10 Ways To Improve The SEO Ranking Of Your Local Real Estate Business

When it comes to having a website, there are many businesses that aim to get their content in front of as many people around the world as possible. From eCommerce stores to blogs, the higher the stats and the wider the audience, the more chance there is of that website turning a profit and growing.

However, as the owner or marketer of a real estate company, the same simply isn’t true. While it might be nice to have thousands of hits on your website every single day, the profitable customers are going to come from people in your local area, in your local town or city, or surrounding areas.

This is why it’s not so important to get as many people as possible looking at your website, but rather optimizing your website to come up first in the local search engine results pages (SERPs), so more relevant people will see you.

To come up first in the local search listings mean optimizing your local SEO practices, which is slightly different from your typical SEO process. Today, we’re going to explore the top ten tips you need to know, helping you improve your ranking to maximize your relevant reach.

1. See Where You Are
2. How good is your current SEO and processes? Not sure? Try to optimize your content here or there, or have you never really thought about it? While SEO rankings can always be tweaked and improved (and if you’re not, then you’re going to fall behind), things might not be as bad as you think they are; or they might be.
3. Before you start tweaking your pages and content, make sure you’re carrying out an SEO audit to see where your website is right now. For this, you can use a professional website service that looks at your XML sitemap, your general page structure, your inbound and outbound links, and your functionality in general, such as how mobile-friendly your website is.
4. Optimise for Mobile Devices
5. Continuing from what we spoke about above, you need to make sure your website is easily accessible and functional from mobile devices, especially since statistics show around 75% of your traffic will be coming from them.
6. You need to ensure you’re using a responsive design that fits any screen or device accessing your website, once again giving your users a clean and fluid experience. If your website is on WordPress, Wix or any similar website builder, you are all set and your website will easily adjust to devices. But if it is not and a developer is in charge of your website, then you should request this specifically.
7. Upload Blog Content
8. If you don’t already, it’s important to make sure you’re posting blog content on your website. These are posts and articles designed to help you provide value to your readers on any topic. The more content you have on your website, the higher you’ll rank because they’ll be more indexable pages.
9. Make sure you’re actually providing value in what you say, optimize your articles for SEO guidelines, and have optimised visual content, such as videos, images, and infographics to enhance your reader’s experience.
10. Here are some guidelines on optimizing with keywords:
11. Research keyword beforehand with Google Keyword research or SEMrush
12. Implement your keyword in the title, as close to beginning of title as possible
13. Implement your keyword in the first 100 words of your blog post
14. Place it in a subtitle or two
15. Use it throughout the text where appropriate - don’t stuff your content with keywords, it’s better to make it look natural.
16. Use it in your meta title and meta description
17. Use it in your URL
18. Other than optimizing with keywords, you can do the following:
19. Make the content useful and relevant as well as engaging to your readers because dwell time (the time a user spent on your post) and scroll depth both count.
20. Link to authority websites in your niche and with relevance to your topic
21. Build backlinks to your website
22. Use internal linking
23. Optimise Your Images
24. As a real estate business, there are going to be lots of images on your website, and every single one of these needs optimizing to make sure it’s giving you the best return and ranking. Start by optimising the size of your images to ensure they’re not too large and could take too long to load, especially on mobile devices.
25. You’ll then also want to rename your image file names to make sure it’s a relevant statement or title that describes the image, rather than just an assortment of random letters and numbers.
26. Include ALT text which has your keyword so that Google bots can recognize it and rank you better for it. You can also add image descriptions.
27. Get on Social Media
28. There’s no denying that social media is a goldmine when it comes to SEO, but only if you’re using it right. This is because you’ll be able to connect with people from your local area on a one-on-one basis, which can then be reflected in the search engines.
29. For example, if lots of people in your local town are reading your blog content which has been shared on social media, this is going to rank the content higher in your area, thus bringing you in more viewers and a higher ranking in your town/city.
30. Register Your Business with Directories
31. There are plenty of business directories out there, but you’ll want to make sure you’re registering with the ones that are relevant to you, your business, and your local area.
32. By registering with these directories, you’re expanding your reach and giving the algorithms more information to work with regarding who you are and what you do; thus boosting your SEO ranking.
33. Start by registering with Google My Business because this is what will appear in the search engine results.
34. Write Optimised Content
35. While some of these tips are slightly different from regular SEO practice, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be following the general rules and guidelines. You still need to make sure you’re writing high-quality, well-optimized content that’s free from errors and mistakes and gives your readers the best experience.
36. Even if you’re not a professional writer, you can still write professional content for your website and social media pages using online tools to help.
37. Backlink to Your Local Area
38. We’ve spoken a lot in this article about optimizing your content through backlinks, whether these are in your blog content or on your web pages. However, you need to make sure you understand the importance of linking to authority websites that rank highly themselves. Since you’re trying to boost your reach in your local area, you’ll want to link to high-ranking pages and businesses in your local area.
39. A good way to do this is to search for your location and see what the first websites to come up are. Then think about ways you can link these websites through the content in your strategy in a clean and respectable way. You may even want to develop a partnership with these companies to help each other.
40. It’s important to make sure you’re only linking to authority websites because if you’re linking to a website or page that has a bad SEO ranking, it’s only going to pull you down, so make sure you’re researching for the best pages to link too. Be consistent and don’t try and cram as many links in as possible.
41. Comment on Real Estate Blogs
42. In days gone past, people actually used to pay money for people to comment about their business on chatrooms, blog comments, and forums, but search engines have come a long way since then, but the tactic of actually commenting and linking is a great way to boost your SEO ranking if done tastefully.
43. The key thing to remember here is to provide value to your readers. If you’re spamming people and blogs, you’re going to get ranked down, so make sure you’re spending maybe an hour or two a week, more if you can afford it, reading through content and providing real insight that people can benefit from.
44. You can then link to your real estate blog content or website in your reply, or in your author’s bio of your comment, thus boosting your SEO ranking and click-through rate. Quora is another popular place to reply and expand your reach in this way.
45. Claim Your Google Business Card
46. Last, but certainly not least, set up your business officially on Google and make sure you’re offering as much information as possible. This means putting yourself on Google Maps and claiming your Google Business card that shows up on the right-hand side of the search bar.
47. The more information you put in here, the better experience Google can give their users, so the more visibility the search engine will give you!

Conclusion

As you can see, there are plenty of ways to boost the local SEO ranking of your real estate business and your website, but it all centers around the point of providing real value to your users. The more value you can provide, the better your rank will be, so aim for this!

Author Bio

Sara Sparrow is a marketing writer at Best Essay services. She writes about latest marketing and tech trends.