SEO Guide for Estate Agents

Today, we live in a digital world where every search starts online. With an estimated 3.5 billion searches carried out on Google every single day, it’s crucial that estate agents are doing everything they can to boost their online presence. 

Whether you’re looking to attract vendors, tenants, buyers or landlords, your website is a key tool that can be used to generate traffic. Today, you simply can’t rely on someone walking into your branch – instead, you need to maximise your chances of being found online. This means that your website needs to appear high in search engine results – in other words, those in the real estate business need a top-notch SEO strategy under their belt. 

What is SEO for Estate Agents? 

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is the process of increasing the amount of organic traffic to your website and getting your business to appear higher in organic search results. It’s all about boosting your online presence, increasing your visibility on Google and making sure that your business is what comes up when people search for local estate agents in their area. SEO drives 1000%+ more traffic than organic social media, and therefore it’s one of the best investments your business can make.  

There are plenty of reasons why SEO is crucial for estate agents. Firstly, no one’s going to get in touch with you if they can’t find you online. If you’re not optimising your website, you simply won’t show up in these searches. Without SEO, potential vendors, purchasers and leads won’t be able to find your website. 

SEO is crucial for building a reputable estate agency and generating more leads without paying for advertising. An effective SEO strategy will cover everything, from the technical aspects of your website right through to the meta descriptions, tags and keywords built into your content. 

How exactly does SEO work?

Search engine giants, such as Google, strive to deliver the best organic results for their users. 

How do they do this? The three following actions are completed by search engine bots in order to determine where your website is placed in search results: 

• Crawling – Search engines “crawl” the web to find websites, content, pages, new URLs and updates to existing pages. 
• Indexing – Search engines then process, store and organise everything they find into an index, which is essentially a database of content that is deemed good enough to show up in search engines. 
• Ranking – Search engines then rank content in the index based on relevance, effectively showing users the most relevant content to their searches. 

Each step is key to ensure that you appear organically in search results. It’s crucial that your website is capable of being crawled and indexed by Google, and your content needs to be relevant enough to rank highly in search results. 

Boosting your SEO as an estate agency

There are lots of different ways to boost SEO, but it’s important to remember that you won’t see your website jumping to the highest rank overnight. SEO is a process that requires work and time – but with the right SEO strategy, you’ll notice huge improvements to your traffic, leads and general online presence. 

If you want your estate agency to be found online, you need to focus on the following: 

Content and Keywords

Firstly, your content needs to be on point. It’s important that you’re producing optimised, relevant and valuable content regularly. And by relevant, we mean blog posts, articles and listicles that answer people’s searches on Google – information that is genuinely useful and interesting. 

Within your content, you should be targeting keywords that frequently show up in your target audience’s searches. For example, this may be “how to sell a house fast” or “estate agents near me”. You can identify keywords that your potential customers search for by using keyword research tools, such as Google Keyword Planner. These keywords should then be integrated organically throughout your content, and your content should be high-quality and up-to-date. 

On-page content 

It’s not just the ‘Blog’ or ‘News’ section of your website that needs to be optimised; to effectively rank in Google and ensure that people can find you, your entire estate agency website needs to be properly optimised too, from the internal links you use to your website speed. Here are a few SEO tips to consider: 

• Page titles and meta descriptions. Your page title should include the keyword you want the page to rank for. It should also be under 65 characters to ensure it doesn’t get truncated. Meta descriptions should also front-load your keywords and be under 160 characters, summarising the content on the page. 
• Image optimisation. Each image on your website should be optimised using keyword-based file names. The title, description and caption should also be edited to make them relevant. 
• Page load speed. Having a good page load speed is important for two reasons. Firstly, your website visitors won’t like using a website that takes ages to load. Secondly, Google can penalise you if your page load speed is too slow. 
• Mobile optimisation. 76% of people who search on their smartphones for something nearby visit a business within a day and 60% of Google searches are performed on mobile devices. This tells you all you need to know about the importance of mobile optimisation. Your website should be mobile-friendly and easy to use to ensure that mobile searchers can find it. 
• Internal linking. Internal links connect pages and posts on your website and guide users around, essentially forming the architecture of your site. Internal links increase time on site and lower bounce rate, as well as helping Google to crawl and index your site. Relevant and organic follow links should be used throughout your content, and all links should fit naturally.  

Technical optimisation 

It’s important to pay attention to what’s going on behind the scenes of your website too. SEO for estate agents goes far beyond having high-quality content and a mobile-friendly website packed with relevant internal links; it’s important that the technical aspects of your website are optimised too. This is just as important to ensure that you appear in search results. 

Without the right technical SEO strategy in place, your website will fail and you won’t be visible to searchers. Technical SEO covers: 

• Website structure – Structured data allows you to tell search engines what kind of product you sell and helps search engines to understand your website. 
• 404 pages – 404 “page not found” errors can affect your SEO and should be checked at least once every month (or weekly for a bigger site) to be fixed. 
• Broken links – Broken links make it difficult for Google to crawl your website and can damage SEO. All broken and dead links should be corrected or removed.  
• Robots.txt files – The robots.txt file is a powerful tool that can give robots directions on your site. However, it should be handled carefully as a small mistake can prevent bots from crawling your site. 
• Duplicate content – You should have different content on each page of your website. Duplicate content can result in all pages being ranked lower. 
• XML Sitemap – An XML sitemap is a list of all pages on your site and acts as a roadmap for search engines on your site. Having an XML sitemap can help the structure of your website. 

Google Analytics 

Google Analytics is an essential SEO tool that can provide you with valuable insights into your website and how users are navigating and finding your site. It can provide a wealth of information, including how many page views your website has, how many new users you have, where your audience is based, how people are landing on your website and where people are leaving your website. 

In order to use Google Analytics, you’ll need to install your unique bit of code on your website. Once you’ve created an account and a property, you’ll be given a Global Site Tag tracking code. This should be installed as the first item into the <HEAD> of every page you want to track. 

Need some SEO help? 

At Property WebMasters, we understand that it can be difficult to find the time to really invest in your SEO – especially if you’re not too sure where to start. We also understand that it can be tricky to understand. That’s where we come in. 

We’re proud to be the property marketing experts, specialising in improving website rankings and traffic and generating qualified leads for estate agents worldwide. As the estate agent website design and digital marketing specialists, you needn’t look further than us to help take your estate agency to the next level. 

Visit our website to learn more.