A massive ninety-seven percent. That is the percentile of homebuyers who leveraged the internet for their home search. Can you believe it?
The internet is vast, with over 197 million active websites and over 4.9 billion active users worldwide. Still, many people need to pay more attention to the importance of a real estate website. A powerful Internet presence should be essential to any real estate business model.
In fact, according to a survey from Ruler Analytics, real-estate websites convert an average of 4.7% of visitors into leads. Moreover, top-performing and optimized ones can convert up to 12% of qualified leads. That is why more and more marketers prefer websites as their marketing channel.
Real estate websites are not any different than others. They need to rank well in Google, generate leads, and get you more business. The same elements you consider when creating other websites, such as keyword research, SEO copywriting, website design & aesthetics, come into play.
The Whys of Real Estate Website SEO
But why should we give effort and attention to our real estate websites? What are the benefits of optimizing it? Below are the top reasons, so let’s proceed.
Reason #1. Professional-looking Web Design Boosts Authority and Reputation
In real estate, authority in the industry is vital as it helps you build trust with potential customers and leads to more long-lasting partnerships. The first thing that your clients will notice when they land on your website is the design and user experience. You want to give them a feeling of professionalism and trustworthiness from the moment they enter your page.
You may lose their trust and credibility if your website looks unprofessional or outdated. Moreover, slow and unresponsive websites will also give your clients a wrong impression of your brand. The optimal loading time for a real estate website is 3 seconds; more prolonged than that will frustrate users and make them bounce away.
Reason #2. Higher SERP Rank Improves Brand Visibility and Awareness
Search Engine Results Page(SERP) is the front page of search results when someone types for something (e.g., keyword: top real estate agency). If your website ranks high on Google for that specific keyword, more people will be able to find and browse your website. The higher your rank, the more likely your real estate business will have new clients.
Reason #3. Results of More Partnership and Collaboration
Top-performing websites tend to collaborate more with other top-performing websites. This is because they have a more established brand and reputation. More partnerships mean more opportunities to expand your business, especially when the partners have complementary offerings.
This leads to more exposure, traffic, and links back to your website. Additionally, more partnerships mean you can build your reputation by associating yourself with other successful brands. You can partner with other real estate websites to cross-promote each other’s services.
The Hows of Real Estate Website SEO
Now that we have a peek at the benefits of real estate SEO let’s look at how you can optimize your website. Let’s discuss several best practices on how we can optimize our website.
Tip #1. Create Unique and Interesting Content
Website content is a valuable resource for both website owners and users. They are a great tool to drive traffic and engagement to your real estate website. That is why creating unique and exciting content gives you an advantage over other websites.
You can create content by writing blog posts, guides, and tutorials that are relevant to your target audience. You may also utilize streaming software to create podcasts or a meme maker to create meme videos. You can then share this content on social media networks such as Facebook and Twitter to gain more exposure.
Tip#2. Add Social Media Buttons
Adding social media buttons to your website will allow users to easily share your content on their social media accounts. You can add buttons for the most popular social media networks, like Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
You may place the buttons in a prominent area at the top or bottom of the page. You may also add links to your other websites or blogs so people can easily access them from the same page.
Tip#3. Personalize Design for Mobile Viewers
With the fact that a lot of people now use their smartphones when searching for homes online, making sure that your website is mobile-friendly is a necessity. There are a few methods to do this, but here are two of the most common practices.
- Using Responsive Design
To personalize design for mobile viewers, you may utilize responsive design techniques like Bootstrap or similar frameworks. This allows your website to automatically customized itself depending on the device. This also ensures that the page will display correctly regardless of the device used to view it.
- Manual Customization
You may also manually customize your website to be mobile-friendly. You can reduce the font size and remove unnecessary information on pages to make them shorter and easier to read. With the help of an image or video editor, you may also resize your images and videos to make them more lightweight and easier to load.
Tip#4. Optimize Your Title Tags
Title tags are the words that appear in blue under the URL of a website. Search engines use them to determine what your page is about and how relevant it is to a user’s query. You can optimize your title tag by ensuring it is descriptive and concise while including keywords pertinent to your content.
Tip#5. Leverage Visually Apealling Animations
Including visually appealing animations improves your user experience and engagement. You can make your page more visually appealing with animations such as videos and GIFs. You may also use them to highlight important content on the page or simply to make your site more fun and engaging.
When adding music to your videos, you can use a music video maker to ensure the quality of your audio and video. A word of caution: try to do your animation sparingly. It is preferable if it is subtle so as not to distract consumers’ attention from what you are attempting to say.
Tip#6. Write Descriptions That Convey Value
Search engines like Google use meta descriptions to display text snippets under each result in their search engine results pages (SERPs). The description should include an accurate description of what users will see if they click on that link, as well as relevant keywords related to what’s being sold on the page (that is, the product or service you’re offering)
Tip#7. Create Landing Pages
Landing pages are web pages optimized for conversion (getting leads or sales). It would be a good practice if you created different landing pages for various products or services (such as free consultations or property reports). This way, you can test which converts the most and then invest more time in building content for that specific type of lead or sale.
Takeaways
Ultimately, a real estate website needs to sell. Some call it capturing leads, and others call it “converting.” It’s no different from any other type of sales funnel; you need to attract new traffic, convert that traffic into leads, and eventually convert those leads into buyers.
This article will explain the benefits and best practices in real estate SEO. You will learn that optimizing your real estate website for conversion is possible and advantageous. You will know that it can solidify your brand reputation, build awareness and drive more collaborations.
With the content above, you will also know how to customize your website design and personalize your content. The key to a successful real estate website is optimization. You need to provide valuable information and enable a positive user experience so your audience can engage with your website and take action.
