A Guide to SEO for Estate Agents

If you're an estate agent struggling to get your website to rank on the first page of Google, it might be time to focus on search engine optimization (SEO). In this guide, we'll explain why SEO is important for estate agents and what you need to prioritise to improve your website's ranking.

What is SEO and Why is it Important for Property Businesses?

SEO is the process of optimising your website, listings, and content to increase your visibility and rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). Google is the most popular search engine, so optimising your sites for Google is critical. When someone searches for something on Google, the search engine crawlers scan the internet to find the most relevant information that matches the searcher's query.

SEO is essential for property businesses because it helps them rank higher in search results, leading to more website traffic, sales leads, and revenue. Unfortunately, SEO is not something you can buy or cheat your way through. It requires skill and expertise to optimise your website, content, and listings and achieve the results you want.

What are the most important factors for SEO for estate agents?

The following factors are essential for SEO for estate agents:

Content on the page: Your website should have high-quality, informative, and engaging content. The content should be relevant to your audience and optimised for keywords that are relevant to your business.

Site speed: Your website should load quickly, ideally within 2-3 seconds. A slow website can result in a high rate of users changing their mind and leaving (aka ‘bounce rate’), which can negatively impact your SEO.

Page titles: Your page titles should be relevant and descriptive, including target keywords, and should accurately reflect the content on the page.

Clean URL structure: Your website's URLs should be clean and easy to read, including target keywords where relevant. Avoid long strings of random characters and numbers.

Website authority: ‘Authority’ is the term that SEO experts use to define how trustworthy and authoritative Google thinks your website is. This can be improved by creating high-quality content, getting linked to by other authoritative websites, and optimising your website's technical aspects. This last point is key, so read on to learn more about it. 

How do you optimise SEO for estate agents?

There are many ways to optimise your website and content for SEO. Here are some tips to help real estate agents do just that:

Focus on user experience: Make sure your website is easy to navigate, loads quickly, and doesn’t aggravate the average user. A good user experience can result in a lower bounce rate and higher engagement (typically measured by clicks), which can positively impact your SEO.

Research keywords: Use online tools like Google Keyword Planner or Ahrefs to research relevant keywords and search terms that your audience is using to find estate agents in your area. Use these keywords throughout your website, listings, and content.

Optimise your homepage and branch pages: Your homepage and branch pages are crucial for ranking high in local search terms. Ensure your homepage’s title includes your agency name and location, and your branch page titles include location details. Also, ensure your brand page H1 title is "Estate Agent in [LOCATION]" to help boost your rankings for local search.

Optimise your content: Your content should be high-quality, informative, and engaging. It should be optimised to include relevant keywords and include meta descriptions, header tags, and alt tags. Use internal links to other relevant pages on your website to improve user experience and encourage visitors to stay longer on your website.

The use of backlinks

If you believe your site is looking strong, it might be time to reinforce it with backlinks. While it can be very research-intensive, finding other well-performing websites to link to can really strengthen your presence to a search engine crawler. 

Search engine bots will note that others are willing to link to you, demonstrating that there is some worth to what you’re saying. If you have the time, reach out to other industry websites and ask to feature on their site as a link or you could even offer to write a guest article for them.

Always bear in mind that Google (and others) are search engines. Their entire purpose is to present users with the answers they need. If you can demonstrate to them that you have those answers, you’re doing everything right and things do not need to get too complex.

To summarise, the most important factors for SEO for estate agents include:

• Content on the page

• Site speed

• Page titles

• Clean URL structure

• Website authority

Remember, SEO is not a process you can cheat your way through. It takes skill and effort to get right. But by following the tips outlined in this guide, you can improve your website's ranking and generate more leads for your estate agency.