How to Get Better SEO Rankings in the Real Estate Industry
SEO in the real estate industry is a highly specialized task that usually requires professional experience to get high-level results. However, you can still get results on your own if you follow these pro tips:
Hire a property manager
SEO is a time-consuming job. How much time do you spend on SEO compared to performing property-related tasks? The first step toward boosting your SEO rankings is spending more time on your strategy.
When you hire a property manager to take over your landlord duties, you’ll have more time required to focus on your SEO tasks.
Define a narrow target demographic
Specific marketing messages are always more effective than general messages. The only way to create specific marketing messages is to have a narrow target market.
Having a narrow target market allows you to tailor your marketing messages to a specific group of people more effectively. Everyone needs a place to live, but you’ll generate higher quality applicants when you have a specific target.
For instance, if your target market is everyone in your city, your marketing messages will necessarily be vague and won’t capture much attention. Few people will read your messages and feel like you’re speaking directly to them.
On the other hand, when your target market is entrepreneurs working from home, you can craft specific messages that speak to the unique needs, desires, and struggles of entrepreneurs working from home.
You can have more than one target market
In real estate, your market isn’t exactly “everyone who needs a place to live,” but it’s still pretty broad. As long as someone pays rent on time and takes care of your property, they’re a potential tenant.
The easiest way to target your entire market is to divide it into several sub-targets with different demographics so you can tailor your marketing messages to speak to those specific people.
Be selective with your backlinks
You need backlinks to rank in the search engines, but where you get your backlinks matters. It’s tempting to buy thousands of backlinks at once, but companies that sell backlinks en masse are scams. You’ll get your backlinks, but it will hurt your SEO efforts.
Purchasing backlinks is an illegal SEO tactic, according to search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and Bing. If you’re caught buying backlinks, your site will get penalized. If your illegal backlinks are really bad, you might even get blacklisted.
Building helpful backlinks requires a focus on quality, not quantity. There are several ways to can build high-quality backlinks:
- Manual outreach. Reach out to people in the real estate industry to see if they’re willing to link to your website. However, be careful not to do link exchanges. Search engines can detect link exchange schemes and will penalize your site. Try to generate authentic partnerships.
- Content marketing. Content marketing is by far the best way to generate quality backlinks for your website because it helps you rank and drives traffic. With content marketing, you’ll write an informative article for a publisher and include a backlink to your website in the article.
When your article gets published, you’ll start generating traffic from readers and your backlink will pull some weight in the SERPs.
- Naturally. Natural link building is something you can’t control, but you can influence people to link to your website. The secret to this is creating amazing, outstanding, authoritative content that people naturally want to link in their articles.
When you create authoritative content in the form of a guide or infographic, and it starts circulating around the internet, you’ll pick up backlinks from all kinds of real estate websites.
Utilize PPC ads
Pay-per-click (PPC) ads are critical for successful SEO. PPC ads can also be a shortcut to getting traffic without getting your website ranked.
When you focus on local SEO by running PPC ads, your ads will show up at the top of search results – at least on Google – and you’ll generate clicks from people who never even scroll to the actual search results.
Imagine being able to get your website visible at the top of search engines without ranking your site in the SERPs? That’s what PPC ads can do for you.
Hire a professional SEO agency
Ultimately, the best way to get better rankings in the search engines is to hire a professional agency. While you can learn plenty of SEO online, professionals have mastered high-level strategies that will take your SEO game to the next level.
If you’re not interested in making a career out of search engine optimization, hire a professional SEO agency and you’ll be in good hands.