By Peter Minkoff

People rarely look at print ads when they are looking for real estate to rent or buy nowadays. Just like with all other stuff they are considering putting money into, they begin their search online, informing and educating themselves, and afterward analyzing the offer.

If you want your real-estate business to succeed, you need to make all of the content you put online easy for them to find. Statistics saying that 75% of internet users never scroll past the first page while about 30% of them just click the first result that comes up in their searches means there is some serious SEO business ahead of you.

Here are the 10 most relevant tips to make your real estate business flourish in 2020.

1. Find the right keywords

Keywords are the starting point of every SEO strategy, so it’s crucial that you use the right ones on your website and the other content that you publish. There are many tools available online that can help you find these keywords, and some of the most popular ones are Ahrefs Keyword Explorer, SEM Rush, and Google Keyword Planner.

Your goal is to find out the words your clients most often use when they’re looking for a piece of real estate to buy, sell or rent. To reach your target audience, it is very important for your real estate property to rank well in local searches too, so you need to find the right local keywords based on the areas of your service.

Besides your content, you should include keywords in the URL, page title, meta descriptions, and image alt tags. Still, you don’t want to overstuff your page with keywords, so make sure they don’t take more than 1-2% of the page.

2. Use relevant links

Google will reward you with better rankings if other relevant websites are talking about your real estate business so you need to create backlinks. In other words, authority sources should contain links pointing to your website. To be successful with link building, you need to reach out to trustworthy review or niche websites, as well as your local partners and media. Or hire a partner like backlink-masters to handle the workload for you.

3. Forget about the fluff

Still, your SEO efforts are hardly going to pay off unless your content is high-quality and tailored to fit the needs of your potential clients. Your every piece of content needs to add value to their lives, so it’s essential to address the most common problems of your target audience and offer them useful information or a solution. 

Forget about the content serving no other purpose than to be a vehicle for keywords and links, and shift to well-crafted pieces that will keep your users on your website longer, and boost their engagement. You can also try a serp simulator.

If you want to make your SEO more efficient but lack the ideas on the content you could create, consider hiring a local digital agency that could help you come up with a good and relevant content strategy. There are some great reputable agencies, such as a New York SEO firm Four Dots, which are affordable even for small companies, so it’s worth checking out their offer.

4. Be local

Google and Bing focus on local searches, so apart from offering useful and relevant content to your clients, you should also focus on making it local. You can write about schools in your area, sports or community events, give a review of a local restaurant – whatever best fits the informational needs of your clients. 

Related: Looking to buy and sell businesses, click here.

Try to spontaneously optimize your content and make it locally relevant. Use interactive maps, infographics, photos – such visuals add value to your content enormously.

5. Ask for reviews

The quantity and quality of the reviews your business gets to affect your ratings in the searches. In order to improve your online visibility, try to incentivize your satisfied clients to share their reviews or recommendations of your real estate business online. Reviews work best when they appear in several different places online, so you can have them on your website and get more Google Reviews, Yelp, as well as on Zillow, and Trulia.

Asking for reviews manually can be a tedious and time-consuming task. That's why you should look into tools that enable you to automate review collection altogether.

Make sure you respond to all the reviews, including the negative ones – it will positively affect your rankings.

6. Optimize for speed 

Consumers nowadays don’t want to wait longer than 3 seconds for the website to load. For every second added the bounce rate increases – a 1-second delay costs you 11% in terms of traffic lost, and 16% in terms of customer satisfaction.

Audit your content for speed and make all the necessary changes to make it run smoothly.

7. Optimize for mobile

As recent research shows, 72% of real estate buyers used their mobile phones to search for their new homes, and the similar applies to rentals. 

Both search engines and your prospect prefer mobile-optimized webpages, so unless your website displays well on smartphones and tablets, your business can suffer.

8. Use videos

Visuals, such as photos and videos, can bring the traffic and boost engagement with your site, thus increasing your rankings.

When it comes to real estate, such real estate marketing video content is essential, as property buyers love to browse and watch brand/property videos before making a purchase.

Learn about the ways you can optimize video content for faster loading.

9. Use social media

Use the power of social media to boost engagement with your content, and increase your rankings. Some of the social media channels most commonly used in real estate are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest, so make sure you have accounts there and post relevant content, often.  

Take a look at a few great real-estate Instagram accounts, and see how realtors can use their personality to promote their listings. 

10. Have a blog

Blog posts are a great way to create fresh and unique content for your website and attract quality traffic. Include them on your website too, and post high-quality, optimized pieces regularly and consistently.

 If you lack ideas, here are a few suggestions to begin with:

• Make a list of 10 best business websites in your area,

• Thank your favorite clients and say what they helped you learn,

• Write about all the parks in the area and what they’re offering,

• Make a list of five most beautiful properties on the market,

• Write the list of the best real estate apps your prospects can use, 

• Review the best places for a romantic dinner.

Many realtors use their personal websites to promote their business, adding their genuine tone and approach to the real estate. Check them out to get the ideas.

Use these techniques to boost your rankings, and enjoy all the benefits of successful SEO in the year to come.

Have a listing you think should be featured contact us or email at Jeremy@offthemrkt.com to tell us more! Follow Off The MRKT on Twitter and Instagram, and like us on Facebook.