Before jumping into the ways you can optimise your real estate website for SEO, let’s look at some stats for 2020:
- 78% of location-oriented searches resulted in an offline conversion
- Updating existing content with fresh content can increase organic traffic by 111.3%
- Video content is 5 times more likely to drive a conversion than content alone
- 82% of people who implemented an SEO strategy found it to be effective
- Position #1 in Google enjoys a 34.36% CTR
With this being said, let’s look at 5 ways you can incorporate SEO best practices into your real estate website.
1. Use a variety of compelling content
To boost brand awareness, conversion, engagement and revenue, your content must be useful to your audience. It needs to educate them on your products and services and find a solution to their problems. The content should be varied and presented in engaging formats, e.g. blogs, video, tutorials, podcasts, etc. In this way, you’ll attract a target audience with whom to build rapport, establish trust and convert into customers.
2. Make sure your website is mobile friendly
The following stats by Safari Digital highlight how critical it is for your real estate website to be mobile responsive:
- 92% of mobile phone users will access the internet from their mobile device.
- 69% of mobile device users say that they are more likely to buy from a website that addresses their questions easily.
- The cut off load time for a mobile device is 5 seconds. And according to Google, a delay of one-second can mean a 20% drop in conversion.
- 57% of users would not recommend a business with a poorly designed mobile website
- 88% of customers will call or visit a store within 24-hours of making search from a mobile device
The takeaway here is ensuring that your website is responsive on all mobile devices, i.e. smartphones, tablet and laptop. It needs to integrate UX and UI best practices so users can navigate the site quickly and easily. Images must be optimised to display properly and assigned a keyword-rich title and ALT tags for search engine indexing. Text must be easy to read and see, and CTA buttons must be clearly visible and clickable.
3. Use long-tail keywords to increase web traffic
Yoast defines a long-tail keyword as “more specific than a head keyword, and most of the time – but not necessarily – it consists of more words”. Backlinko further explains that “long tail keywords are search terms with relatively low search volume and competition levels. Also, long tail terms tend to be longer in length (3+ words) than most other keyword types”.
So why use long tail keywords? Because 92% of all keywords that people type into search engines are long tails, they can be cheaper to bid on and can have a higher CTR (click through rate).
4. Social media is very important but not everything
Safari Digital points out that “search engines are 10 times more effective than social media at driving traffic to shopping sites”. The most visited website in the world remains Google which still ranks #1 as of April 2020. In fact, according to Oberlo, Google currently holds a whopping 92.18 percent of the worldwide search engine market share. As far as social media is concerned, Facebook is in position #4, Instagram at #29 and Twitter at #40.
These stats emphasise how vital it is to have an SEO strategy in place, particularly in meeting Google’s algorithmic demands. This requires optimising your real estate website for page speed, page titles, meta descriptions, backlinks, keywords, etc.
5. Improve under-performing content
Go to the Search Analytics report in Google’s Search Console and review all Clicks, Impressions and Position. This data will provide insights on what keywords are generating the most traffic and SERP impressions, and their average position. Identify the keywords that fall between positions 10-25 and which can be pushed up to page 1 so as to increase traffic significantly. By establishing which pages your keywords are ranking for gives you the opportunity to make improvements.
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