5 Tips for Real Estate SEO
Real estate SEO tips you need to know to improve traffic for your brand, listings, and deals. If you’re a landlord, owner, investor, developer, or broker these are five easy tips you can implement yourself.
1. Quality Content
Will your target audience find your content valuable? This is the question you need to be asking yourself before you post anything. The number one way to improve your real estate SEO is to make sure that the content you are posting is of strong value; meaning it’s helpful, easy to digest, and prompts action. Rand Fishkin, founder of MOZ, says it best “Better content is outweighing more content”.
Quality content is something that you build over time and just as with any building project, you would not start construction without first developing a set of plans. I have consistently found that the quality of my content substantially increases if I create a plan of action and work through multiple drafts before posting.
One good starting point in the creation of quality content, is to identify knowledge gaps within your target audience. Do this by compiling the most frequently asked questions and concerns of your clients/customers. This gap in understanding is where you have an opportunity to insert value. Center your content around being a source of information that answers your clients/customers questions and concerns.
Providing valuable answers that promote positive outcomes helps solidify your position as an industry expert. One example in which we have done this is through our real estate resources page, which can be viewed Here.
“Better content is outweighing more content”
2. Link Building
Link building is an essential factor in improving your real estate SEO. There are two main link types to consider while improving your real estate SEO.
The first of the two are external links, which are hyperlinks that point to websites outside of your own domain. Simply said, if you post a link to a separate website, you are providing an external link. External links are valuable in reinforcing your point and providing validity to your content. An example of an external link, is the hyperlink included under the first point “Quality Content” pointing to Moz, which is the leading authority in search engine optimization. Given this article is about real estate SEO it is of value to reference the foremost expert in SEO.
How do you apply the concept of external link building to commercial real estate? One way is by providing external links to your unique industry specific profiles such as your LoopNet, LinkedIn, or Medium profiles. Another would be to provide a direct link to your property listing pages on any number of MLS sources that you are utilizing. A third idea would be to link a few pre-vetted affiliate businesses such as lawyers, accountants, and architects. You could even take it a step further and get reciprocal linking by having these affiliates link you on their websites.
The second of the two links are internal links, which are hyperlinks that point at the same domain that the link is on. In other words, an internal link is one that points to another page within the same website. Internal links are great for promoting site exploration and customer engagement. Try to create flow with internal links where one page naturally leads into another. Below is an image with an internal link which points to our property owner/landlord portal.
3. Page Title
Search engines will often prioritize site titles and page titles when serving results. You can view your different page titles in both your browser tabs as well as your results when you complete a search. The high visibility of page titles means that they should be easy to understand for both humans and search bots.
One clever way to maximize your pages title is to include a brief elaboration of what your page is about. For example instead of our home page title just reading “Home”, we took it a step further by titling it “Champagne: Los Angeles Commercial Real Estate”. This page title is not only more useful to readers but it also adds SEO content that is usually non existent. Informative page titles provide more information to search engines, which helps bots understand the purpose of your page. Take a moment to view some of the unique page titles we used for our site by viewing the tab titles in your browser window.
When considering page titles for real estate SEO, it is important to remember that real estate is largely a location based business. This means the market and locations in which you operate are keywords that should be included throughout your website. Page titles are a prime location to include these location keywords. Below you can see how we have done exactly that.
4. H1 Tags
H1 tag utilization and optimization is remarkably underused in real estate SEO. Simply described, H1 tags are generally the biggest and most impactful text on your website. H1 tags not only give readers an overview of your content but also inform search engines of the predominant subject of your page.
More often than not, H1 tags could be further developed and lengthened. H1 Tags are valuable characters that should be deliberately chosen and maximized. Neil Patel who is considered to be an SEO guru recommends keeping your H1 tag length between 20-70 characters.
An effective H1 tag should answer the question “what I am about to read?”. Consider using a long tailed keyword which is a phrase consisting of 3-5 words. The title of this post, “5 Tips for Commercial Real Estate SEO”, is a perfect example of a long tailed H1 tag. Although long tailed keywords technically deliver less traffic than short tailed keywords, long tailed keywords have greater specificity which means your competition will be less.
5. Update Frequency
If you don’t have a blog on your site, make one now. One factor search bots consider when ranking and serving results is how active your site is. Increasing blogging frequency helps search engines determine that your site is active. A blog not only benefits your SEO, but also helps build your reputation and brand.
When you create blog posts, utilize both tags and categories if possible. Additionally, structure your posts so that your blog post titles are H1 Tags. As you write blog posts, always put yourself in your target audience’s shoes and ask yourself what they might be hoping to find when visiting your site. For inspiration, check out some of our recent blog posts below.
Thanks for reading and hope you found this helpful. If have real estate questions or want to talk how we can maximize your property exposure using SEO and other innovative techniques give me a call at 805.900.3000
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