Think your website can’t compete with the big portals? SEO expert David Marden writes that with smart keyword planning, you can get your site found in online search results.
Is Month of marketing and branding here in Inman. As we enter a competitive spring sales season, we examine what proven, cutting-edge tactics and innovations are driving deals in today’s market. We also recognize industry branding and marketing leaders with Inman’s Marketing All-Star Awards.
In the highly competitive world of real estate, staying ahead of the competition is crucial. While some competitors may be driving more organic traffic, it’s essential to remember that quantity sometimes translates into quality.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the secret weapon that can help a real estate domain outrank competitors and attract high-quality organic traffic. Strategic SEO efforts, including keyword research and implementation and leveraging Google Search Console, can make all the difference in outranking your rivals.
Keyword Research: The Foundation of SEO
Keyword research is the cornerstone of any successful SEO strategy. Understanding what potential clients are looking for in real estate is paramount. It involves identifying the relevant keywords and phrases that potential buyers, sellers or renters use when searching for properties.
The most searched real estate inquiries in your market may be too difficult to rank as a newer website, as national portals like Zillow and Homes.com will have a very strong handle on these.
Instead, the first step should be to analyze the domains of successful real estate brokers in your market to see which keywords or search queries are driving traffic to their websites.
Here’s what you should be looking for:
Analysis of the competition: Analyze the keywords your competitors are ranking for. Tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs can provide insight into your strategies and help you identify gaps in your keyword targeting.
Local keywords: Real estate is inherently local, so focus on keywords specific to your location. Includes neighborhood names, landmarks, and other relevant geographic terms.
Long tail keywords: While highly competitive keywords can drive traffic, it’s often long-tail keywords that convert better. For example, instead of targeting ‘homes for sale’, consider optimizing for ‘Victorian homes for sale in [your city],” and create content about Victorian houses. You will then start to see organic traffic from potential home buyers interested in purchasing a Victorian home.
Keyword implementation to increase organic traffic
Once you’ve done a thorough keyword research, it’s time to put them to work and optimize your real estate domain.
This is how:
On-Page Optimization: Incorporate keywords naturally into your website content, including property descriptions, blog posts, and meta tags. Avoid keyword stuffing as it can hurt your rankings.
Quality content: Create valuable, informative and engaging content. Regularly updating your blog with articles on local real estate trends, market insights and neighborhood guides can help attract and retain organic traffic.
Mobile Optimization: Make sure your website is mobile-friendly, as Google prefers mobile-responsive sites in search results.
User Experience (UX): A seamless user experience, with fast loading pages and intuitive navigation, can lead to higher user satisfaction and better rankings.
The value of organic traffic
While paid advertising can yield quick results, organic traffic has its own unique advantages:
Profitable: Unlike paid advertising, organic traffic requires no ongoing expenses. Once you achieve a high ranking, you can continue to attract visitors without additional advertising costs.
Credibility and trust: Users see organic search results as more credible. High rankings imply that your website is a reliable source of information in the real estate industry.
Sustainable growth: SEO efforts tend to increase over time. As your domain authority and ranking improve, so does your ability to attract more organic traffic.
Google Search Console – A valuable SEO tool
Google Search Console is a powerful tool that can provide insight into how your website is performing in Google search results. It offers several features to optimize your site’s SEO:
Performance reports: Monitor how often your site appears in search results, click-through rates, and traffic-generating keywords. Use this data to refine your SEO strategy.
Index Coverage: Identify and fix any indexing issues that may affect your site’s visibility on Google.
Site Maps: Submit XML sitemaps to help Google crawl and index your website efficiently.
mobile usability: Check for mobile usability issues, as mobile compatibility is crucial to SEO success.
Keyword Research Example: Debra Dobbs (one of Chicago’s top agents for the past 15+ years)
Competitor Traffic:
How We Can Take Traffic From Competitors’ Websites: Debra Dobbs: Keyword research shows an estimate of where organic clicks are coming from.
Debra Dobbs has gotten a lot of keyword positions related to zip code, so I created one blog about postcodes to start taking some of the traffic from your domain.
Blog entry for January 11, 2024: Gain share of impressions for search queries containing “zip code”, which increased another 574 percent in less than four weeks, and the keyword’s average position for “zip code” jumped three places 60 to 24 and got seven organic clicks.
Note: During the previous 28-day period (before the article was written), the Openhausrealty domain received over 1,000 organic clicks, but none included the keyword “zip code”.
In the competitive real estate landscape, SEO is the key to beating out competitors who can generate more organic traffic. Keyword research, strategic implementation, and leveraging tools like Google Search Console can help you build a sustainable and successful online presence.
Remember that in the world of SEO, quality and relevance often trump quantity. By optimizing your real estate domain for the right keywords, you can attract high-quality organic traffic that will lead to greater long-term success.
David Marden is a third generation real estate professional with over 20 years of experience and has mentored some of Chicago’s top real estate professionals. Connect with Marden enabled Instagram i Linkedin.
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