By Ben Spowart
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 platforms, and therefore it’s one of the best investments your business can make.
There are plenty of reasons why SEO for Estate Agents is crucial. 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 good 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.
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.
If your estate agency website isn’t being indexed by Google, there could be a few reasons why:
More than 70% of internet users skip straight past the paid adverts at the top of SERP’s and click on the first organic result instead?
Even if your website is being indexed, it’s important to remember that search engines don’t always recognise changes straight away. If you want your estate agency to be found online, try these tips and see how your website improves over 6 months.
As previously mentioned, an estate agency’s SEO value is crucial. There are lots of different ways to boost your SEO, but it’s important to remember that you might not see your website rank higher overnight. The SEO process requires work and time – but with a great SEO campaign, you’ll notice huge improvements to your traffic, leads, general online presence and a high SEO score.
If you want your estate agency to improve its Google ranking within search engine results and see an increase in your web traffic, you need to focus on the following (SEO tips to improve your search traffic):
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 online. Someone might be using Google to search:
As well as other property search terms that are relevant to your agency. You can identify keywords that your prospective customers search for by using keyword research tools such as Google Keyword Planner, which is a highly-rated SEO tool. These keywords should then be integrated organically throughout your content, and your content should be high-quality and up-to-date.
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:
With how much focus there is now on writing for people rather than the web, those within the property industry need to know who their audience is if they’re going to succeed online. Although your website content is going to be optimised and focussed on a specific topic/subject, the primary point of what you produce is to attract and engage with your readers. The first step to doing this is knowing who your audience is and understanding their wants and needs.
Making content that is of genuine interest to your users will perform much better than pieces you’ve done just for the sake of doing it. Your content should:
Knowing your audience and creating content that’s relatable to them will also be more shareable on social media. This, in turn, can help heighten brand awareness while also driving additional traffic to your website.
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.
Backlink (link building)
A link from one website that points back to yours.
Search engines are here to help provide users with the best possible results based on a search term or query they’ve entered. Algorithm updates are designed to make sure that SERP’s are giving a searcher an appropriate answer. Although Google now makes thousands of changes every year, most of them go unnoticed. However, every so often, a major update is rolled out, which can see webmasters put their heads in their hands as they watch their rankings drop because they’ve been applying techniques that aren’t recognised as best practice. Providing you’re doing everything that Google wants, you’ll be rewarded for your efforts.
If you want to find out more about the evolution of SEO, check out our article here
First off, to be able to reap the benefits of Google Analytics, you must first install your unique bit of code on your website. Once you’ve set up your account and created a property, you’ll be given a Global Site Tag tracking code. When correctly installed as the first item into the <HEAD> of every webpage you want to track, you’ll gather all kinds of usable data that can help improve your estate agency’s SEO.
There’s so much you can do with Google Analytics, that it can often be difficult to know where to start. It’s an essential tool that estate agents need to be using as it tells you how much traffic is going to your website, as well as how they’re engaging with what they see. Here are five useful things you can be doing with Google Analytics:
At Property Webmasters, we understand that it can be difficult to find the time to really invest in your Estate Agency’s 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. Working with clients in the estate agency industry continues to be our passion!
Want to see SEO results and increase your search engine visibility? If you are looking to boost your organic online presence so you appear high within search engine rankings when potential customers search for property or other relevant search queries, visit our website to learn more about our SEO service.
