SEO for Realtors: 8 Tips to Enhance Online Discoverability

The real estate market is highly competitive. Because of this, real estate agents need to do everything they can to market their services and properties online.

Reports show that most homes sell after just seven days in the US. Nearly half of all sales are over the listing price.

If you’re in the real estate business, you need all the help you can get.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the key to ensuring you grow your audience, attract new leads, and establish a reputation in the industry.

Why Prioritize SEO for Realtors?

To make the most of SEO and maximize the potential of your online presence, you need to climb up the search engine rankings and get noticed.

In this post, we’ll share eight tips that can give you an edge over your competitors in the online world.

Run Regular SEO Audits

SEO is an ongoing effort that needs consistent updates, tweaking, and perfecting.

However, there’s no point in making changes if you aren’t paying attention to what’s happening on your website.

Any SEO for realtors strategy should start with an audit. This project will help you see what level of optimization your site currently has and how you can improve it.

By getting the basics in place, you can rapidly boost your domain’s rankings.

But again, SEO is not a one time thing. Make it a habit of auditing your website once every quarter. This way, you can keep your website up to date with the latest SEO trends and requirements.

There are plenty of free auditing tools that can help you to do this quickly and efficiently. Or even better, you can hire an SEO agency such as Return On Now to do it for you.

Be Sure Your Website is Mobile Friendly

Since as far back as 2013, Google has prioritized mobile-optimized websites. They use your page load speed as a key metric for search ranking.

Considering that 94% of organic search traffic originates on Google, you simply HAVE to offer a mobile-friendly user experience (UX). 

Also take into account that more than half of all internet browsing these days is done on mobile devices, rather than on a desktop computer.

If you aren’t ensuring that your users have a great experience on your website regardless of what kind of device they use, then you’re definitely missing out on potential customers.

Focus on Publishing Quality Content

Gone are the days of simply stuffing your keywords into your website content and not worrying about how it reads.

Today, Google and the other search engines are smart enough to know the difference between content that’s well written and useful to the reader, and content that’s purely for the keywords. Their recent E-E-A-T guidelines are proof of this.

Today, you need to build a website that is rich in written content and media. Include things such as infographics, photos, and videos to engage your visitors and reduce your bounce rates.

Register Your Domain on Good Directories

Backlinking plays a major role in SEO. Every time another reputable website links to your domain, search engines see that as a positive vote.

A great way to market your real estate agency is to sign up with relevant directories online.

You’ll get important backlinks and show up on those directories when people search there.

Build a Blog

A blog is one of the best ways to add fresh content to your website on a regular basis. This is something that search engines actively look for when ranking sites.

With a blog, you can also expand your use of keywords on your website.

Each new blog post you write is an opportunity to engage buyers and sellers with new and useful information.

It’s also a chance to start ranking for niche keywords that can give you an edge over your competitors.

The most important point to remember about a blog, however, is that the content must serve a purpose for the reader.

You can’t just fill your blog up with keywords and hope that Google will rank your site for them.

Search engines will look at the quality of the content and its overarching purpose.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Google is serious about this important point. They even rolled out a helpful content update in August, 2022 to focus on how useful your materials are for readers.

Include Social Media in Your Strategy

Social media should always be thought of as a two-part strategy. It helps you with marketing, and it helps you with your SEO.

Search engines look favorably at backlinks from platforms like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. While most are tagged as nofollow, they serve an important role in keeping your link profile looking natural.

This is why you should always link your website to your social accounts.

It’s also incredibly important to regularly share links to your content on your social media profiles.

Now you can see why a blog is so useful; you always have new content to share.

Ensure Your Website is Accessible To Everyone

Accessibility has become a very important topic in recent years, and search engines understand this change.

The Americans with Disabilities Act now covers online media, even though the language in the Act pre-dates the age of the internet.

In fact, your real estate business stands a chance of getting sued if it’s not compliant with the Act.

Regardless of whether you use one of the many real estate website builders available online or you had your website coded from scratch, you need to ensure it’s accessible.

This means that the design accommodates screen readers for the visually impaired and that colors are easy to see and fonts are clear to read.

Your audio and video content should have subtitles too, and you need to insert headings and alt tags.

If you include these accessibility elements, search engines will rank your domain above those that lack these important features.

Optimize Your Local Profile

An estate agency is all about location. Local SEO for realtors is where your business can really stand out online.

Your first step is to claim your Google My Business profile. Next, ensure that it’s correctly filled out and kept up-to-date.

This helps users to find your business when they search for real estate agents in your area.

You should also consider including specific pages or blog posts on your website that cover each area where you operate.

This will help you focus all of your keyword and SEO efforts on the location data.

Remember, Google often tracks the location of the people searching and prioritizes content that’s relevant to their immediate location.

Conclusion: Keep the Long Game in Mind with SEO for Realtors

It’s important to remember that SEO is not a quick fix. It’s also not something that you do once and forget about. SEO for realtors is very competitive, and requires focused effort.

You need to keep fine tuning your SEO efforts by refining what’s on your website and identifying new keywords to add to new pages and blog posts.

The more you work at it, the better your online presence will be. The more leads you’ll generate. And ultimately, the more successful your real estate business will be.