10 Tips To Improve Your Local SEO Real Estate Websites
Are you an online real estate agent dreaming to rule your local market?
If you, you aren’t the only one dreaming to do so. All the real estate agents of your hyperlocal area also want the same. However, this isn’t a very difficult task. As you luckily have an online business, just focus on real estate SEO. This will enable you to compete with other real estate agents. Isn’t that what you want?
Focusing on local SEO will give a chance to fight, but only when used properly. So, here are 10 tips by which you can improve your real estate SEO.
1. Start with an SEO Audit:
So, where do you think you are right now? You have to know where you are, before heading anywhere. That’s exactly what an SEO audit does. It helps to determine which pages are going well and where to make improvements.
Performing an SEO audit can be a time-consuming process. However, it provides you with all the information you need to make progress. The key areas you must focus on are:
- Site Structure
- Page Structure
- Content
- Links
- Usability
When you improve above five areas, you can automatically see an increase in traffic. You can Google Analytics to find pages that need attention. In addition to that, you can use Google Search Console to find issues that need solutions.
2. Optimize for Search:
After generating the audit results, you have to focus on optimizing your website. This means you have to create a plan to address each of the issues. Then you have to fix all of those issues. Moreover, you have to look for other ways to improve your optimization further.
So, what are the things you should focus on? Well, there are several things you need to focus on with a systemic approach. Some of them are:
- Keyword reach and analysis
- SEO-friendly URLs
- Content optimization
- Optimizing of titles and meta descriptions
- Image optimization
- CTR and bounce rate optimization
- Proper outbound and internal link placement
- Schema
- Robots.txt
- XML sitemap
- SSL certificate
- W3C validation
3. Ensure Good Accessibility of Your Website:
Does your website provide a good user experience? Then you are lacking far behind in the competition. You have to make your website with good accessibility. Like with screen reading options for visually impaired people. This will ensure that you increase your customer base.
That’s why different businesses make sure that their sites are ADA compliant. This is especially important for real estate. You have to take care of some things to be ADA compliant. A few such things are:
- Multiple ways to access the site.
- Any live audio/video content must have text captions.
- Only links are underlined.
- The contrast ratio between background elements and readable elements must be at least 4:5:1.
- The keyboard focus must always be clear and highly focussed.
4. Ensure that Your Website is Responsive:
Do you know just how many clients abandon your unresponsive website? That’s larger than you can think of.
Do you want thousands of your potential clients to abandon your website? If not, you have to make sure that your website is responsive. By making your website responsive, you can keep Google and your interested customers happy.
The key areas to focus on while making the website responsive are:
- Responsive design
- Page speed
- Hosting speed
- Homepage
- Site navigation
- Site search
- Forms
- Conversions
- Usability
A responsive website allows your webpage to fit into the screen space of any device. With different device layout designs, you can make your website more accessible. Thus, allowing more traffic to drive in.
5. Add Your Site to Google My Business & Other Relevant Directories:
Is your real estate business listed in Google My Business? If not, get it done as soon as possible. This allows you to focus on your local citations.
Therefore, the more website your business is listed on, the better it gets. People will get your name, address, phone number, website link, and a lot more from there. That’s why you must have been list on sites like Google My Business and similar other sites, like:
- Realtor.com
- Yahoo Homes
- RedFin
- HomeSnap
- Neighborhood Scout
- Zoocasa
- Local.com
- Yelp
- Yellow Pages
- Manta
- Better Business Bureau
- Merchant Circle
- Angie’s List
- CitySearch
- Whitepages
However, with each of the directories, you have to complete your profile as much as you can. In addition to that, you can spice it up with photos, videos, and other relevant content. This will help in better engagements and ranking higher.
Just like you, many real estate agents are using these platforms to boost their lead generation. Therefore, get registered and begin your game.
6. Get More Social:
Haven’t used social media for promotion? Really? Why not?
Businesses use social media platforms for many reasons, like:
- More exposure
- Better connection with the targeted customers
- Build trust and brand awareness
- Drive more traffic to your landing page
- Better lead generation
- Better conversion rate
Social media is a must for businesses nowadays. Even real estate businesses are not falling behind in the race of using them. They are using these platforms to increase their online presence.
Are you wondering which social media platform to use? Well, there are a couple of media, namely Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest. You can use any of them or all.
7. Publish Useful and Relevant Content on Your Blog Section:
Don’t you have a blog section on your website? Why don’t you utilize it?
Even small businesses use their blogs to generate traffic on their website, so why can’t you? You can create useful and relevant blogs for your targeting customers. This means your blogs need to be informative enough to drive in potential customers.
Informative articles can be posts about the housing neighborhood, like:
- Walkability
- Cost of living
- Social life
- Schools
- Crime
- Restaurants
You can also create visual content through images, video tours, and visual tours and live to stream. In addition to that, you can describe the pros and cons of living in these housing neighborhoods. Moreover, you can provide conversational videos of interviewing the local citizens. This will provide a unique perspective for homebuyers to consider.
8. Create Video Content:
Content is an awesome marketing tool. But video content is on a level higher. People prefer watching vlogs to reading blogs. That’s why you should prefer investing in creating and optimizing video content.
Other than the options mentioned in the above point, you can consider the following points as well:
- Create a YouTube channel and optimize it.
- Continuously upload videos.
- Share/upload your videos to your website and social media page.
- Perform live streaming on Facebook and YouTube to engage more audience.
In addition to that, you can create videos on an open house, Q&A live streaming, Q&A videos, and any relevant idea you can come up with. Just creating the videos won’t generate leads for you. You have to spend time optimizing the video content as well.
9. Use Structured Data Markup:
Do you know about structured data markup?
Structured data markup or schema lets search engines like Google know more about the content on any page. That’s the reason why so many real estate businesses use it:
- RealEstateAgent
- Offer
- Product
- Place
- RentAction
- Residence
- PostalAddress
- SearchResultsPage
- WebPage
Which one of the above to use depends on your site structure.
If you are confused about which one to use, you can get some consultation with an SEO professional. This way you will know how you can boost your real estate SEO.
10. Try to Earn Featured Snippets:
Do you know featured snippets can be a game-changer for your website? Featured snippets will let your website remain at the top of the SERPs. They can:
- Increase traffic.
- Attract users with your offers.
- Improve the search engine ranking.
- Increase the conversion rate.
However, earning them can be quite a task. Only a few businesses can have them in the local search.
How to Increase the Visibility of Your Brand?
Are you a business owner struggling to grow your business?
If that is the case you should focus on reaching out to more and more people to recognize your brand. Increasing your brand awareness has always been an effective way of promoting your products and brand name.
Visibility increases the customer base of any business by boosting brand awareness and thereby, increases revenue. It is always important to leg up on competitors and rule your marketing sector.
So, if you want to increase your brand awareness, how are you going to do it?
We will describe the different strategies that you can follow to increase your brand awareness.
1. Upload Your Google My Business Listing:
For effective brand awareness, you have there where your customers are.
Then what can be better than Google? People are always using it in their everyday life.
Don’t forget to get your company verified by Google My Business. It is absolutely free and very easy to use.
After signing up there, you can update your brand’s information, upload photos, create attractive posts, and give responses to customers’ reviews. It has another advantage in that it can be accessed via all devices.
2. Increase Brand Awareness by Being Mobile-Friendly:
A study has shown that about 96% of potential customers use their mobile phones to look for a local business. So, it a must for your website to be accessible by mobile phones, i.e., your website needs to be responsive.
If your website is not mobile-friendly, it will surely hamper the ranking of your website in the SEO ranking. While with Google My Business, Google’s mobile-first algorithm will take care of the website ranking.
3. Manage Your Brand Reputation:
Popularity always comes with a price.
Focus on maintaining the hard-earned reputation of your brand. It can always be hampered by outsiders.
So, you need to come up with a strategy to deal with bad reviews and to satisfy unsatisfied customers so that you can develop your brand’s visibility in a positive way.
Research suggests that customer reviews play a great role in converting traffic. Customers determine whether your brand is trustworthy or not by the customers’ reviews.
4. Optimize for Local SEO:
Search engine optimization is an essential factor for any online business.
Only have a website is not enough for a business to get established online. For that, you need to optimize your page to make it appear on the first page of any related query search.
5. Create a 360° Virtual Tour:
Give your customers a virtual tour of your website to let them what they can expect from your website.
It will help you build stronger brand visibility.
New visitors will probably remember your offer and can even come back again.
6. Pump Up Your Social Media Marketing:
Get in touch with the influencers and micro-influencer to help you promote your brand on social media platforms.
You can also use customer-driven content and social media branding to grab the attention of the audience. This will help you in boosting your brand awareness.
Prior to target customers, get to know what your audience is actually looking for in your website. Then only you can use this strategy to effectively target.
7. Consistency is Key:
The message on your website should be clear and consistent so that the audience can understand it within 3-5 seconds.
Your aim should let the customers know more about your brand and ultimately converting them.
How To Create Facebook Ads Accounts?
If you’ve decided to use Facebook as an ad platform to campaign your brand, you must be ready to accept whatever outcomes it brings.
Its effectiveness is very uncertain. It depends on how an ad has been created, what the ad type is, and how it is managed during the campaign.
It may sound not very easy, but it is not what it seems. You need to understand the logic behind using Facebook Ads and how to manage them for your campaigning.
Now the question arises: How to create ads on Facebook?
The first thing you need to start a Facebook Ads campaign is to have a Facebook ads account. Moreover, this account must be linked to your credit card so that you can pay for your ads quickly.
Step 1: Accounts in Facebook Ads Manager
Every personal profile has a Facebook ads account under their name by default. You can see your ads accounts, status, currency, and transaction details in your Ads Manager.
Facebook Ads Manager can get you access to your account details. This can help you manage your past and present campaigns, see their status, get reports on their effectiveness, etc.
Step 2: Manage your Facebook Ads account settings
After choosing your account in your Ads manager, you have to fill in all the details of your business in a Setting tab. You can find different options for payments and information about your transaction in the Billing tab. Thus it helps you to keep a record of how much you’re spending and how much you owe.
Be careful about the currency you choose from the list of currencies, as you can’t change it. But you can set the preferred currency of your profile from your Account settings on the Payment tab.
Step 3: Creating a group account
You can create an account group from the tab account groups. With this, you can give a group of people access to the ads, to manage them. But be careful, as the Facebook ad is linked to a particular user account.
You have different users roles:
- An administrator can alter the settings of the group and have permission to change any ad associated with this account.
- General user, who can only manage the ads and doesn’t have any access to group settings.
- Reports only are those who can only see the reports of the ad campaigns- they cannot manage the ad budget, period, etc.
Group accounts are beneficial for accessing a particular ad by a group of people.
Thus, once you are done with the creation of a Facebook Ads Account, you are good to go and start your ad campaigning.
How To Use Instagram Ads Effectively For Generating Leads For Your Website?
Social media provides amazing platforms for business owners to target a million users of social networking sites. There, you can directly target the specific audience who have shown some interest in your brands to generate leads with effective ads like Instagram ads.
Social media leads are the potential customers who have provided you with their information to follow them around within the different platforms.
Instagram is such a social media platform, which is used by many brands to generate leads and in converting the interested unconverted prospects. If you are also a business owner willing to use Instagram to generate leads, then look forward to this article to know how to effectively use Instagram to generate leads to your websites.
1. Use Instagram Lead Ads:
The most obvious way for lead generation on Instagram is using lead ads. Moreover, Instagram ads are specially designed for business owners to collect information about interesting prospects by collecting their contact details like email id or phone number. The information about the prospects collected can be used to differentiate the targets and improve the Instagram ads targeting strategy. This will help you to group the prospects with similar profiles, allowing you to target them at once. Also, Instagram ads help to increase brand exposure and bring new leads.
2. Add Action Buttons to Your Profile:
If you want to use Instagram for your business, you need to add action buttons to your account. In addition to that, you can also provide a link to your email id, phone number, and business address in your profile for visitors to get in touch with you. Furthermore, Instagram has better options for lead generation like Book, Reserve, and Get Ticket Action Buttons, where forms by Instagram providers appear in front of the visitors.
3. Optimize the Link in Your Bio:
You have to use the link space provided in the Instagram account to the fullest. The link provided should take the customers to the objective that you want to accomplish like signing up for newsletters, product sales, or a survey.
4. Design a Landing Page:
Since you are providing a link to your website, you need to have a landing page. The landing page must not make the visitors regret their decision. The page should give a seamless visual experience and relevant content to the visitors.
5. Add “Swipe Up” Feature on Your Instagram Stories:
Instagram stories are another way that businesses use to generate leads. Stories can be more effective than the bio links since people view them with just a swipe. Again, for this, you need a proper landing page, where the visitors will go after viewing your story.
6. Customize Your Goal:
You need a strong call-to-action button to generate leads on Instagram. The visuals and the call-to-action buttons of Instagram ads should be working for the same purpose. When someone clicks on your bio link, your posts and captions should convince them to do so.
7. Create Shoppable Content:
Instagram is a great platform to tag products to increase the sale. When someone taps on the tags, you generate a lead who is interested in your products, even if the conversion doesn’t occur.
8. Partner with an Influential Instagram User:
It is another effective strategy for new Instagram lead generation. Go for an influencer who has a strong brand affinity with only a few mutual followers. Moreover, this will increase your brand to reach new prospects and gain new followers.
9. Conduct an Instagram Contest:
It is a good way to attract prospects to your Instagram profile. Run a contest, sale, or promotion that people will find a good chance to gain something.
10. Feature Popular Products:
Visitors don’t purchase a product the moment they see it. Instagram provides the Insight tab that helps you to find the best product posts. Now you can feature on your Instagram account regularly, to remain in their mind and create more opportunities for conversions.
