First-Page Ranking SEO for Real Estate in 3 Steps in 2022

Search engine optimization (SEO) or content marketing for realtors brings your agency free organic traffic creating an evergreen source of new leads.. It is the most efficient long-term marketing strategy for real estate websites and agencies across the globe. With Geonet, we’ve designed a 3 step formula to do SEO for real estate that brings authority, traffic, and leads.

What is SEO for real estate agents?

SEO or Search engine optimization is a method of organizing a website and optimizing content in order to get seen and highly ranked by Google. It is because of straightforward SEO strategies and Google algorithms that readers are able to find us among the search results on the first page that are related to the key term they typed in. As real estate agents, our ultimate goal in SEO is to reach out to more prospects and to convert them into our clients.

A real estate agency website needs to have a clean structure and be optimized for SEO. All the website’s content must be quick to access and readable across a variety of browsers, platforms, and devices. The site also should contain 10-20 useful and well-written content with relevant keywords throughout the text. We should gain authority by getting valuable backlinks from reputable websites and magazines.

The easiest way for a real estate agency to implement SEO strategies into the website is to start a blog. This blog will contain several blog posts written by an SEO-trained copywriter and each blog post will have 2 goals: provide a comprehensive, fact-checked answer to a search query a reader typed in Google, and lead this reader to take action and contact us or browse our listings.

A 3-Step Winning SEO Strategy for Real Estate

SEO is a powerful yet complex tool entailing a lot of skills and practice. However, there are 3 simple steps that you can take and start winning some first-page rankings for your website right now. An effective SEO strategy for real estate will take up to 6-8 months to fully show its potential, yet with Geonet we see results in a few weeks. What do we do? Let’s find out.

3-Step SEO Strategy for real estate includes a healthy website, good SEO writing, and backlinks to build authority.

Healthy website – How to do SEO for a real estate website?

There are multiple technical elements of a healthy SEO for a real estate website, but let’s focus on something we can really change right now. Google likes healthy websites and it will promote them higher, but what is it, a healthy website?

A healthy website has:

• Transparent categories and structure,
• Detailed “About us” page with all your awards and success records,
• No chunky images but only .jpg pictures of less than 1MB,
• Fast speed! It is crucial to have a website that loads in 2 seconds according to Google’s best practices. Check Google PageSpeed Insights if you’re not sure how fast your website is.
• Meta titles and descriptions. Each page of your website should have a clear and simple title, and a short description that will help Google index it and understand what this page is about. Google is smart but it uses helpers – bots – that crawl every page on the Internet, and they will read your titles and meta descriptions.
• A healthy website is easy to navigate for users, has good fonts, no annoying pop-ups, and is mobile friendly. Google strongly disapproves of websites that are not mobile-optimized.

Whether you are building your website on a builder like Wix (which is not recommended for SEO) or hiring professionals to set up a website, it will be easy for you to keep your website healthy.

SEO Writing

Having a blog is key to your success in SEO in the long run. SEO writing helps real estate websites rank high for relevant queries people may have without bombarding them with ads or direct sales.

Having a blog for your real estate website works like this. Imagine a person, Jasmine, is planning to sell a house, but not ready yet to meet an agent and doesn’t really like annoying ads following her everywhere she goes online. However, it is her first experience with selling a property and she is asking Google for some advice, she types: “selling house tips”.

Smart Google shows her the best results on the first page. Google knows that a specific page talks about “Selling tips” as it is in the title, at least, and many people have already read and shared this article. Jasmine clicks on it and is happy to find 15 very helpful tips. Yet, she realized that this article was actually created based on Brian’s experience – a reliable real estate agent from her neighbourhood and there is his contact.

Do you think Jasmine will more likely call Brian or an unknown agent from the ads? However, Brian didn’t spend a cent on having Jasmine as a lead – this is a power of an SEO blog in 2022.

To write a good, SEO optimized, article for real estate you need:

1. Using a simple SEO real estate tool, like Keysearch, find good key phrases people are looking for answers to.
2. Write a really useful article of 1500-3000 words targeting each of the phrases you found. A good article has a transparent structure with subheadings and paragraphs.
3. Add the keyword from step 1 to your title and subheading, meta description and URL, sprinkle it over the text, especially in the first 100 words.
4. Add at least one image to your post with your target keyword in its Alt description.

SEO experts implement more strategies to enhance the quality of their SEO writing, yet, this basic setup will help you achieve great results and first-page ranking within weeks after publishing your content!

It is worth mentioning that SEO is a long-term strategy and its full power will come in the next 6 to 8 months or a year. SEO requires consistency and diligence.

Best real estate SEO keywords for 2022

Doing your research in 2022, try to look for several categories of real estate SEO keywords:

• Local keywords, ex. real estate agent + your area, buy a house in + your area.
• Buyers keywords, like buying tips, how to buy a house in…, etc.
• Selling keywords, for ex., selling tips, how to prepare your house for sale, etc.
• Rental keywords, such as: what is property management, tenant eviction, and so on.

Backlinks or Off-page SEO for real estate

A Backlink is when another website links to your blog posts or homepage and alerts Google that your website is trustworthy. The bigger the website backlinking to you is, the better it is for your SEO. Over time, Google will recognize your domain too and will treat you like a reliable source of information, sending more and more traffic and ranking you on the first page!

Avoid spammy websites as a link from them will downgrade your website.

A healthy and extremely efficient way to get a valuable backlink is to use HARO – Help a reporter service that shares all requests reporters from magazines of all scales (even Forbes) have. There are tons of requests regarding real estate! All you need to do is to pitch your short answer to the reporter and wait for a backlink to appear!

SEO Real Estate Experts

Geonet is a one-stop solution for marketing for real estate agencies. We have dozens of clients in our portfolio with success stories of implementing SEO strategies which makes us one of the Best SEO companies for real estate in the Asia Pacific region.

Our case studies show how we achieved great results, first-page rankings, and traffic growth for real estate websites within a few weeks. Following our 3 steps, we are able to rank on the first page for new local keywords for a real estate website within a month and increase rankings by 3 to 7 positions for some pages and keywords within a few days from publishing an SEO optimized content.

5 Must-Have SEO real estate tools

To cover your basic needs you don’t have to buy a lot of expensive SEO real estate tools. But at Geonet we use some of them, that we highly recommend getting for any real estate agency with a website and ambitions:

• Ahrefs – an all-in-one SEO tool for advanced users. Allows you to analyze competitors’ websites, do backlink research, check your rankings, and more.
• Keysearch – the cheapest yet most effective keyword research tool.
• Google Analytics and Search Console – free Google tools that will show you insights about who visits your website, what pages and how did all these people find you. You will be able to monitor traffic volume and its changes once you implement SEO strategies.
• Answer the public – a freemium tool to find out more juicy keywords you can write about.