SEO tips for estate agents: seven ways to increase traffic and leads
In this modern-age, it’s estimated that over 90% of house hunters will use the Internet to search for their next dream home.
In the same survey, it found that over 53% of these people begin by searching online. This means there are a wealth of people that could be using your property management website; you just need to find ways of drawing them to your website and keeping them around long enough to make a sale.
As with any website, the best way to attract users to your website is through the fluid and solid search engine optimisation (SEO) practices that will always result in your becoming top of the search engine result page.
In this article, we’ll explore seven essential tips that you need to know, helping you to achieve just this, increasing both your website page traffic and your amount of potential leads.
Using keywords
This is the #1 consideration when it comes to SEO. It’s imperative that you use the relevant keywords of your website on your pages.
For example, if you’re a property management company operating in London, you need to include keywords such as ‘London estate agency’ and ‘London property listings’ in your page. The recommended keyword density is 2% per page or article.
To make things easy for you, you can easily check your industry’s leading keywords, and the density of keywords in your content, using websites such as WordStream and Keyword Density Checker.
Redefine your keywords
Now that you’ve embedded your relevant keywords, it’s time to become more targeted.
By using targeted keywords, you’ll be found even easier by users who are searching in your operation area. For example, if you’re operating in Glasgow, then embed these into your content.
However, make sure you do the first consideration first and then this one as traffic increases. It’s much more effective.
Write blog posts
Content marketing is easily the biggest online industry in the world right now. This refers to blogs, articles, listicles, slideshows or any blog post you’d read online. Use this worldwide phenomenon to your advantage.
If you choose to write your own blog posts, you can use online checking tools, such as Ginger or Ukwritings to assist you, and ensure that your grammar and writing style is perfect before you upload.
Call in the professionals
As mentioned above, the content marketing aspect of your website is the key to successful SEO ,as you can embed keywords as well as draw people into your website.
Not everybody is a born writer, and some business owners simply won’t have time to create their own blogs. If this is the case, call in a professional who can do it for you. Websites such as Paper Fellows have a wealth of online writers who can write copyrighted SEO-ready material that matches your requirements.
Keep things short and sweet
Whether you’re writing a blog post or a property description, nobody wants to read pages of content describing points that could have been summarised in a few hundred words.
It’s recommended, for estate agents, that you sum up your properties’ best features in around 200 words. You can use online tools, such as Easy Word Count or State of Writing, to track your content to ensure it matches this recommendation. This will also boost your SEO ranking.
Make no mistakes
Keeping in line with the considerations above, you need to ensure everything is perfect BEFORE it’s uploaded.
Aspects of your website text and blogs posts, such as grammar, punctuation and sentence structure, need to be pristine. Nobody will trust an estate agent whose content is riddled with errors. To ensure perfection, send off your content to leading proofreading tools, such as Academized, to have your content proofread by a professional editor.
Editing to perfection
Finally, it’s unlikely that you’ll get things right the first time. You need to edit your content to ensure that everything is perfect continuously.
When it comes to SEO using your own business’s tone of voice and style, it’s a case of trial and error to see what works and what doesn’t. Refer to your analytics to see what articles and pages are most successful and clone that style. When it comes to editing, you can send content to a professional writer, ensuring all your blog posts and listing are perfect, and maximising your opportunities.
If you consider all the tips above and put them into practice, you can be sure that whichever preferred search engine you use, you’ll boost your SEO ranking. This means that when users are searching in your operating area, you’re sure to head up the list of results, driving more traffic to your site.
As online business goes, the higher your traffic, the higher the number of leads you will have and, therefore, the more sales your website will make.
Photo credit: Gerd Altmann