The real estate industry is notorious for being highly competitive among real estate agents. There are often far more real estate professionals than people looking to purchase a home.
Thus, the real estate market gets very congested, and it can be difficult for agents to stand out from the competition. But, there is a solution that not every agent takes full of advantage of.
The internet, particularly social media, has evolved to the point where it is integrated into our daily lives. Real estate agents can utilize the internet to help increase exposure to their target audience.
But this takes more work than simply posting on Facebook about a home you recently sold. Solid SEO strategies are vital if you want to have the most exposure possible.
Let’s take a look at five strategies you can use to your advantage.
Keyword placement
There is more to keywords strategy than just using keywords on your website. When and where you use them is just as important.
In fact, there are four locations where you should incorporate keywords: the page title, the page URL, throughout the page and the image title.
Although this may seem like a lot of extra work, Google will recognize each instance of your keyword usage and help boost your ranking. You should also create content that is relevant to the keywords that you already rank for and also keywords that you want to improve your rank for.
Over time, when you have a large number of keywords in these locations across separate pages, you’ll see a significant increase in traffic to your site. Therefore, remember to take keyword placement just as seriously.
Social media
With all of the potential social media options available to real estate agents for SEO performance, it would be a shame to not incorporate them.
Platforms such as Twitter, Instagram and Facebook are all great when it comes to looking for ways to show your audience what you’re capable of. They’re also great opportunities to share relevant articles or even link back to your site.
Each of the three major platforms has its own niche for real estate agents to use for SEO.
Facebook is more slow-paced and useful for your audience learn more about who you are as a professional and also learn key industry insights from the content you share.
It’s also a great place to post guides, such as how to overcome common issues people face when looking to purchase a home.
Twitter is something you can incorporate to increase your online presence. But it doesn’t accomplish anything that Facebook can’t. Instagram is particularly useful because you can only post photos and videos, which makes it a great way to showcase a new home you’re trying to sell.
LinkedIn is also useful because it is more formal than the other three social media vehicles, and it allows you to connect with industry influencers on a professional level as opposed to following them on Twitter.
Linking
This is one of the most important aspects of SEO, especially when it comes to real estate. In fact, your website won’t get very far if you have no other sites linking back to it.
Although there are shady ways to accomplish this task, you could get slapped with penalties from Google that actually decrease your rankings on the search engine. The best way to get other sites to link to your own website is to create content that people want to share.
This means that your blog should be informative, captivating and provide enough value to your readers that they’ll want to show other people. To help increase your viewership, you could even reach out to prominent figures in your local market and pitch your article to them as a guest post.
If the quality is high enough, they may just post it on their website and also link back to yours. This could realistically increase your following by a significant amount overnight.
Mobile formatting
People love browsing the internet on mobile devices. Whether it is a tablet or a smartphone, it’s simply more comfortable to read content on these devices than to sit upright at a desk while browsing.
But you’d be surprised how many people forgo the importance of the mobile formatting. There are plenty of sites out there that load slowly, have jumbled images and text or have missing parts of the sides interface just because they didn’t decide to format it for mobile devices.
You can easily stand out from the competition by making sure that your website looks sleek and clean when viewed from this type of technology. Putting in the small amount of extra work will take you a long way when it comes to establishing yourself as a source of relevant information.
Videos
Video is easily the best way to showcase your achievements as a real estate agents. Not only can you provide video walk-throughs of different homes, you can show off the surrounding landscape and neighborhoods.
You can also use videos to provide insight into who you are as a professional. A great way to do this is to create a market analysis video that conveys how much you know about the local market and industry. Establishing yourself as an authority is one of the most important pursuits that you can take as an agent.
To put it simply, videos do everything that pictures can’t. Thus, you should be serious about integrating it into your online strategy. You’ll be glad that you did.
The internet isn’t going anywhere, and neither is SEO. In the future, it will get more and more competitive as new techniques are developed.
If you don’t want to get left behind, make sure you carve out your niche in the industry.
Will Henry is a freelance content creator in Tampa, Florida. You can connect with him on LinkedIn.
