Real Estate SEO Requires Special Attention Other Industries Do Not Need
Realtor’s Website SEO That Works
By Your Marketing Guru - Stu Leventhal - Site Editor
Local Realtors want to rank for local realty search terms. What are local realty terms? These are terms and phrases that web searchers use to find a local realtor when they search using an online search engine. When your website does not come up right away on the first or at least the second website page of a potential new real estate client’s search on Google for a realtor or for property for sale or condos for rent, you know you have little chance of that searcher landing on your website.
First you have to tell Google exactly what your website and specifically what each page is about before Google can recommend you properly to the searchers looking for what info you host on your site or blog online.
***Realtor Business and Marketing Strategy***
Announcing Your New Real Estate Agent LinkedIn Group - created just for realtors seeking business advice and marketing tips! Join... Learn, Network!
Now you and I can agree that real estate terminology is in use worldwide. So local SEO, Local Search Engine Optimization, begins by enhancing the generic real estate industry words and phrases so you are using more local versions. Home for sale becomes homes for sale in (add your town or city). Now people in other counties and living miles away, on the other side of the nation, who search for “homes for sale” won’t be shown your website, unless they specifically ask for your town.
Now you should know that often Google will recommend local realtors and websites that have local house listings without someone requesting a specific town because google search has advanced to the point where they know where you are located as you search. Yes, they speed things up for their searching customers by assuming you want a nearby realtor or a nearby real estate blog because you are in a particular vicinity at time of your search. Still you specialize in a particular real estate client looking for a particular price range or type of home or life style. You need more specific client leads. So you first convince Google, the best web search engine the world has so far, that your webpage is about and for your specific client you serve as well as for the specific neighborhoods you advise on.
To a point, google can tell what your website is about. But Google is not using humans to view and then decide how to determine what, when and to whom to recommend your webpage to or for what searches. Of course if google does not recommend your site or keeps on recommend your competitors’ sites ahead of yours then your web effort and publishing will not do their job which is to get you new business and new real estate clients.
You can skip pleasing Google all together and just post on social media and blog post, so you are sending potential clients directly to your site via the links you leave in your posts from your writing and in your video descriptions. Although those same kind of relevant links are one of the things that Google wants to see going to your website.
Those links help Google determine what your site page is about and by monitoring the activity those links get from your social media post for example, Google can tell how much your website’s page is enjoyed once someone lands on it. Know that when you show you can get your own visitors to your site, Google is impressed and ranks your web page higher for their searchers.
So placing good links in prime places anywhere online that actually can lead a potential business prospect for you, to your website and to a specific page on your site, is one way to raise your web page ranking for a specific keyword or key phrase. So we have learned so far that we first tell Google what our web page is about and that is done by being very clear and drilled down with what we say, show and publish on our web pages. Think like a computer. A smart computer can be programmed to figure out what a page of text is about, fairly accurately but not photos or videos unless you tell it what those images pertain to. Google likes photos and especially videos on your page and site because it knows lots of videos and photography pleases its search customers. But Google relies on you to tell it what those images are about so they know the type of search traffic to send you.
Search Engines evaluate your text based on the wording you use, the titles and subtitles you use and because they know what those words mean. They have been on many other realtor websites. But you have added some images graphics and photos perhaps a fun video or two to make your page more visually pleasing and they reward you some for that, but are those photos any good quality and is the video about the same topic as the text you wrote? They may not be able to tell so to avoid confusion you are tasked with informing them about your images.
Remember, it is very important to Google that your website page loads fast, because they have learned as you and I have learned too from experience that web browsers are impatient and do not wait long for web pages to load up. Web searchers go try a different page on some other website, perhaps one of your competitors’ web pages, when your videos and photos do not load fast!
To get photos to load faster requires shrinking the files as much as possible without messing up the quality of the images. Did you know that your published images, graphics, videos and photography can rank all by themselves as well as help rank your page? Yes; so do add lots of images of various kinds but keep checking if your page loads quick too and take measures to improve load time.
Now just like you need to tell Google what your web page is about, you also need to describe your photos, vids and graphics. This can be done by using local keyword phrased titles for all of your images. What I am telling you is to name each photo and video appropriately using key phraseology that matches the page’s text and or the client type that you are seeking to attract to that page.
Do you know what alt attributes are? Alt attributes are textual versions of what a web browser sees when their viewing device does not read and display your photos or videos or other images. You must supply the alt attributes when you load your images or you get penalized or ranked lower by web search engines. By using local keyword phrases in your alt image descriptions you can tell Google and other search engines exactly what your image are showing and who they are for.
So again, it comes down to using keywords and key phrases that are local so you get searchers interested in property in your sales territory coming to your blog and website. Yes having good photos and enjoyable, informative videos are important to rank your pages but SEOing those images properly too is equally important.
Good Local keywords are terms and phrases that local people use to search for property or a Realtor who specializes in their precise needs. You really do not want people who are searching for real estate that is not in your sales territory so you create a website that instantly identifies the type of client you serve. A house photo is just a house photo unless you tell everyone where that house is and give us some specific features of the home. Google cannot see the house so you have to be more specific with you alt attributes.
Make sure search engines thoroughly understand your images. Search engines like Google search will reward you with high rankings because most realtors, your competitors, do not take this extra step and when they do they rush and are not nearly as thorough as I am suggesting that you be.
Do not let Google guess about things. They will rank your web pages wrong and you will get the wrong visitors unless you make it as easy as possible for them to recognize what you are trying to do with your website and tell them what is going on at each of your web pages.
Your intimate knowledge of your sales territory should give you the best local keywords to optimize your pages for. Other realtors will not be publishing stuff about small niche communities that you serve because they would never have heard the local words that the area residents use to talk about a certain place or tiny neighborhood. Keywording to win is all about information and you since you know more about your local neighborhoods than anyone, descriptive keywords should be on the tip of your tongue.
Ask yourself; what do the locals call the various wealthy sections of your town or city? The different rural areas are often referred to by cute names only the locals know? The community that lives near the lake or by a river’s shore, are referred to by nicknames that could date back many, many years and even generations. These are your best keywords because realtors not involved with your community cannot poach your web searchers due to not knowing those key names for specific areas in your sales territory!
State a house listing is near a local landmark or in the vicinity of a popular golf course. Sometimes just mentioning the west or east side is enough to get your page to rank for that area. Other times you can add, for example, a land mark like saying, homes in the neighborhood around a popular park. Or talk about the section near the museum or say, home for sale blocks from the (add the name of a well-known mall). If your town has a local hero or sports star or historic figure like a popular general or Author that once lived there and many know where he lived because it is a visitor or tourist site seeing place, you can say home for sale in the prestigious neighborhood that (add the celebrities name) lived at with his family for many, many years.
Keywording is not hard; just describe things using plain language that you think searchers might use to search with. Yes use zip codes and phone area codes to designate areas and places and situations that you are talking about. Remember to optimize for human searchers too since they are your clients who pay your fee. Great photos of your sales area and its architecture there, will get you clients calling your phone number. The best photos and videos sell the most houses and they sell faster too!
Your image alt attributes get your website appropriate visitors but your website must be set up to do more; to sales pitch and to capture names and contact info. Remember people and Google search love images. But do not overload one page with too many images and do not place very large images on pages because your load time will suffer and that as mentioned earlier annoys both people and search engines.
TIP: Compressing your images makes them load faster. There are plenty of free online solutions that will help you compress your image files.
If you have image thumb nails, yes you can use a different set of keywords on your alt attributes for the thumbnail from those keywords used on the actual larger image alt attributes. This gets you a new set of viewers to your page.
TIP: Another way to tell search engine spiders where certain pages are and what they are about is to always have a detailed site map on your website that directs the spider to places and pages and says exactly what is there. Yes, you can also have an image site map too.
Also add local tags to all of your images, articles and posts. If you make the extra effort to do just some of these SEO suggestions your realtor website and blog will out rank most of your competitors sites and thus be recommended more often to cyber searchers!
That is because it is a fact that most realtors will not go the extra mile to SEO properly. Many do not understand SEO because few have invested in taking a Realtor Marketing or Business Course on what they feel are the too very complicated to learn tech elements of web marketing. This of course is not true; SEO is easy once you get the basics down but learning anything does take dedication and time.
When you choose local real estate words to optimize, far less realtors are optimizing for those same phrases, since many have never heard them and you own the local search results pages for searchers who use local language to Google search.
Are not these informed searchers your best chance to sign a new client. They already know some things about your local sales territory and they are obviously interested. Now you have to pitch them on you being the best realtor in town!
Hey, want more SEO tips and other marketing advice for realtors? Join the new LinkedIn group, created just to discuss realtor business and marketing issues:
Realtor Business and Marketing Strategy
References for more Realtor Career info and Tips:
The Realtor's Business Book Library
The 90 Day New Realtor's Course
By Your Marketing Guru - Stu Leventhal - Site Editor
Local Realtors want to rank for local realty search terms. What are local realty terms? These are terms and phrases that web searchers use to find a local realtor when they search using an online search engine. When your website does not come up right away on the first or at least the second website page of a potential new real estate client’s search on Google for a realtor or for property for sale or condos for rent, you know you have little chance of that searcher landing on your website.
First you have to tell Google exactly what your website and specifically what each page is about before Google can recommend you properly to the searchers looking for what info you host on your site or blog online.
***Realtor Business and Marketing Strategy***
Announcing Your New Real Estate Agent LinkedIn Group - created just for realtors seeking business advice and marketing tips! Join... Learn, Network!
Now you and I can agree that real estate terminology is in use worldwide. So local SEO, Local Search Engine Optimization, begins by enhancing the generic real estate industry words and phrases so you are using more local versions. Home for sale becomes homes for sale in (add your town or city). Now people in other counties and living miles away, on the other side of the nation, who search for “homes for sale” won’t be shown your website, unless they specifically ask for your town.
Now you should know that often Google will recommend local realtors and websites that have local house listings without someone requesting a specific town because google search has advanced to the point where they know where you are located as you search. Yes, they speed things up for their searching customers by assuming you want a nearby realtor or a nearby real estate blog because you are in a particular vicinity at time of your search. Still you specialize in a particular real estate client looking for a particular price range or type of home or life style. You need more specific client leads. So you first convince Google, the best web search engine the world has so far, that your webpage is about and for your specific client you serve as well as for the specific neighborhoods you advise on.
To a point, google can tell what your website is about. But Google is not using humans to view and then decide how to determine what, when and to whom to recommend your webpage to or for what searches. Of course if google does not recommend your site or keeps on recommend your competitors’ sites ahead of yours then your web effort and publishing will not do their job which is to get you new business and new real estate clients.
You can skip pleasing Google all together and just post on social media and blog post, so you are sending potential clients directly to your site via the links you leave in your posts from your writing and in your video descriptions. Although those same kind of relevant links are one of the things that Google wants to see going to your website.
Those links help Google determine what your site page is about and by monitoring the activity those links get from your social media post for example, Google can tell how much your website’s page is enjoyed once someone lands on it. Know that when you show you can get your own visitors to your site, Google is impressed and ranks your web page higher for their searchers.
So placing good links in prime places anywhere online that actually can lead a potential business prospect for you, to your website and to a specific page on your site, is one way to raise your web page ranking for a specific keyword or key phrase. So we have learned so far that we first tell Google what our web page is about and that is done by being very clear and drilled down with what we say, show and publish on our web pages. Think like a computer. A smart computer can be programmed to figure out what a page of text is about, fairly accurately but not photos or videos unless you tell it what those images pertain to. Google likes photos and especially videos on your page and site because it knows lots of videos and photography pleases its search customers. But Google relies on you to tell it what those images are about so they know the type of search traffic to send you.
Search Engines evaluate your text based on the wording you use, the titles and subtitles you use and because they know what those words mean. They have been on many other realtor websites. But you have added some images graphics and photos perhaps a fun video or two to make your page more visually pleasing and they reward you some for that, but are those photos any good quality and is the video about the same topic as the text you wrote? They may not be able to tell so to avoid confusion you are tasked with informing them about your images.
Remember, it is very important to Google that your website page loads fast, because they have learned as you and I have learned too from experience that web browsers are impatient and do not wait long for web pages to load up. Web searchers go try a different page on some other website, perhaps one of your competitors’ web pages, when your videos and photos do not load fast!
To get photos to load faster requires shrinking the files as much as possible without messing up the quality of the images. Did you know that your published images, graphics, videos and photography can rank all by themselves as well as help rank your page? Yes; so do add lots of images of various kinds but keep checking if your page loads quick too and take measures to improve load time.
Now just like you need to tell Google what your web page is about, you also need to describe your photos, vids and graphics. This can be done by using local keyword phrased titles for all of your images. What I am telling you is to name each photo and video appropriately using key phraseology that matches the page’s text and or the client type that you are seeking to attract to that page.
Do you know what alt attributes are? Alt attributes are textual versions of what a web browser sees when their viewing device does not read and display your photos or videos or other images. You must supply the alt attributes when you load your images or you get penalized or ranked lower by web search engines. By using local keyword phrases in your alt image descriptions you can tell Google and other search engines exactly what your image are showing and who they are for.
So again, it comes down to using keywords and key phrases that are local so you get searchers interested in property in your sales territory coming to your blog and website. Yes having good photos and enjoyable, informative videos are important to rank your pages but SEOing those images properly too is equally important.
Good Local keywords are terms and phrases that local people use to search for property or a Realtor who specializes in their precise needs. You really do not want people who are searching for real estate that is not in your sales territory so you create a website that instantly identifies the type of client you serve. A house photo is just a house photo unless you tell everyone where that house is and give us some specific features of the home. Google cannot see the house so you have to be more specific with you alt attributes.
Make sure search engines thoroughly understand your images. Search engines like Google search will reward you with high rankings because most realtors, your competitors, do not take this extra step and when they do they rush and are not nearly as thorough as I am suggesting that you be.
Do not let Google guess about things. They will rank your web pages wrong and you will get the wrong visitors unless you make it as easy as possible for them to recognize what you are trying to do with your website and tell them what is going on at each of your web pages.
Your intimate knowledge of your sales territory should give you the best local keywords to optimize your pages for. Other realtors will not be publishing stuff about small niche communities that you serve because they would never have heard the local words that the area residents use to talk about a certain place or tiny neighborhood. Keywording to win is all about information and you since you know more about your local neighborhoods than anyone, descriptive keywords should be on the tip of your tongue.
Ask yourself; what do the locals call the various wealthy sections of your town or city? The different rural areas are often referred to by cute names only the locals know? The community that lives near the lake or by a river’s shore, are referred to by nicknames that could date back many, many years and even generations. These are your best keywords because realtors not involved with your community cannot poach your web searchers due to not knowing those key names for specific areas in your sales territory!
State a house listing is near a local landmark or in the vicinity of a popular golf course. Sometimes just mentioning the west or east side is enough to get your page to rank for that area. Other times you can add, for example, a land mark like saying, homes in the neighborhood around a popular park. Or talk about the section near the museum or say, home for sale blocks from the (add the name of a well-known mall). If your town has a local hero or sports star or historic figure like a popular general or Author that once lived there and many know where he lived because it is a visitor or tourist site seeing place, you can say home for sale in the prestigious neighborhood that (add the celebrities name) lived at with his family for many, many years.
Keywording is not hard; just describe things using plain language that you think searchers might use to search with. Yes use zip codes and phone area codes to designate areas and places and situations that you are talking about. Remember to optimize for human searchers too since they are your clients who pay your fee. Great photos of your sales area and its architecture there, will get you clients calling your phone number. The best photos and videos sell the most houses and they sell faster too!
Your image alt attributes get your website appropriate visitors but your website must be set up to do more; to sales pitch and to capture names and contact info. Remember people and Google search love images. But do not overload one page with too many images and do not place very large images on pages because your load time will suffer and that as mentioned earlier annoys both people and search engines.
TIP: Compressing your images makes them load faster. There are plenty of free online solutions that will help you compress your image files.
If you have image thumb nails, yes you can use a different set of keywords on your alt attributes for the thumbnail from those keywords used on the actual larger image alt attributes. This gets you a new set of viewers to your page.
TIP: Another way to tell search engine spiders where certain pages are and what they are about is to always have a detailed site map on your website that directs the spider to places and pages and says exactly what is there. Yes, you can also have an image site map too.
Also add local tags to all of your images, articles and posts. If you make the extra effort to do just some of these SEO suggestions your realtor website and blog will out rank most of your competitors sites and thus be recommended more often to cyber searchers!
That is because it is a fact that most realtors will not go the extra mile to SEO properly. Many do not understand SEO because few have invested in taking a Realtor Marketing or Business Course on what they feel are the too very complicated to learn tech elements of web marketing. This of course is not true; SEO is easy once you get the basics down but learning anything does take dedication and time.
When you choose local real estate words to optimize, far less realtors are optimizing for those same phrases, since many have never heard them and you own the local search results pages for searchers who use local language to Google search.
Are not these informed searchers your best chance to sign a new client. They already know some things about your local sales territory and they are obviously interested. Now you have to pitch them on you being the best realtor in town!
Hey, want more SEO tips and other marketing advice for realtors? Join the new LinkedIn group, created just to discuss realtor business and marketing issues:
Realtor Business and Marketing Strategy
References for more Realtor Career info and Tips:
The Realtor's Business Book Library
The 90 Day New Realtor's Course