Let’s face it!
The only reason you are in the real estate business is that there is good money when you close a sale.
If you are in the real estate business, then it is safe that we both agree that it would be a dream come true, if you had a stream of quality people who are willing and ready to buy any of the real estate properties that you showed them.
Your life will be so much better if you had to make warm calls to people who have already engaged and interacted with what you have to offer. By the time you are meeting up with them, they are hot prospects and cannot wait to give sign the dotted line so that you can give them the keys to that house.
How can you make this dream become a reality?
The answer is real estate SEO search engine optimization
If you are new to the term SEO, it basically means that you get to show up and stand out on Google. That way when people are searching for properties with the intent to buy or otherwise. You are on top of that list and they get to consider looking at the different properties that you have to offer.
What’s really good about optimizing your real estate website for search engines is that you will always be able to generate a new stream of people who are ready to buy from you.
There will be no need in spending money on advertising, yet new prospects of people will be flowing into your business 24/7. Once you have optimized your systems. There will be no need to call them, they will always be coming to
What is SEO In Real Estate?
There is a tone of information and jargon online about search engine optimization, the reality boils down to one thing.
Search engine optimization is simply meaning that your companies show up in the search engine when people are looking for properties or even an agent to advise them on the best property to buy or sell.
Let’s assume for a moment that you are not a real estate agent but you are looking forward to buying a home. You already know the place that you want your home to be located in and you know the type of house that you want to buy.
The first thing that you will do is that you will go to the search engine, be it, Google, Bing, Yahoo. Open a new tab and start typing
Within a few seconds, you will be presented with so many different options and thousands and thousands of pages.
You will probably look at the first top three search results
Recently the layout of the search engine results page has changed. Meaning that you will be presented with organic results after you have seen a few advertisements and local maps of business that are nearby.
The competition to appear on the top of search engine results is very tough in real estate. Having a website and publishing content is not good enough
Why is SEO Critical for Real Estate Agents?
Let’s face it, with the internet penetrating our lives, it is inevitable to use it to make our lives easier. Anytime that we are about to buy something, the first place that we go to is the internet. The same thing applies to when a property buyer wants to buy a house in the first place, they go to is the internet.
Take a look at what Mkaazi Real Estate is getting from a local keywords.
This simply shows you the number of people who are looking for homes in the local areas every single month and how much of that traffic this website is getting.
If you were to optimize your website with a couple of the keywords used locally, it will mean that your website will be on top of search engine results when someone is looking for a property in that area, and that will help you get a new lead of someone interested in buying that property.
Optimizing your real estate website for search engines can be an extremely daunting task. An easier way out to skip this part and go straight into spending money on advertising on Google, it will still get you to the first page of google.
However, it is important to keep in mind that using paid advertising doesn’t convert as much as organic search does. I will not lie to you; it is not an easy task doing SEO for your website. It will also cost you (See standard SEO costing in Kenya). But, it is guaranteed that the hard work that you will do in setting up the system will always bring you a new stream of leads that you will be converting into sales.
What Property Search Engines do Real Estate Agents Use?
There are different types of search engines that you can use to market your property. Take a look at the top three property search engines that you can use in Kenya.
a. Buy Rent Kenya
Buy rent Kenya ranks on top of google because of the number of properties that it has on it. The site is ideal for an agent who is looking to get his property in front of many eyeballs as possible because of the high number of search traffic on the properties that are on the site
b. Property 24
Property 24 has a web-property portal network across Africa. It has a mobile application that is both android and iOS ability. Enabling most of the prospects to search for the property at the comfort of their phones in an app.
c. The Star.co.ke/Classified
This is a search engine for Kenyan’s classified advertising. Besides properties, they have other products on their platform.
There are over 40,000 property ads on the site. Meaning that there are people who are viewing and clicking the properties. It can be a good platform for you as a real estate agent to advertise your properties. The downside is can be the fact that too many people are competing for the same audience who are already being bombarded by too many ads. It will be difficult for your property to even get viewed.
What is the Number 1 Best Real Estate Search Engine?
Mkaazi Real Estate
Love it or hate it, Mkaazi Real Estate is at the top spot in the hearts of both home buyers and sellers. This could be because of the fact that it has a solid search engine optimization strategy in place. This strategy is centered around the fact that they genuinely care about their customers having the best products in real estate.
Mkaazi Real Estate is a one-stop-shop for both home buyers and sellers. Not only that, but the company is owned with one of the best digital marketing agencies. Signing up with them, simply means that they will go above and beyond to make sure that you have achieved your goals. In this case, it could be ensuring that your properties get sold to the right buyers.
Everyone walks away happy at Mkaazi’s Real Estate.
How Can a Real Estate Agent Drive More Traffic, Leads & Sales Through SEO?
For starters, if you are new to SEO then you need to understand that it is divided into three main categories.
- Local Search Engine Optimization
- Onsite Search Engine Optimization
- Offsite Search Engine Optimization
We are going to simply take a look at each one of them. Nothing difficult, in fact, it going to be super fun when you are optimizing your own site for SEO.
What is Local SEO?
Local SEO simply means that you optimized your site so that the people within your locality or region can locate your business much easier.
So, if you are wondering how you can do local SEO it is quite easy. Continue reading along…
Optimize Google My Business for Your Company
Your business needs to be listed in the top pages of Google. That way when a prospect is looking for a property or even service that you might be providing. They could be searching for a real estate agent in Nairobi or even houses in Karen. You will appear on top and they will more than likely see a map featuring another google my business pages.
If they are doing their search on the mobile, then the top three business will most likely fill up their screen. This will automatically make them pay more attention to the search results that have ratings, reviews, and google my business.
Here is how you can set it up:
step 1: Go to
google.com/business
Once you are logged in, fill out the form that will be presented to you on top of your screen
Ensure that you have completed the profile 1 00% and that it is up to date:
- Website
- Phone number
- Opening hours of your business
- The exact location on google maps
- Description of the business
- Photos of the location
Important to note: Ensure that the Name, address, phone number and website (NAP+W) is complete and the same information is being reflected on the website.
This is because Google favors businesses that have provided them with complete information. The information that appears on the righthand side, simply indicates that our company is registered under Google My Business.
What is Onsite Search Engine Optimization?
Alright, so now that we are done with local SEO. Let’s jump straight into where all the fun happens when it comes to SEO. That is onsite at times also known as on-page SEO.
This basically means optimizing certain things on your website to make it not only friendly for the search engine but also for the end-user.
Here are some of the onsite SEO practices that are easy for you to do and can start working on immediately:
- Conduct a targeted keyword research
- Create local content
- Use Compelling headlines
- Optimize images
These are just a few of the practices of onsite SEO that are beginner-friendly, there is more that I haven’t mentioned.
How Can You Conduct a Targeted Keyword Research?
Keyword research is overlooked when it comes to SEO. People tend to be really excited and jump straight into the more technical stuffing. I cannot embassies enough of how much keyword research is important.
This is because keyword research shows you the actual intent of a customer. The words that they look while they are in the search engine before buying. Before you start working on the content strategy and social media strategy. You need to conduct keyword research.
Having the right keywords that customers search for when they are in the search engine, will attract the right customers to you.
Here is the simple way for you to be able to get started with keyword research.
- Go to Google search bar, insert the keyword that you want to rank for. This should be your primary keywords. The quick and easiest way for you knowing your primary keyword is though the major services or products that you are offering as a realtor. This could be varying from industry to industry. Once you have your first primary keyword. This could be something to buy the property, advise clients about market conditions, and provide guidance and assistance through the process of selling, or leasing properties.
- Go with it on search engine and then open us the first five companies that will show up after the advertisement and google my business. Once you have opened them in a new tab.
- Select and copy a link of the top of the search bar
- Open a new tab, and Open your Google keyword planner
- paste the URL you got on the previous bar and get the results of the keyword research and then click get results in excel.
Repeat the process for the other first google search results that showed up. The whole process of this is to ensure that you know the keywords that your competitors are ranking for. Then you will be able to make better-informed decisions on the keywords that you are going to use to help you rank even better.
Note that once you have downloaded the five different excel spreadsheets from google keyword finder. Combine then together into one excel sheet. At this point, you will notice that most of the keywords are probably repeating themselves…
The solution to this is to be able to use text mechanic. This is a software that edits texts, finding and replacing texts and removing duplicate words.
copy-paste it and then take it into text mechanic. All of these are free tools. There is software that you pay for when you are doing SEO. Since we are beginner-friendly SEO all the software and tools that we use are all free.
Copy-paste your keyword research into text mechanic, it will remove all the keywords that are duplicating from the previous keywords research.
Download the results of the remaining keywords and then copy and paste it back into your excel sheet. make sure you save this new excel a new name that you will remember not to confuse it with the rest.
Now, start sorting out the different keywords into primary keywords, secondary keywords, long-tail keywords and the other pages that you would want to be included in your page.
The other tools that you can use to conduct your keyword research include, SEMRUSH and Ahrefs and LSI. This is paid for the software. If you are a beginner. You are good to go with Google Keyword planner.
What Types of SEO Content Should a Realtor Create?
Once you know the different keywords that you are going to focus on. Ideally, the best thing to do will be to create a content strategy of the different types of content that you will create revolving around the major keywords that you have decided to focus on they will make your company rank higher on Google.
Ensure that you create inspiring entertaining content that will keep the prospects in your industry entertained to keep on coming to your website for more of the good content.
Ensure that in your strategy, you have an entire mix of different types of content. That is the only way you won’t bore the people coming to your website to death. You have to ensure that the content you create informs, educates and engages with your website visitors. that is the only way that you get to earn their trust and keep them in your funnel for a longer period.
The different types of content that you can create include:
- Blog posts
- Photographs
- Digital Magazine
- Infographics
- Videos Podcasts
- Audio Podcasts
And Primary Research… Just to mention a few.
The beauty of having a content marketing in place that is in line with the keyword research. Is that you can use content to nurture people who are willing or not willing to buy a property immediately when they are interacting with your website for the very first time.
Only 3% of the people in the search engine looking for a service or products that you are selling are willing and ready to buy from you. This does not imply that the remaining 97% is not going to buy. If you spent time creating content that will nurture the remaining 97% correctly. Then this will give you a pretty food chance of whooping a big number of the people in the 97% category when they are ready to buy.
The reason being, by the time the person interacted with you the first time and you have been sending them emails, sending them documents, industry reports, pdfs, white papers. By the time this prospect is ready to buy you are no longer making a cold call to them. Instead, you will be making a warm call to someone who has interacted with you more than twice.
They know, like and trust you and would be more than willing to go for a site visit with you. If their eyes catch a property that they might be interested in buying.
Why It Is Important to Use Compelling Headlines?
Once you have spent your time energy and times money to create content it is very important to get your customer to read your blog post, email, pdf, white paper, or whatever type of content that you would have created. You MUST create a headline that will catch people by the throat and nearly force them to read.
Create headlines that naturally compel someone to read that particular content and win them over to your side.
The whole purpose of your headline to get the customer to read what’s in the next line. After they do that, to get them to read the next one and the next one. You need to recognize that your prospects are very busy individuals and you have to earn their time.
How do you do this?
After you have spent your valuable time creating awesome content. Pieces of content that is entertaining, educative and inspiring. The next thing that you need to do is make sure that your content gets read.
Here is a simple way to make sure that your headline is on point…
Create a free account with a co-schedule…
Once you start using a co-schedule headline analyzer. It will greatly help you in ensuring that you create compelling headlines that WIN. The only way you know that you are close to creating a winning headline is when you get a score of 70%. Which is not an easy task. But I assure you when you do you will be winning with your content.
- Here are some formulas that you could use to help you’re come up with headlines fast:
- Amazing Secret of (blank)
- Top Ten (blank)
- Who Else Wants (blank)?
- Here is What You Weren’t Told About(blank)
- You Too Can (obtain the desired result) in (period) with (blank)
- Stop (undesired result)
Note: On the headlines, the first letter of your headline, has to be in the capital. This is not only good for SEO purposes but it also makes it easy for your website visitor to read.
Why Is Using Video Good for Your SEO?
Incorporating video into the mix of your content on your website is a really good way for you to optimize your site.
In recent years, we have seen video taking up most of the space on the internet. We have seen YouTube growing up 1.3 Billion users and the average number of mobile YouTube video views per day is 1,000,000,000. This makes YouTube the second largest search engine after Google. Leaving that besides, even Facebook, ticktock, Instagram all seem to be doing so much better because of videos.
With that said, you cannot ignore how important it is for you to incorporate video into your website. Do videos of the properties that you have on the listing, convert one of your blog posts into a video using PowerPoint. Take your photographs and create a slideshow video. The options are endless and once again you can use free tools to create videos today.
Not only will it make it easier for your website visitors to consume the information easier. You are guaranteed that you will receive a lot more prospects who are willing and ready to buy from you. Because they enjoyed the interaction with you.
How to Optimize Images for Search Engines?
This is one thing that tends to go out unnoticed. But the images and photos that you place on your website must be optimized correctly.
When you are publishing a new blog post on your website. Always ensure that you add images to the blog posts, when you adding images, you will notice that after uploading the images, you will be required to fill in the alt text, caption, title, and description.
Filling out this information basically gives you more content to Google regarding what the image is about. Google does not view images the same way that we do. Providing it with information enables it to read the image, and when someone is looking for this particular information. The search engine bot can know and give you all the required information.
Once you have filled in all the descriptions for the image, this will give your site a higher click-through rate (CTR) from Google. The next time you are about to publish content on your website. To ensure that you have optimized the images that are going with it.
Awesome, so that’s it in regards to on-page SEO, this is just a drop of the ice when it comes to SEO. The beauty is that you will start seeing results almost immediately. and all the tools that you will be using are free. They are just a few things that you can start doing today to see massive changes in your website rankings in Google.
What is Offsite SEO?
Offsite SEO basically implies to the stuff that you optimize outside of your website. That means that if you have rented space on Facebook, Instagram, Linked in or YouTube. You get to optimize the social presence of your company in those sites. So let us look at the most famous offsite SEO.
How Can a Realtor Optimize Their Business Facebook Pages?
You have a Facebook page for your business, right?
If you don’t you should create one. If you do have then you should optimize your page, with the correct eye-catching images. That way if someone is looking up real estate agents in the local area that you live in, you can easily come up with a Facebook search engine.
If you have people following your page already, do encourage them to leave positive reviews on your page, this will make someone new trust you more easily because they can see people giving who have had a positive relationship with you.
The other thing that you could do to optimize your Facebook page. Simply by add on your website, correct contact information’s and most importantly the keywords that you want to rank for.
This will make the visitors trust your way before they meet up with you in person for a site visit.
What Are the Best Tools a Real Estate Agent Can Use for SEO?
Yoast SEO
Yoast is a famous SEO plugin with over 8 million downloads.
It will help you optimize all the important key pages of elements. It will ensure that the content on your website is readable for your end-user and it will manage the technical search engine optimization for you.
Google Search Console
Google search console gives you insights on the search performance of your website. It also identifies technical SEO issues, googles search console is also able to gather links data and then it sees how Google sees your content
Google search console is also able to show you the exact number of keywords that your website is ranking for and it also helps you identify the opportunities that you can improve your click-through rates.
Google Light House
Google lighthouse is the next generation of tools produced by Google that will build on the page speed insights and mobile-friendly tests.
Google lighthouse contains everything when it comes to testing your website, it will give you elements.
What Are Some of The Mistakes Real Estate Agents Should Avoid Completely?
Okay, we have spoken about a lot of things up to this point. Now, let us get into some of the things that you should completely avoid doing.
Keyword Stuffing
Once you have decided on the keywords that you want to focus on. There will be a very high probability that you will be tempted to put in all the keywords into a single blog post or on a page. After all, you already know the keywords that people are searching for, why not just get all of them into one page, that way when people are looking for it, they find your site faster.
One thing that you need to understand is that today’s search engine is very advanced and their algorithms understand the relationship between words and synonyms.
So, with the keywords that you are going to add in your sentences, make sense not only to the search engine but also to your end reader.
Duplicating Content
The other mistake that you shouldn’t make is duplicating the same content from one page to another, just so that you can have multiple pages on your site.
Once you have organized your keywords into primary, secondary and longtail. Ensure that you organize your page in such a manner that the pages that have long-tail articles are connected to the supporting keywords and those are connected to the primary keywords on your pages too.
Google will punish you if you duplicate content on the web pages on your website.
Outsourcing Local Content
Well, as much you might spend money hiring a writer to give you content about real estate. The truth of the matter is that no one would know the real estate landscape in your area better than you do. If you were to get yourself to write it, I am pretty sure that you would inject your emotions and feel to the piece of article.
To be honest you would be much easier for you to rank in such an evergreen content. Not mentioning the fact that it will save you money.
Publishing Wall of Texts
You need to incorporate different types of content on your website. If you were publishing blog posts, make sure that you include images, graphics and even a video in your content just to get it to rank more.
If you can do an infographic on your website then that will be even much better for you. This is because people interact more with visual content then they do with texts.
The number one thing that Google is trying to do is to give its web users a pleasant experience. But having a block of text that makes it hard for the human eye to digest the information will also see your website being penalized.
Create a win-win situation by making your website visitors happy and google happy too.
How Can You Drive Traffic into Your Real Estate Website?
Realtor SEO can be a very daunting task, optimizing your website is not an easy job. The most important thing is that you get the ball rolling…All of the things that we have discussed here is are simple to do. They may seem a bit technical but they are doable and they work. Test them and see for yourself the kind of positive impact it will make to your website. You can always start small by doing all the keyword research. Then do the next small thing to get your site optimized.
Once everything is set up correctly you can drive traffic to your website by sharing link content from your website the different social platforms. At this point make sure that you know where your audience hangs out when they are online. This could be Facebook, Instagram, Linked-in, or even Twitter. Share the link to your content on this platform and attract them back to your website through the use of good content.
What Are Some of The Things That You Should Consider Before Working with an SEO Agency?
Optimizing your site for the search engine might seem like an easy job, or a difficult one. It all depends on your background. One thing is for sure that in between having to go for site visits with clients and adding new property listings to your real estate website, you almost certainly might not have the time to do the most important things your website needs to rank well on search engines.
Before you hire an SEO agency or a digital marketing agency. Make sure that you are certain about the problem that you want to be solved. This could be ranking better one on Google, or creating content for your website or fixing the broken links. Whatever the issue might be. Make sure you are clear on the problem that you want to solve and get yourself an agency that will meet your needs.
One thing that is for sure is that at Tipping Point Media we have a history of delivering results to our real estate clients.
