SEO is vital for the success of any real estate business that wants to stay ahead of the rest. Because when people want to get a home, the first place they look is the internet. 

The real estate industry is a highly competitive sector. Realtors and real estate agents have to stay ahead of their game if they want to be at the top of the pack. The reason for the high competitiveness is due to the high volume of investments in the industry.

Besides that, the real estate agents compete against one another even though they are united under one larger real estate firm. So each individual agents must make their cut hence they rely on a number of marketing and branding techniques to help them get new business.

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The internet has enormous opportunities to grow any business. It is easily accessible and there will be very few charges.Unfortunately most real estate business concentrate on just having an online presence without a clear strategy on the end goal. What such business don’t understand is that there is more to having a website or a blog.

With the overwhelming popularity of the internet, one has to find a way of standing out above the crowd. A proper real estate SEO strategy can help you get there. But how?

What does a well-informed Real Estate SEO involve?

Proper Keywords for Relevant Audiences

Like the general SEO, real estate SEO must target a specific audience. As such, it is important to have proper keywords for the relevant audiences. This means that if you are selling homes in Canada, your keywords must be directed to a Canadian audience.

Local SEO

Real estate marketers also need to embrace local SEO for a number of reasons. The main one is that local SEO is a lot more different from the average SEO campaign. It is highly effective especially in targeting local customers. It helps link local home buyers with realtors at exactly the time they are looking for a home to buy.

To get started with local real estate SEO, there is a lot of up-front work that is needed on your website. This is to ensure that it is clearly visible on search engines as wells as local pack listings. Therefore, you have to rely more on things like local NAP (name, address and phone number) citations, local reviews and other business signals.

For the local SEO, you also need to be very categorical about optimising your website for local keywords. Below is a classic example of keywords that can be used for local SEO for a real estate business in cape town:

• Cape town real estate
• Find a real estate firm in Cape town
• Cape town homes for sale
• Cape town realtors
• Cape town real estate agent

Site Performance and Usability

A good site is always an advantage for real estate SEO. This is because it makes it easy for the search engine to find such a website and thus enabling a real estate agent to reach more people. One way of increasing the usability of your site is to write a blog post on different homes.

A blog with catchy content is a good way of securing traffic on your site. This is particularly true if your blog targets specific properties which prospective home buyers will be looking for from the internet.

In preparing a blog post, the standard SEO practices for using the right keyword in the Meta description, title tag, ALT tag on photos and the Content should be adhered to.

Take Advantage of Pictures and Videos

From time to time, SEO experts have continued to emphasise the importance of photos in SEO. I reiterate this position noting that both pictures and videos are key engagements for the real estate industry. Home buyers would obviously want to see a video tour of their prospective home or images of the home and the surrounding environment.

Videos can also be very effective for capturing testimonials. People want to know what the experience was buying a home with you. In fact, this increases the number of inquiries for listings thus increasing the number of home sold.

Make Use of Social Media

Many people haven’t quite internalised that social media is now a very big part of SEO and more so real estate SEO. Social media is a great way to establish new client relations, as well as, maintain the existing ones.

As a realtor, an active social media presence enables one interact with the clients on different levels. It allows the client to as questions and they get immediate feedback unlike in other communication channels.

Social media is also a good avenue to share all the pictures and video testimonials from the clients. The real estate agent can also share the blog posts from their website thus providing for an interesting read for his or her customers who are on social media.

So don’t let your business be left behind, improve your visibility through real estate SEO. I promise that it will be worth every single penny that you spend.

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