SEO for Realtors & Brokers

Want more search engine traffic to your website? This guide will give you a step-by-step directions that yield growth. Real Estate SEO for Realtors

There is quite a bit of misinformation out there when it comes to SEO shortcuts and ‘cheats’. Because of this, SEO is largely misunderstood by Realtors.

I’m going to be showing you how I increased the effectiveness of real estate website’s organic traffic by over 1,200% within 1 month.  This Real Estate SEO for Realtors Beginners tactic can get traffic and leads for you.

Why would you want to spend time and money developing great SEO? Or read this Real Estate SEO for Realtors article?

SEO traffic typically ends up giving you the best converting visitors to your website.  The customers typically stay longer, read more, and buy more often from you.  SEO visitors average conversion rate is around 14.6% where as other outbound methods (Facebook Ads and Google Adwords) convert around 1.6% (via SEJ).

SEO traffic can really increase the effectiveness of your real estate marketing and ultimately fill your pipeline with more leads.  Best of all, these leads cost way less than traditional pay-per-click campaigns.

The goal of this article is to teach you the basics of a content driven SEO campaign that has produced results for me over the past 5 years.

Let’s dive into Real Estate SEO for Beginners!

Overview:

1. Demographic Research
2. Content That Succeeds
3. Getting the Content Found Through Social and SEO
4. Social Media and Guest Blogging Checklist for SEO

1. Demographic Research Tools To Get The Best Audience To Your Website

Step one of Real Estate SEO for Beginners is finding the Optimal Person You Would Like To Sell To:

The biggest mistake made when doing Real Estate SEO for Beginners is choosing the wrong target audience.  The internet is a huge place and there are tons of unqualified leads that we do not want to waste our time on.

For example, how busy are you? Do you have time to talk with buyers and sellers that you know will ultimately not do business with you?  Probably not.  With internet marketing, we can control who finds us.

To start this process, write down the actual names of the most successful clients you’ve ever had.

Then, look for similar things between all of them.  Use this list:

1. What are the biggest problems they face?
2. What information are they sharing on social media?
3. What are differentiating demographic factors of your ideal clients?
4. What type of questions are they asking on Yahoo Answers and Quora?

The answer to these questions will help you determine how to attract people like this to your website.

Take 5 minutes right now and fill out this Google Drive Spreadsheet in order to help you determine what type of clients you should target:

Click Below To See The Spreadsheet:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1vkIP5dHwa5x5XTzmrMLqZnxw5wshTTwnx0NLd-xeHoI/edit?usp=sharing

Commercial Keywords Vs. Informational Keywords

Ok, we have an idea of who we want to target.  Now you have to decide how to target them.

There are two very broad ways to make content for SEO.  And people doing SEO for Realtors usually don’t understand this.

The first is Commercial Keywords:

Commercial Keywords are phrases that indicate the individual is about to make a purchasing action. Thus the content is more commercial based.  These keywords typically look like: “Homes near [Neighborhood]” – or – “Best Realtor in [CITY].”

The person typing these words already knows that they want a property in that city and are probably looking to buy on a shorter timeline.  These leads are going to convert more quickly.

The problem with these types of searches is that they are super competitive.  Here is one for Dallas:

You typically have to compete with HUGE Domain Authority and Page Authority scores.  

Domain and Page authority are arbitrary numbers that Google uses to determine how trustworthy a website is.  Typically, it’s tough for a real estate firm to get a DA/PA above 45.  So, you can’t compete with big competitors like you see in the above image! Those national competitors have huge authority rankings.

The good news is we can target lesser commercial keywords like neighborhoods and smaller cities.  Additionally we can target the second type of keyword:

SEO For Realtors: Informational Keywords

These keywords are largely based on informing your target audience about a typical question they might have.

For example: “Best tactics for selling your house quickly in Austin”

These articles or pages typical are focused on giving away as much as possible.  Remember that phrase: “You get what you give.”?  That is what internet marketing is all about.  Give as much free content and information as possible on your website.

Sure, this type of buyer is one more step away from listing with you, but the visitors to this page will convert a lot better if you cultivate them.

Encourage them to join your email list after they read your article and then enter them into a drip sequence.  

Great content mixed with more free information in the drip sequence will turn into more sales.

These keywords will drive your real estate business.  And the content is really easy to make because people are already telling you want they want to read about. Real Estate SEO for Beginners is best accomplished by simply writing a lot.

Let’s start by making a list of 100 keywords that we would maybe want to target:

1. Go to twitter.com and search for real estate tips. Copy the article title and URL of the best 30 articles.  You will want to make these articles and use their keywords.
2. Go to google.com and search for real estate tips. Do the same thing! Copy the top 30 articles from here
3. Go to your local newspapers website and copy the best articles they’ve ever had about your city.  You’ll soon have a list of 40 articles that people in your town want to read about.

Now that we generally have an idea of what is popular around you and in the real estate tips marketing, you are ready to start thinking about keywords. Good keyword targets can really make you more successful when doing real estate SEO.

Keyword Planner

Google: “Google Keyword Planner” and login with your Google Account.

Then enter the titles of your favorite 10 articles out of the 100 that you collected.

Next, you’ll want to sort these keywords by number of searches a month.  Target searches where the competition is medium to low. This will mean that the keyword has fewer searches per month.  However, it will be easier for you to rank.

Plus, 70% of keywords typed into Google are longtail keywords. Longtail means the keyword is a long strings of words that isn’t typed in exactly the same time-after-time.

You want to target these words.  For example, “Best homes in Austin for disabled children” and “Homes for sale in Austin with accommodations for disabled kids” are not the same keywords. So you will never find the true number of searches a month for these queries with the keyword tool.  However, people are searching these phrases and if you optimize for them you will be found.

If you make an article a week that targets one of these long tail keyword phrases, you can build up significant traffic in a short period of time.  Plus, the competition is a lot less fierce. You’ll be on the first page very quickly for these searches.

This gives you an idea of which of those 100 articles you should write first.  Write the ones that have the most search volume first and then target the other ones.

Let’s talk about how to create SEO for Realtors content:

2. Content Driven Real Estate SEO for Beginners

Now, we have content ideas and we know which order to produce this content in.  But, we’re left with the task of actually writing it.

Most people will write their content the way the write a paper for their 9th grade English class.  They sit down, start writing, and then post it.  This is fine. But we need content that gets shared on social media and that gets linked to by other people in the community.  Otherwise, we won’t get the maximum SEO benefit.

In order to do this, you really want to copy the format, style, and tone of already successful content.  Basically, you simply want to re-write the articles you already found on Google, Twitter, and the newspaper.

But

You need to make it better.  It needs to be longer, have more photos, and be more engaging.

Whatever they did, you have to make people like it even more.

A great content does 4 major things:

1. Become informed
2. Get professional advice
3. Learn new technical skills
4. Find new tools, etc.

You want to make the already great content even better by adding those things to it.  Next, you need to get a great graphic for each of your posts.

Posts that have graphics are shared way more often on social media and it’s basically impossible to get on the first page of Google unless you have original images.

There are two ways to do this:

1. Go to fiverr.com and search for someone offering “Flat Design Graphics”.  You can get a graphic that is about your blog post for only $5. That’s a pretty easy, quick solution to this problem.  Google is the ultimate in catching people who copy from other sources.  You really don’t want to copy your contents images from somewhere else online.
2. Get out your smartphone and go take some pictures. There are great apps on both iOS and Android devices that will let you easily put a filter on any image you take.

Do you know how few pictures there are of your town online?

If you take up the second method, you will get more people to your website simply through google.com/image searches.

Finally, here are my personal specs for content that Real Estate SEO for Beginners students should follow:

SEO For Realtors Content Specs:

• 2000-3000 words
• 2% keyword density for your main keyword
• Place the Main Keyword at the beginning of your title
• Main keyword at the beginning at your URL
• Main keyword in your Headings
• Use at least 2 images
• 1 Share to get offer
• Call to Action (usually asking to join the email list)
• Shared on all social networks
• Shared in 3 groups on social networks
• Shared once a month after posting

2.5 Publishing Your Real Estate SEO for Beginners Content

I’m assuming in this post that you have access to a blog on the backend of your website.  If you don’t checkout wordpress.com, Blogger, or Tumblr.  You can easily start a blog for yourself in seconds.  However, posting this content off of your main site will hurt the SEO effect of having all of your work in one place. You will still get found with an external blog, but it is not as effective as having a blog and website together. Real Estate SEO for Beginners is all about building trust on your website. Not on 2 different websites.

Be sure to use a plugin like: SEO by Yoast or All In One SEO. These will help you fill out the necessary meta data for your posts.

3. Spread Your Fresh Content. Help Your Real Estate SEO for Beginners.

Want to know the best thing about making great content? No one minds if you post the link in groups for free AMAZING content. Real Estate SEO for Beginners is really helped by creating shareable content that people like.

I only used two things to get the 1,200% grown in organic traffic.  The first one is content and you just learned how to make great content.  The second is backlinks that aid your Real Estate SEO for Beginners.

Backlinks are links from other websites to your website.  There are different versions of them such as: no follow links, keyword rich links, and links that come from authority websites.

Basically, you want links from trustworthy websites in your community.  The more, the better.

To get these links, we start by spreading our free content around in social media groups.  You can easily find groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter (use hashtags) to share this material in.

Do NOT ignore Pinterest.  Pinterest is the #1 driver of social traffic to websites according to Hubspot.  The way they’ve setup Pinterest, it is really easy to get to a bloggers website from the image.

After you’ve gotten 10+ likes, comments, or shares to the content, then you need to get a few back links to it.  The primary way to do this is by asking people who’ve already linked to similar websites in the past.

The simplest way to find this is to take the article you based your article on and go to Google.

Do a search for:

“link:URL”

You will find all the websites in the world that link to that specific article.  Contact the owners of those sites and ask them to read your article.

This method will get about 2/10 people to link back to your content.  That will be enough for you to start ranking on Google.

Check out this other post I wrote on the 10 Golden Backlink Sources for Realtors.

You really need about 2 backlinks per article to have an effective website.  This can take time to build up so don’t get discouraged if the links do not come right away.  Another tactic towards link building, is to do it in person.  Asking business owners, in-person, about linking to your website greatly increases your odds of them saying yes. This is a great way to start Real Estate SEO for Beginners.

4. SEO for Realtors Social Media and Guest Blogging Checklist

Finally, consider this when doing Real Estate SEO for Beginners:

The tactics below are for you to start using after you have a base of articles already written.  Generally speaking, you need to have at least 15 articles on the website and several other pages up before you start these methods. If you don’t do this, you might as well not have read this Real Estate SEO for Beginners article.

Tactic 1: Guest Blogging

Find the most popular websites in your area and ask them if they’d be willing to collaborate on a post.  Websites that show up on the first few pages of Google are always in need of fresh content. So you are really doing them a favor.  Write an article that blends together their audience with yours.

This is really not that challenging as it sounds. And really is a great way to start Real Estate SEO for Beginners.

Let’s say there is a food blog for your city that gets tons of traffic.  You can propose writing an article about the Restaurants With The Best Views or Best Location or Best Buildings.

Whatever the website is about, there is probably a way to marry your interest in real estate with that topic.

Tactic 2: Local News Websites – Great Place For Real Estate SEO for Beginners

Reporters need help with ideas and expert advice. The best way to discover who these people are is through Linkedin.  A simple search for people working at the local newspaper will help you.

It’s best to reach out to the lesser popular papers in town.  Everyone contacts the most popular paper. But the lesser ones hardly ever get attention. You can get some great links to your content and some social media attention as well this way.