property listing pages are drawing inquiries and the forms that are performing the best. Add their characteristics to other pages to reduce bounce rate and earn more leads.

11. Optimize On-page Elements and Integrate Your Site with MLS 

Your real estate site is the entry-gate of your lead funnel. And therefore, you must ensure all on-page elements are optimized. 

• Use crisp and intriguing headlines that include the primary keyword 
• Build comprehensible sub-headers and include important page keywords in them
• Create an intriguing Meta Title to grow CTR
• Add keywords to your Meta Description
• Create and submit an XML sitemap to Bing and Google webmaster tools. 

Also, make your site compatible with Internet Data Exchange (IDX) to display listing via MLS. 

Adding multiple listings (MLS) on your site enables you to grow site engagement and conversion potential. 

12. Promote Your Real Estate Business Using PR and Influencer Marketing 

Real estate SEO isn’t limited to search rankings, but it is also about boosting business popularity.

A proper PR strategy can help you create brand awareness and attract qualified leads. 

You can take a sneak peek at your competitor’s PR strategy through SEMrush, Ahrefs, etc.

And you can track their media brand mentions through the Mention.com tool. 

Approach local PR channels to showcase your business-specific news. These can include new property schemes, commercial property launches, Real Estate events, etc. 

Moreover, promote your business and listings through relevant social media influencers.

13. Build Engagement through Real Estate Blogs and FAQs 

You need the right content strategy to drive traffic to your real estate site. That said, your blogs, case studies, and FAQ sections can uphold this responsibility. 

Many of your potential leads are at the top of the funnel, and blogs can help you capture them. 

For instance,

If you are a realtor in Dallas, you can create various blog topics to engage homebuyers in that area. For example: 

• Best Places to Live in Dallas and Why? 
• 10 Best Localities in Dallas to Plan Your Future Stay
• Top Activities to Plan while Staying in Dallas
• Why (YourPropertyOffering) is a not-so-ordinary commercial property scheme?

Moreover, also cover the case studies and client experiences related content on your site. 

Next, address the common user queries by creating FAQs. Search the common queries on Google, Quora, and user-generated content. 

14. Attract High-authority Inbound Links on Your Real Estate Site

Once you sort your on-page SEO elements, it’s time to address the off-page SEO. 

Start with attracting high-authority links to your real estate site. Here are some tips:

• Use skyscrapers technique to produce a better version of popular real estate content. And then attract backlinks on this new content. 
• Post guest blogs on high DA sites that publish real estate-related content. And attract backlinks through these posts. 
• Find backlink opportunities through competitor analysis. 
• Build exclusive long-form blogs that rank for crucial long-tail keywords and attract backlinks. 

14. Offer an Impressive Experience to Mobile Users 

Let’s assume your ideal client wants to buy a home. He switches on to his smartphone to search the web, but your site doesn’t appear in the search. 

There is a high probability that your real estate site lacks mobile compatibility. 

If that is the case, you are probably losing over 50% of your potential leads. 

Mobile-based search accounts for 52% of the total website traffic. And this is the reason

Google brought mobile-first indexing into consideration. 

Use Google’s Mobile-friendly Test Tool to check how your site performs on mobile devices. If you find any shortcomings, summon your developer to help you with fixing mobile compatibility. 

Summing Up

Real estate lead generation isn’t anything less than a tedious hamster wheel. You have your targets staring at you with a smirk at the end of every month. 

But, until you follow the above SEO tips, you can expect a regular lead flow.

How about a quick recap?

• Update your GMB profile and grow citations from business directories
• Highlight client testimonials and gain positive reviews on Google and listings.
• Target real estate keywords with informational, transactional, and navigational intent.
• Localize your content for local real estate leads.
• Multiply engagement and leads through video content.
• Draw SEO insights from other realtors and real estate businesses.
• Optimize on-page elements and gain quality inbound links.
• Address common queries of homebuyers in blogs and FAQs.
• Grow awareness and reach through PR an influencer marketing