REAL ESTATE AGENT SEO
SEO for Real Estate Agents is an incredibly profitable way to market properties.
Learn the best free SEO tools, Keywords and my complete process to rank your website number 1 in Google!
Who are your potential SEO clients as a real estate agent?
Every action or challenge you face when doing SEO, should always be orientated back to your business and real life goals. That’s what comes first, then SEO follows.
With real estate agent SEO, you’re trying to align what your potential buyers are searching for with what you offer, and convince them to buy from you by offering them value when they most need it.
To do that, you have to know who your potential clients are. To find this out you need to ask yourself the following questions:
- What part of the world are they from?
- How old are they?
- How much money do they have?
- What needs do they have that you can solve?
- How big are their needs?
- How much money would they spend to fullfill their needs?
The reason to do this is to make sure you’re narrowing your audience of potential clients down to make an informed decision when you try to find what they search in Google.
*You might have to read that long sentence again*
This action is called making a SEO buyer persona. Keep in mind that you don’t really know the exact answer to these questions, you’re just trying to make the most accurate guess of this, based on your knowledge of your business and experience as an estate agent.
Now that you have a broader view of the spectrum of people you want to target, let’s do some SEO!
THE BEST 7 Free SEO tools for real estate agents
It’s absolutely possible to do SEO for free. You just have to know where to find them and how to play around with their ‘freemium’ features.
These are the free SEO realtor tools you will need to follow through in this article:
And yes, I use these tools too with my clients, so they’re legit good!
You can download my free SEO Estate Agents tools in this link. Is what I use to do SEO for my Real Estate client, so you will need them too and they’re completely free!
KEYWORD RESEARCH FOR A REAL ESTATE AGENT WEBSITE
It’s time to find out what your clients really want!
How are we going to do this? We are going to see:
- What they search for.
- How many times they search for it.
- What they want to see when they search for it.
- If you should make a page for a keyword or not.
What are seed keywords in SEO?
A seed keyword in SEO is the most general word or set of words that can describe your business.
You can normally find the seed keywords for you business asking yourself these questions:
- What is my business?
- A real estate agent in Spain
- What does my business do?
- I have property for sale in Spain
- What’s the objective of my business?
- To sell houses in Spain
So our seed keywords are ‘real estate agent’, ‘real estate agency in spain’, ‘property for sale’, ‘property for sale in spain’, ‘buy house in spain, ‘sell house in spain’.
If you concentrate and think deeply about your business, you can find more questions and seed keywords to put in your ‘ammo’ of keywords.
Watch my video for 1 on 1 instructions on how to do these next tasks.
Open the first 3 tools tools and create an account (if needed):
This tool is called Ubersuggest and it can give you keyword ideas when you type a seed keyword. It also gives you the estimated monthly search volumes.
Type your seed keywords and download all the suggestions and volume data in your super SEO document I’ve made for you. Download here.
Check my video to see how I do it.
Moz does the same thing, however, is a bit more powerful and can give you keywords based on similarity and not just variations of it. More keywords in the bag!
- My two free SEO Template tools.
My two templates are a Google Sheets to add al your information in one place and a SERP duplicate checker to do the next step in this guide.
You’re looking to build an empire of keywords in your Google Sheets document I gave you. No one can defeat you with them! To build it follow these 4 steps:
- Search your seed keywords and variations in the tools.
- Download them.
- Filter the document to the highest search volume (to find more seed keywords within them all).
- Pick another of the popular keywords and add it to the tools again and re-do the process.
I show this step by step in my video!
*Yeah, I really want you to see it. It takes too long to edit for you to miss it! Ahah*
Let’s look at your huge squad of keywords.
What are king keywords and prince keywords?
*Weird analogies MODE – ON*
I like to call king keywords to the most popular keywords that act as the tip of the iceberg for a specific topic.
By most popular, I mean the keyword with most monthly searches. Monthly searches is the metric used in SEO.
Let me give you an example to enlighten you.
- ‘Property for sale in spain’
- ‘Buy a house in Spain’
- ‘Property to buy in Spain’
- ‘Buy a house in Spain’
In this case, all the keywords fall into the same topic and intention, ‘I search in Google because I want to buy a house in Spain’, so as you can see, ‘property for sale in Spain’ is the most popular keyword. Which means that the other two are the prince keywords.
Prince keywords are variations of the king. In other words they are other ways of searching for the main topic of ‘property for sale in Spain’. These keywords always have lower search volumes.
Now that you know about these two types of keywords let’s continue with our real estate keyword research.
Firstly, you have to look at all the keywords in your list and erase any that aren’t relevant to your business. For example, if you don’t sell houses in France, then the keyword ‘property for sale in France’ would be the unwanted one. Sorry France!
Then, you want to find the king or topic keywords in your list.
To do this, you have to group keywords that have the same intention. Ask yourself:
- What does the searcher want when they search ‘(keyword)’?
In my video I use the example of the keyword ‘rural properties in the uk’ to establish the what people want to see when they search this.
Group the keywords that fall into the same topic or category.
Another way to be sure of this is to look at the SERP and see what pages appear:
- If it’s blog posts you see. The user wants info.
- If it’s a category page with houses or property listings.
- The user wants to buy (or evaluate) a property.
Then, within these topical clustered groups of keywords, you have to find the most popular way (keyword) people search for this topic you. To do this, you can look at the search volume number in your sheet.
Another way is not use this tool:
Type the keywords in your list in Google search to give you estimated volumes. Keep typing until you see which one has the highest volume.
One last trick is to look at the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) and see what keywords you see in the Meta Titles of the pages. Look at common repetitions of a keyword to see if she’s it´s the king! If others are targeting it then it must be the one.
But Alex, why do I need to do this?
Simple, you want to optimize your page to target the king keyword. Then you can sprinkle some of the prince keywords. Imagine as if you could only target one keyword per page, understandably, you would want to target the keyword most people search for. Right?
One last example to illustrate this is with a page I did about taxes in Spain.
There were so many keywords about this same topic, and I had to find the main one to focus my article around it. So I did. Following the process I’m telling you now.
- ‘Property taxes in Spain’
- ‘Real estate tax Spain’
- ‘What taxes do I have to pay in Spain?’
- ‘House tax in Spain’
- ‘What taxes do I have to pay in Spain?’
- ‘Real estate tax Spain’
I found that ‘property tax in Spain’ is the most popular way people search about taxes in Spain. And by the way, my page is in position number 1 for it!
Now you have a list of king keywords, clustered with their respective prince keywords.
As an example, picture it as something like this:
- Property for sale in Alicante (The user want to buy/evaluate buying a property in Spain)
- Houses for sale in Alicante
- Apartments for sale in Alicante
- Buy houses in Alicante
- Property taxes in Spain (The user wants info about property taxes in Spain)
- ‘Real estate tax in Spain’
- ‘What taxes do I have to pay in Spain?’
- ‘House tax in Spain’
- Selling property in Spain (The user wants info and help to sell their property in Spain)
- How can I sell my house in Spain
- Sell my house with estate agents
- How to sell a house in Spain
If you’re following me, you might have already asked yourself this question question.
How can I know if I should make a specific page for a SEO keyword?
Let me explain.
Let’s use the example of the page I made about ‘property taxes in Spain’. In my keyword research, I found this topic as something relevant to write about. But I also found that the people interested in this also searched specific things about this topic. For example:
- Property taxes in Spain (Main keyword)
- ‘Capital gain tax in Spain’
- ‘Selling property tax in Spain’
- ‘Plusvalia tax in Spain’
As you can see, people search for specific taxes too, even though, with the process I’ve explained before, we’ve identified that the most popular way to search for this is ‘property taxes in Spain’.
So, when you have all these keywords in front of you, you might wonder.
- Should I make a page about each type of tax?
- Or should I do a page with all the taxes?
- Or should I just take a rest and have a coffee?
Don’t go to have a coffee please!
I have the answer for you in a few steps. Let’s have a look:
- The most important thing is common sense and experience on the topic. Do you think the specific topic of ‘capital gain tax’ (for example), has enough info to talk about to make a page about it? Relative to the king keyword/topic in our list, is it a big enough subtopic/prince?
- Then, you have to see if your competitors are doing specific pages about ‘capital gain tax in Spain’. To do this, search both keywords in Google and write down what you see. If both keywords show similar SERP’s and pages, it’s not worth creating a specific page for it. If they show different SERP’s and pages, then it’s a signal that you should create that specific page. I’ve created a free tool document to help you with this. Check out my video to see how to use it because it will make this process so much easier! You need your second free tool I’ve given you to do this step.
Another example of this, with keywords with buying intention rather that finding info, would be:
- ‘Property for sale in Alicante’
- ‘Property for sale in Alicante with swimming pool’
Should I make a specific page of my houses with swimming pools? Or will my page with properties in Alicante also rank for the keyword ‘property for sale in Alicante with swimming pools’?
Follow the steps I’ve told you in my video and you will find out!
Your keyword research is done. You now know what your potential clients:
- Search for.
- How many times they search for it.
- What they want to see when they search for it.
- If you should make a page for a keyword or not.
Congratulations, you’ve aligned your business services with your clients needs and you’ve gone from SEO level 1 to SEO level 37 for your real estate agent business !
Do you need help with your real estate website SEO?
Learn SEO with my weekly newsletter or tell me about your project so I can help you get more visibility!
RealTOR SEO content research
So let’s see what you actually have to create to make sure you rank high in Google and pass your real estate competitors.
We are going to see.
- What your competitors created.
- How to create something more valuable.
- Establish if you have any possibilities to rank for your king keyword.
Once you’ve decided that you want to create a page about a topic and you’re armed with your king and prince keywords, you have to research what the content (page) around these keywords is actually going to be.
To do this, I want you to search your king keyword in Google again and scrape (Transfer from the internet to your Google Sheets) the top 10/20 positions.
Use this tool to do it:
I show how to do this in my video.
Now, you want you to scan each website and establish what they are about, what type of page it is, and most importantly, ask yourself this question, ‘how does it answer the intention of the person who searches for (‘Keyword’)’.
Write this down.
Next, I want you to use the information you have and your most powerful tool, your brain, to see how you can make a better and most valuable page to the user. Something that answers the intention of their search better.
If you do this step correctly, your probabilities of ranking high are going to go up stratospherically (cool word), regardless of your website’s authority or amount of links (Link Building for real estate agents in my last step).
An example of this is a page I created attacking the keyword ‘Property for sale in Altea’, that has a transactional intent.
I saw that many competitors ranked due to sheer authority power and links, however, their content simply has properties and vague text about how the beaches in the area are nice.
Do people who search for this keyword want to know about the beaches? Maybe.
But do they want to know about beaches when they’re searching for properties? Or do you think they would rather know about specific information about ‘buying property’ in this area?
I mean, they’re literally telling told you they want that, their intention is to buy a house, so let’s give them valuable information that could enrich their experience through their journey of or buying a house.
And who knows, they might even buy from you for being so valuable to them!
Again, align what they want, with what you have, and offer value.
I created this page with property listings and information like:
- Atea property market
- Property prices in Altea
- Where to buy in Altea
- Where are the cheapest properties in Altea?
- Where are the most expensive properties in Altea?
Now that’s more helpful than knowing about the best restaurants in Altea!
I hope you can make an informed decision armed with all the info I’m giving you.
SEO On Page for a real estate website
Let’s get a little technical. There are more advanced guides that talk about how to do SEO On Page in more detail (I will make one soon). But I’m going to give you some actionable steps to follow.
The reason to do SEO On Page for your real estate business is to make it clear to Google’s bot what your pages are about.
You know what pages to create, what content these pages need to have, and now we’re going to show it to Google!
I’m just going to make a bulleted checklist for you to follow it along:
- Write the content.
- Make the content readable using short paragraphs and bullet lists. Just like this article.
- Add the most important information and keywords in the titles at the beginning of the page.
- Surround these titles with HTML <H> tags. Using all of them with hierarchy. <H1>, <H2>, <H3>, <H4>, <H5>, <H6>.
- Add between 2 to 5 links (if possible) to other authoritative pages where it makes sense in the text. Make sure these ‘external’ pages offer value to your reader and that they aren’t SEO competitors. For example, an official governmental page if you’re talking about taxes.
- Add minimum 3 links to other internal pages of your own website where it makes sense. The more the better. If these links anchor text (the text in the link) can be the exact king keyword you’re targeting for that page even better. For example, a link for an info page about taxes to your page of property listings in Los Angeles with the anchor text ‘property for sale in Los Angeles’.
- Make your page’s meta title inciting and add your king keyword. To do this check at your competitors meta titles and make it stand out.
- The same process with your meta description.
- Make sure the images you use are relevant, compressed, that the file’s name has keywords, and that the ALT attribute describes the image using keywords too.
- Add schema markup. This is a piece of code that describes your page to search engines so they can understand it better. There are many types of schema, but the one I use the most is FAQ schema because it creates a big rich result that takes space in the SERP and incites people to click. Check my video on how to do it using this tool.
Now your content is easier to consume by your users and easier for search engines to understand!
Real estate link building
Link building takes a lot of time and is a manual task. If you want to follow Google’s guidelines of course, which I strongly advise if you don’t want your website to suffer unexpected and hugely costly problems. Like disappearing from Google completely.
From the 200+ ranking factors Google uses to rank websites, links are still the most powerful one.
Why? Because it’s the most important one that helps Google decide the most if a page is relevant or not. Think of people linking to your website as giving you votes to rank, in Google’s eyes. This is engrained in Google’s algorithm and is called Page Rank. No, is not ‘Page’ as in ‘your page’ but rather as one of Google’s founders Larry Page.
Let’s get to it.
There are many ways to do it. I’m going to show you one way that makes sure you’re going to get the highest answer rate when you contact people ‘for a link’ (we won’t actually ask for a link).
We are going to use the list of 10/20 competitors you have scraped for the SERPS to see who has linked to their page to them.
We will use this tool to see what pages are linking to your real estate website competitors:
- Add your competitor’s link to this tool and see who is linking to his page.links to him. (Watch video)
- Visit these pages and check where the link is. See the context of the link.
- Evaluate if your page offers more value than your competitor´s the page they are linking to. It should if you’ve followed my steps.
- Contact the website owner with a message telling him them that you’ve seen the link and that you’ve created a page that could offer more value to his website.
- DO NOT ask for the link. Simply leave it as it is and they might link to your page you.
You can see an example of a message I sent when doing link building for a real estate client in my video.
You have to use copy writing and psychological skills to make sure people open your email and are actually interested in reading it.
You might think, ‘wow that’s going to take a long time, and the possibilities of them linking to my website are low’. This is true, but if they do, it is pure gold and counts more than 100 irrelevant bought links from newspapers or fake websites. These are the links that Google wants to see directed to your website.
This is because the link is hyper relevant. Check out how Google decides if a link is relevant or not.
This process works well with pages that offer value. Normally informative pages or blog posts. No one is going to link to your property listing in the city. I mean, why would they?
And well, that’s it!
Your real estate agency website has gone form SEO level 37 to SEO level 77! Do you want it to go to level 90?
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SEO FAQ by an actual real estate agent
Finally, there are some Frequently Asked Questions real estate agents might have about SEO, from an agent himself! He’s my SEO client from Houses In Spain.
How long SEO takes to work depends a lot in your current website’s authority and your competition. You can expect to start to see results after 4/6 months.
In simple words, the easiest strategy is to create a lot of pages for very specific locations. Then, make sure these pages are optimised with SEO On Page. These pages are hyper targetting a location, so your probabilities of ranking are higher because there will be less competitors.
Real Estate SEO services can very depending on the time needed to rank in Google. If you hire a SEO like myself, the price you pay is per service in hours. I do SEO for 400 DOLLARS a month.