Getting Started with Real Estate SEO
We don’t need to tell you that the real estate industry is competitive: you’re vying with dozens of other real estate businesses in your area for a limited number of houses, which means that you need every possible advantage to grow your portfolio.
You have the experience, passion, and expertise necessary to guide buyers and sellers through the process, but you need to help prove that to potential clients before they even step in for a consultation. How can you achieve this? By SEO for real estate agents & brokers.
What Is Real Estate SEO?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing your real estate website and online marketing in order to appear as high as possible on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
This is done by a variety of factors, which we’ll discuss shortly, but the bottom line is that it is a way to tailor your site to the search habits of consumers.
Search engine optimization ensures that Google and other search engines rely on you to provide quality content to those learning more about the real estate industry – thus driving more traffic to your site.
How the SEO Industry Has Changed Over Time
In the early days of the Internet, an SEO strategy was quite primitive. Quantity ruled over quantity, and those who hit enough keywords matched to search queries would be favored by search engines, even if their content wasn’t useful or even particularly relevant.
For a real estate SEO strategy, this could include giant lists of all the towns you serve without any associated content, or nothing but a giant button directing a user to other websites with a bunch of white text surrounding it: visible to crawlers, but not to the average consumer looking for information.
As Google and other search engines have evolved, so has the search engine optimization necessary to rank well. Now, Google punishes those who use these underhanded tactics, as it’s recognized as manipulative and unhelpful.
We call these dangerous tactics black-hat SEO, as opposed to the white-hat and gray-hat tactics that Stellar SEO uses to help our clients do well while still abiding by the guidelines of a search engine.
White-Hat, Gray-Hat, and Black-Hat SEO
SEO tools can be broken down into three categories: white-hat, gray-hat, and black-hat. They each carry a level of risk to them, but the danger rises precipitously when you move into black-hat territory.
Search engines may penalize your website if it identifies these tactics, pushing you to the third, fourth, or even fifth search engine results page.
None of these tactics are illegal, but some go against Google Search Essential guidelines and will push down your rankings in search results.
A white-hat SEO strategy is all about creating true value for site visitors through a large volume of excellent content, a highly functional website, and a network of reputable backlinks from sites with high organic traffic.
Solid meta descriptions, relevant keywords, and a responsive design that looks great on both desktop and mobile devices are key here.
Gray-hat SEO involves those tactics that are not explicitly banned by Google’s terms of service but may result in penalties if terms of service change in the future or if it’s misidentified as black-hat. The lines are blurrier here, and some strategies may result in quick wins but long-term losses.
We research and plan carefully whenever using gray-hat SEO to reduce any potential risks, balancing the risks and drawbacks of every strategy.
On the other end is a black-hat SEO strategy, which uses things that are explicitly banned by Google’s terms of service. This includes things like keyword stuffing, where you use white text and code to jam as many keywords into a site as possible.
It’s also black-hat SEO to duplicate the same content on multiple pages across your site, as this doesn’t provide site visitors with more value.
Stellar SEO avoids all black-hat strategies: while they may provide quick wins, they are highly dangerous over the long term.
Why Is a Real Estate SEO Strategy So Important?
Real estate SEO is everything because search results are everything. Gone are the days when someone would look you up in a phonebook and call you; now, they’re finding a reputable real estate agency by combing the search engine results page.
That wasn’t a typo: generally, people will only look at the first page of the search results unless they’re not finding what they need. Given how crowded the real estate niche is, they have little reason to go further.
Not only does search engine optimization drive more traffic, but it also reduces your own efforts over time because you’re not having to reach out to every potential client – your content is doing that for you.
