Real estate local SEO is rapidly changing. It's becoming increasingly difficult to rank high in the search engines, especially if you're a new player and don't have any authority or brand presence. It's even more challenging if you're trying to rank for a long-tail keyword phrase. Sites like Zillow and Trulia rank for thousands of search phrases and drive billions of visits to their websites annually. In this post, I'll go through my complete rundown of real estate website traffic strategies.
Real estate website traffic, and why it's crucial to your business
A well-designed real estate website is an essential piece of your business. It allows you to showcase your best properties and make the most money possible. But how do you get people to visit your website in the first place? The answer is simple: search engine optimization (SEO). With a targeted approach, you can ensure that qualified buyers and sellers find your website and contact you for more information.
How to define your local real estate market
Understanding how to define your local real estate market means you have to understand the characteristics of the housing market.
You need to be able to identify the different types of housing that exist within your local area. For example, there could be a significant difference between the number of people looking for apartments and those seeking homes to buy.
Other factors can influence demand, such as what is happening in the broader economy. For example, an increase in jobs could lead to more people moving into your local area and looking for accommodation.
Another important factor is supply. There need to be enough properties available for sale or rent to meet the level of demand; otherwise, prices will rise, or sales may fall through entirely.
As you can see, many different factors can affect demand and supply in your local area. Understanding these characteristics will help you to identify opportunities within the housing market.
How to determine what keywords work best for you
If you have a website, the chances are good that it's missing out on most of your target audience. You could be getting traffic from the right places, but if your site isn't optimized for local searches, then nobody will find you when they're looking for you.
This is where geo-targeting comes into play.
What Is Geo-Targeting?
When you geo-target your website, you're optimizing it to perform well in local searches. If you're a real estate agent in New York City, for example, then you would make sure that your site shows up when someone searches for “New York City real estate agent.”
There are several different ways to do this. One of the easiest methods is to make sure the name of your business appears in the title tag (the text that shows up in search results) and meta description (the text below the page title). Here's how it will look:
<title>Real Estate Agent | New York Real Estate Agent</title> <meta name=”description” content=”Real estate agent specializing in historic homes for New York businesses and individuals. Contact us today!”/>
Another way to get noticed by search engines is to optimize your images with relevant keywords. This can be tricky because there aren't any tools available.
Learn how to drive traffic through your blog posts
Driving targeted real estate website traffic is the key to any successful real estate marketing campaign. With an effective strategy in place, you can harness the power of your website to create a steady flow of potential buyers.
How do you drive traffic through your blog posts?
The first step is to focus on creating content that is relevant and helpful to your target audience. Once you have an idea for a topic, conduct some research to determine your ideal client's questions. This will help give you direction for your content creation efforts.
Once you understand the information your audience is looking for, you can begin developing blog posts that address those questions and provide helpful solutions and suggestions. The deeper your content goes on a topic or issues facing home buyers and sellers, the more people will be willing to share it on social media and within their network of family and friends.
Optimize your website and blog posts for better real estate results
Real estate website traffic is the lifeblood of your business. If your website isn't getting traffic, you aren't getting leads, and if you aren't getting leads, you aren't making money. To generate real estate website traffic, you need to optimize your site and blog posts for search engines and pay attention to the conversions that come from those visitors. The following tips will help:
Make sure your title tag and meta description accurately describe the content of your page. The meta description is critical because it appears directly below the page title in search engine results pages (SERPs). This gives searchers a second chance to decide whether or not they want to visit your page.
Use keywords well. Place keywords strategically throughout your content without over-optimizing. Use them in headings, subheadings, image captions, body copy, and article titles for maximum effect. It's okay if a keyword appears more than once on a single page as long as it's used appropriately in different sections.
Leverage social media channels to promote your blog posts and encourage people to link back to them from their websites or blogs. Social sharing is a great way to increase links back to your site from other sites and boost real estate website traffic.
Learn how to drive traffic through Facebook groups
Every successful real estate agent wants their website to rank highly in Google for target keywords. This is how you drive targeted traffic to your website. The good news is that it's not at all difficult to learn how to drive traffic through Facebook groups if you know what you are doing.
How to Drive Traffic Through Facebook Groups
The first thing you need to know about driving traffic through Facebook groups is that it can be a highly effective way of building up a list of interested buyers and sellers. Not only will these people potentially convert into sales, but they'll also help spread the word about your services via their social media accounts.
So, how do you drive traffic through Facebook groups? It's pretty simple, but before we begin, let's go over some ground rules for running an effective campaign:
Only target relevant groups: As with everything else in life, the key here is to focus. If your services are geared towards homeowners looking at selling their property in the next 6-12 months, don't join groups for landlords or people considering moving interstate; these people won't be interested in what you have to say. Instead, find the right group (or multiple groups) and spend time posting helpful content consistently before asking for anything in return.
Don't spam:
Don't waste time trying to rank for high-volume keywords. Get local real-estate rankings and drive more traffic to your website.
Real estate website traffic is best generated with local SEO. SEO for realtors is still very much about ranking for “local” keywords. That's because Google is still the biggest game in town (I'm talking about organic referral traffic here). Google generates nearly 40% of all search engine traffic, and that percentage is growing. So, if you're not getting real estate website traffic from Google, you're missing out on a massive chunk of your business.
One way to do this is by finding long-tail keywords with lower competition and higher search volume. Long-tail keywords are typically more specific and less competitive. It is easy to rank on page one of Google for long-tail keywords because they usually have less than 100 global monthly searches (for example, “corner lot homes in Houston” gets about 900 searches per month). Long-tail keywords can be found using keyword research tools like Ubersuggest or LongTail Pro.
The most important thing to keep in mind is that SEO does work for real estate websites. The key is to make sure you're targeting the most relevant terms for your target audience. Whether it's finding the correct keyword phrases or creating quality content that ranks well on search engines, the first step to generating real estate website traffic is understanding your target market and knowing what they're searching for online.
Need more local marketing tips? Check out our entire Guide to Local Marketing for Real Estate Professionals
