The Three Components of a Successful Real Estate SEO Strategy
As part of your overall digital strategy, it’s critical that you have a well-planned SEO strategy in place. Without one, no one within your target audience will be able to discover your website organically, at the right time, and for the right reasons.
Organic traffic is by far the most valuable traffic your website can get because it’s often the most engaged, the most qualified, and the most likely to convert into a lead over time.
No matter how you look at it, when it comes to your digital presence, SEO success means digital strategy success.
When you’re planning your SEO strategy, there are 3 key components that you need to focus on to see long-term success:
1. Establishing Authority
Establishing authority is all about proving that you’re an expert in your field and that your opinion matters. But more specifically, when it comes to your SEO strategy, establishing authority means building pages, posts, and content that are seen as authoritative to search engines.
When someone searches for something online, there might be thousands of search results, potentially even millions, and (leaving some of the technical details out) Google is really just trying to find the best, most relevant search results to answer the searcher’s question – and the pages and posts that are seen as the most authoritative usually are at the top of those results.
While there are a lot of different ways to show that your website is authoritative, one of the main ones is by getting backlinks, but those backlinks also have to be from an authoritative source.
For example, if you were to get a backlink from one of your colleague’s real estate websites, that’s great; but if you’re able to get a backlink from the Washington Post (or whatever your local equivalent large news source is), that’s even better and way more valuable because the source is seen as being much more authoritative.
Essentially, the more quality backlinks you get from authoritative sources, the more Google will see your website and content as authoritative as well.
In short, backlinks are a signal that shows that your website is trustworthy, authoritative, and good source for showing up in search results for relevant searches.
★ Want to learn more about establishing authority? Have a look at these posts:
- How Being Authoritative Can Bring You More Quality Website Traffic
- The Steps to Building a Trustworthy Personal Real Estate Brand
- Why You Need an External Link Building Strategy for Your Real Estate Website
2. Building Relevance
To be successful, your SEO strategy and your content strategy must both be relevant; not just for what you want to rank in search for, but also relevant to what your target audience wants to engage with.
That’s because a solid SEO strategy doesn’t stop at just getting your content to rank in search. SEO is always 2 parts: the first 50% is getting your content to rank in search for the keywords and keyphrases that are relevant to your target audience, and the other 50% is getting your target audience to actually click the link once they do find it in a search result.
And both of them need to be treated as equally important to build a strong, relevant SEO strategy that gets results.
That means making sure your SEO titles and meta-descriptions are well-written, well-planned, and are highly relevant and indicative that they can provide a direct answer to the question being searched – so the searcher will want to click it.
The next step after that is engagement. Once they do actually click through, you need to make sure they stick around for as long as possible and click through to as many other links as possible, so Google knows they’re engaged with your website after their initial search. More on why that’s important in the next component.
★ Want to learn more about building relevance? Have a look at these posts:
- Understanding SEO Titles and Meta-Descriptions on Your Real Estate Website
- Writing Content for SEO as a Real Estate Agent
3. Creating a Positive User Experience
While there are a lot of technical details that go into building a strong SEO strategy, that doesn’t mean you should overlook the visual details and what your overall website user experience is like.
Nowadays, if you have an ugly, old, dated website that you’ve decided to attempt to rank in search results, you’re facing a long, uphill battle (maybe even an impossible one).
How your website looks and how people use it is an important component of your SEO strategy.
For example, if someone searched for something like: “when’s the best time of the year to sell my home”, and they click a link in the search results that brings them to an ugly, dated, slow loading website with a poorly-written article that doesn’t really answer their question, they’re going to click the back button fairly quickly.
If they then click another link in the search results, and it brings them to a beautiful, well-designed, fast loading website with a well-written article that answers their question in detail, and they stay there for awhile reading it (and maybe click to read a few other articles), all of that information gets sent to, and is processed by, Google.
From that, Google knows the the first website isn’t good to show for that search result, and that the second one is a good result to show for that search result – and it will reward the better search result.
★ Want to learn more about building a successful SEO strategy ? Have a look at these posts:
- Building a Successful Real Estate Off-Page SEO Strategy
- Why Building Trust is a Key Part of a Successful SEO Strategy
- How to Build a Solid Real Estate Local SEO Strategy
Building a strong SEO strategy that consistently brings in organic traffic takes time, effort, and skill, but by focusing on the basics, you’ll be setting the foundation for long-term digital success.
Want to learn more about SEO and get more traffic to your website? Our SEO Strategy Building Guide is a mix of curated content and self-guided workbook that will help provide insight on how you can build and implement a modern SEO and overall search strategy.
