It is given that real estate is an extremely competitive industry, with real estate agencies and realtors fighting for attention from the same set of audiences. Online visibility and credibility play a huge role in your audience finding you and being interested in your services.
Now think about the fight between huge corporate giants and individual realtors battling for their share of space and online visibility and how challenging this can be. This is where real estate local SEO brings ample opportunities for realtors. And hey, we’re here to give you all the necessary Local SEO tips to win at it.
First and foremost, let’s understand what exactly Local SEO is. So what goes into Local SEO is optimizing the content based on the queries of the local audience. Now how you find these keywords and use them in your content to target the local audience depends upon localization.
Google uses localization to show the user the most relevant results. Realtors have a high chance that their potential clients are from your area or looking up in your area. Here, local SEO makes it easy for your business to get seen in your local market on the search engine result page.
Investing in Local SEO by employing a real estate digital marketing agency with the proficiency and experience will give you the returns on your investment by bringing you high-quality local leads for your business.
This article will guide you regarding the essential areas and execution strategies for Local SEO so that you hit the bull’s eye with your Local SEO efforts, overshadowing your competitors and ruling over your local area.
First, let’s get a brief idea of local SEO and its ability to generate business for real estate agents compared to any other marketing strategy. Local SEO is optimizing the website and its contents to appear higher in the search engine results for local searches.
The practice involves optimizing the website content on real estate local SEO keywords, creating location-based pages, and using other local optimization strategies to make the search engine understand the service location of your real estate business so that it displays your services in search queries.
Real estate Local SEO is beneficial in ways where real estate agents improve their opportunity of ranking high on relevant local queries so that more and more people in your area can find you when they’re looking for real estate services in a particular area. So, it ticks the box to secure the target audience and online visibility. Trust me you can do it yourself but hiring an agency that has expertise in real estate digital marketing will bring results quicker.
Important data states that 46% of users on Google are searching for local information. It is also important to highlight that Local SEO gives you a competitive advantage over your competitors if you’re able as you attract more traffic and clients when you appear high on local queries.
Now that we’ve talked about the importance of Local SEO for real estate, let’s get down into the nitty-gritty of local SEO, from the tips to the tools and more.
Now that you must be well-versed in Local SEO in the real estate business, let’s look at the valuable Local SEO tips to get you started with your Local SEO journey by boosting your online visibility for prospects looking within your vicinity.
Google Business profile is the bread and butter for Local SEO. We know that Google has its own algorithm for ranking a website on the search result, so it’s beneficial to use Google My Business to make Google notice your business. Now for that, you need to optimize your business profile and claim the listings in the most authentic way possible.
Now, you must be wondering how to optimize your Google My Business, and we’re here to guide you through that as well.
Regular posting on your Google My Business helps to improve the knowledge graph panel on Google Search and Google Maps. So when the user searches for related keywords, the chances of your business appearing in the search result are amplified.
Also, when you interact with and reply to the queries and reviews of your audience on GMB, it encourages them to take action, which could be calling your business or visiting your website.
A convenient and effective way to enhance your ranking on the search engine for local searches is to use leverage the local directories and create the online profile of your real estate business. You can scout for relevant online directories for real estate business and fill out the profile and citations. The directories you must not miss at aunty cost as a real estate agent are:
Community pages are one of the best ways to enhance the reputation of your real estate business within a geographical area. The community page can focus on creating local content that provides local information, such as the real estate market of that particular community, open-house events, and new listings.
These pages on your website help the local audience get valuable information about their community, improving your local relevancy. This positively impacts improving your search engine ranking.
Keyword research is the base of content strategy. Before you begin curating the content of your website, you need to identify the important keywords relevant to real estate and cater to the needs of your audience.
First, you need to identify the local keywords that will help you rank on the search engine and develop a content strategy around those keywords. Finding out hyperlocal keywords also help in narrowing your target audience. You can also take the help of various tools that make keyword research easy.
The most preferred local SEO strategy is to create local content for your website that highlights your location. Include the location of your business on the header, footer, Contact page, and anywhere else where it feels natural.
Similarly, creating blog and website content geared toward your local audience by focusing on the local keywords always helps rank in those terms, but please avoid keyword stuffing as the search engine considers this practice as spam, and your content is demoted even though it is of quality.
Smartphones and the internet have made accessibility very easy for us, and hence, 52% of global internet traffic is witnessed from mobile devices. A responsive website is also a ranking factor for the search engine.
Thus, optimizing your website for mobile devices is crucial if you want to deliver a seamless viewing experience for your audience and gain a plus point from the search engine for ranking.
When optimizing its responsiveness, you must ensure your website has excellent page speed, navigation, and usability.
Make a habit of adding internal links to your website to get visibility in the eyes of the search engine. Internal linking supports building the information architecture and website hierarchy, which distributes the page authority and improves the pages’ ranking power on your site. Thus, internal linking is important for improving ranking on the search engine.
We are strong advisors of social media presence, and the power social media hold to make your business reach billions of people at once. Real estate businesses can leverage social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok and create regular posts, set location where you’re targetting your local audience, and make your content seen by them.
Now that you’ve read through the important strategies that boost your local ranking let’s talk about the tools that will help you enhance your local SEO ranking.
Before you optimize your website locally, you first need to know if your website is well structured or if are there any technical or on-page issues.
Because the technical and on-page issues are also one of many Google ranking factors auditing websites and making a strategy relying on the data should be the first priority. And, for that screaming frog is one of the best free SEO tools.
Screaming Frog is a desktop tool with a free plan where you get the basic features to analyze 500 URLs, but if you want to take full advantage of this tool, you get the $ 209-a-year plan. You need to add the URL of your website, and the tool crawls all your web pages, links, images, CSS, script, and app.
Now you can find out issues like canonical tag issues, duplicate meta descriptions, page speed issues, crawl depth issues, and more from a single tool.
Google Search Console comprises the report of your website, which shows everything from your search performance to your website performance.
You get the report on the keywords people use to find your site, your website’s optimization issues, how Google analyzes your website, your organic search performance, and more. Search Console is definitely worth your time if you want your real estate website to be well-optimized from every aspect.
Google Analytics is the best tool to track website traffic, user behavior, and your website’s conversion rate. It shows you the pages of your website which are most popular and how your website visitors are finding your website.
Local Vikings help manage the Google Business Profile, where you can easily manage your reviews, trace your local pack rankings, schedule posts for your GMB, track your performance from its dashboard, and upload pictures.
It makes your work easier when building your online presence through Google My Business, and the biggest advantage is that it starts at just $20 a month.
Moz Local is a tool that validates whether your business listing is verified on Google and Facebook and shares your listing across various search architectures. Another advantage of this tool is that its data aggregator supports pushing your listing so your business gets visibility.
Ahrefs is a feature-rich SEO tool that helps you with your local SEO strategies. You can get the detailed backlink profile of your real estate website and your local competitors. Ahrefs is considered to be one of the best tools for keyword research, site audit, competitor analyses, and content gap.
Finding popular keywords and content gaps will be crucial findings for a real estate business to target local audiences. It’s a bit expensive SEO tool but investing in it is worth every penny.
Like Ahrefs, Semrush is also packed with useful features for Local SEO. From the basics, such as identifying the accurate local keywords for your content strategy and competitor analysis to identify the areas you can improve your local SEO strategy.
With this tool, adding information about your real estate business to the notable directories and editing them is easy. When the listing is verified and live, you can manage and track them to ensure your business information is correct and consistent across all the online directories. Apart from these excellent features, it also includes a local ranking heatmap for you to evaluate the performance of your local SEO strategy.
The Position Tracking tool enables you to track the search engine ranking and local packs of your website on location-specific keywords, which makes it easy for you to evaluate the visibility of your website in local search results compared to your competitors. This helps you stay ahead of your local competitors and get more customers.
Now that you’ve gone through the local SEO tips and their importance for generating genuine traffic for your real estate agency, take advantage of this knowledge and hire the best agency to handle your Local SEO.
At Splendour, we are the marketing leaders in real estate digital marketing with numerous successful real estate businesses under our wing. Not just Local SEO, we can create a personalized strategy to generate consistent leads and attract local customers for your real estate business. Partner with us if you’re looking for an industry expert with proven experience. Contact us and get a free quote today!