The Ultimate Guide to Real Estate SEO in 2023: How to Rank Higher in Google?

SEO or Search engine optimization is the process of optimizing websites to rank higher in the SERPs for relevant keywords. And when you optimize your website for home buyers/sellers, it becomes real estate SEO. So, there’s no rocket science. It’s just focusing on one specific niche at a time. 

Real Estate SEO uses a mix of general SEO and Local SEO practices. The reason is, you want to cater to the searches conducted both locally and in other locations. The whole idea is to create brand awareness and get in front of your target audience as much as you can. One of the most important benefits of real estate SEO is you can also use it to generate leads and convert them into potential clients. And doing that successfully is the trick.

Having said that, it’s important to understand how to go about doing real estate SEO for your website. So let’s dive straight in.

The numbers we shared at the start of the article only emphasize the importance of keeping up with the SEO best practices. If you are looking to rank higher in the SERPs for real estate, there are some working strategies you can use.

On-Page SEO for Real Estate

On-Page SEO deals with optimizing your real estate website’s content and structure to make it more search engine-friendly. This involves conducting thorough keyword research, segmenting them, and optimizing your website’s title tags, meta descriptions, header tags, and URLs with relevant keywords. Keep the URLs short and make sure they’re SEO-friendly. By doing so, you’re telling search engines what your website is about and making it easier for them to crawl and index your website. You would also want to include formatting your pages to improve their speed, creating high-quality content, and working on including useful internal links on the web pages. 

Off-Page SEO for Real Estate

Off-page SEO relies heavily on link building. Contrary to On-page, Off-Page SEO requires more effort. You will need to create additional content not just for your own website but for external platforms like social media, guest posts, etc. On top of that, you also need to establish contact with other creators and maintain it so they could add a link to your website in their content.

Despite the effort, work, and attention involved, off-page SEO is worth every second of it, given you choose the promoters wisely and ensure that their websites have a good SEO score as well. Building contacts with reputable and high-authority website owners is only going to help in the long run.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO involves optimizing the technical elements of your website. This may be related to fixing broken links, securing your website, improving the website structure, and making it mobile-friendly.  

Optimizing the technical elements of your real estate website can be difficult given the complexity of the tasks involved. However, with proper assistance and knowledge, you can ace it in no time. Ensure you have an SSL(Secure Sockets Layer) certificate added to your website, generate an XML sitemap even for the slightest change or update you have made to the website, and get the robots.txt file updated. Doing so will ensure that your website is indexed properly and the search engine knows what the website is about. 

Local Real Estate SEO

Local SEO is one of the most crucial aspects of real estate SEO. It involves creating content that is relevant to your target local audience. You may be selling or leasing properties in a particular area, and by leveraging the right local SEO techniques, you can build brand awareness to capture potential leads successfully. 

Start by building your own Google My Business(GMB) listing. Provide thorough information about your business such as contact, address, website URL, hours of operation, and more. If you want, you can also add photos and videos for the audience to have a sneak peek into your business.

Secondly, you can also utilize leading real estate directories to get your real estate business listed and obtain citations. However, before you do so, ensure that the directories are legitimate and not spammy. This will ensure that your spam score remains negligible.

Finally, ensure that your NAP(Number, Address, Phone Number) information stays consistent across different platforms. Providing up-to-date NAP information is critical as this is what potential leads will use to contact you. Moreover, search engines like Google aim at providing the most accurate information to users. And, if there’s conflicting information posted at different places, it will weaken your credibility and lose your trust score.

Now that you are familiar with the strategies that work in real estate SEO, knowing what to avoid is important too. Here are some SEO tactics you should probably stay away from-

Keyword Stuffing & Cloaking

Including relevant keywords is beneficial. But using them excessively can do the opposite. If you think using keywords in every other sentence is going to help, you are mistaken. Search engines today, are smart and their search algorithm can quite understand the semantic relationship between words. If you are using a keyword over and over again, the search engine will consider it spamming. This will further lower your SEO score and SERP rankings. Therefore, focus on providing useful and concise information that works best for readers and search engines alike.

Secondly, if you are using cloaking techniques to hide the actual content through CSS, or adjusting the text color with that of the background, stop doing that immediately. This is a huge red flag and will impact your search engine rankings severely.

Link Farms & Directories

It’s always a good idea to create a page with a long list of keywords that you wish to target and then link each of them to a page on your website. Obviously, what can be better than having multiple links directing users to your real estate site, this is exactly where you may be committing the greatest blunder. Unlike the old days when it was easier to gain authority by getting listed on link farms, you may now get penalized and removed altogether from the Google index for such malpractices. Unless, you wish to intentionally experience that, stay away from such link directories.

Bait and Switch Content

You might have come across content that redirects you repeatedly to websites and links that aren’t relevant at all. Nothing can be more frustrating than that. From initially being intrigued, to finally being disappointed, such content can never rank in the search results in 2023.

While content that overpromises may get a lot of clicks, the actual engagement will drop drastically. The time on site, pages per session and bounce rate will be disappointing. The only thing you’ll adjudge is visitors clicking on your page, rolling their eyes, and then closing the website after frustration.

Search Engines like Google compare user engagement with content and considers such user behavior to mean that the content is not worth ranking in the SERPs.

Buying Links

Several websites adopt this shady technique in a bid to climb quickly in the SERPs. This used to work in the old days, but now, Google can identify this behavior and can penalize your website severely. Therefore, if you are looking to climb the SERP ladder, refrain from paying for links to your website. Also, never accept payments from other people in lieu of providing links to their website.

Duplicate Content

Duplicate content, not just for real estate SEO, but for any website that’s looking to ace the search engine rankings, is a big NO-NO. While short and other common phrases can be used on other pages in form of keyphrases, it is better to be careful not to include the exact same content on more than one page. Doing so is such a waste of time. 

Google itself states, “When large portions of the website are copied across both of these sites then we assume that actually the whole website is kind of a copy of another and we try to help you by just picking one”.

This means that you only rank for a piece of content once. You cannot just go around duplicating it, re-optimizing it, and hoping you would get ranked twice for the same content. It just doesn’t work that way. There may be instances where duplicate content may help you, but, it’s still best to not take on the tactic.

What does SEO in real estate mean?

SEO in real estate means optimizing your real estate website for relevant keywords. Real estate SEO can help realtors reach their target audience through a mix of useful and effective SEO strategies like keyword research, link building, local SEO, and more.

How can I improve my real estate SEO?

When you are considering SEO for your real estate website in 2023, it is important to use White Hat SEO tactics to grow it organically. By leveraging keyword research, link building, high-quality content, and other SEO techniques, you can generate new leads and convert them into potential clients. Being persistent in your efforts and experimenting with your strategy regularly to see what works is important.

What should be the SEO plan for a real estate company?

Your real estate SEO plan should revolve around the following tips:

• Conducting Keyword Research
• Segmenting the Keywords
• Improving website structure
• Starting and Maintaining a Blog
• Creating Landing Pages
• Link Building
• Securing your Website
• Creating GMB Listing
• Updating NAP information regularly

What are the SEO best practices for real estate?

There are many ways to get the best results out of your SEO efforts. Here are some of the SEO best practices you can use:

• Leverage all aspects of real estate SEO
• Using social media marketing and email marketing
• Partner with influencers to create interactive content
• Work with the real estate SEO experts

A major chunk of home buyers in 2023, prefer online shopping more than in-person meets and site visits. Therefore, if your real estate SEO strategy isn’t solid enough, you are missing out on significant traffic and potential leads. The SEO strategies discussed in this article can help you ace the SERPs and grow your bottom line greatly. 

While you are focusing on these strategies, remember to build useful, and high-value content that matches the user’s search intent and entices them into signing up to your website and completing a transaction successfully.

If these SEO strategies sound a bit too complicated to you, consider working with a leader in the SEO realm, like the team at Webguruz. We can help you build a solid real estate SEO strategy that not just promises results, but delivers on them right away.