The real estate industry is highly competitive in local search — after all, real estate is a hyper-localized business, and many people looking to buy, sell, or rent properties start their search online. As such, there's intense competition among real estate businesses to appear at the top of local search results.
To stand out in this competitive market, real estate businesses need to implement effective local SEO strategies, such as optimizing their Google Business Profile and website, creating high-quality localized content, and actively managing their online reputation.
Why Local SEO for Real Estate Businesses Is So Important
Real estate searches are often highly localized, with people looking for properties in specific neighborhoods or areas.
Real estate businesses can leverage local SEO to target leads at a hyper-local level, ensuring they appear in these types of highly specific searches.
There are also many real estate brokers, agents, and property listing websites competing for visibility in local search results, meaning potential customers have a lot of competition to choose from.
By implementing local SEO best practices for the real estate industry, businesses can outrank their competitors in local search results and increase the chances of prospective clients choosing them out of all the possible options.
7 Local SEO Best Practices for Real Estate Industry Businesses:
- Google Business Profile Optimization
- Local Keyword Targeting and Content Marketing
- Backlink Building
- Reputation Management and Sentiment Analysis
- Local Citation and NAP Consistency
- Competitor Analysis
- Image and Video Optimization
Google Business Profile Optimization
Even if your real estate business relies heavily on its website to do business, it's important not to overlook optimizing Google Business Profile for real estate agencies, property management companies, and other real estate businesses.
Google even lets individual realtors set up a Google Business Profile, helping them stand out more from the competition.
The reason Google Business Profile optimization is so important in local search is because a selection of the top Google Business Profile listings is usually the first thing people see when they search for real estate services via Google or Google Maps.
So, even if your company's website is ranking highly in organic search results, prospective clients might contact a competitor first because their Google Business Profile ranks higher than yours.
In order to optimize Google Business Profile for realtors or real estate companies, follow best practices like filling out all business information completely and accurately, selecting all relevant categories, adding high-quality photos and videos, providing answers to FAQs, and creating posts to showcase certain aspects of your business or promote special offers.
It's also highly recommended to track your Google Business Profile's ranking with Local Falcon to monitor its performance in real time — down to a hyper-local level — in order to gain insights into the local search landscape, including competitors and opportunities to outrank them.
Local Keyword Targeting and Content Marketing
Targeting local keywords in website content is an important part of any local SEO strategy, but it's especially important for real estate sites, since prospective clients are typically searching for properties and services using very specific geo-modified keywords.
To start optimizing a real estate website with local keywords, try and incorporate them naturally into as much core website content as possible, including headlines and body text on the home page, about us page, contact page, and service page(s).
After their core website content is optimized with local keywords, real estate companies should implement a content marketing strategy that involves producing informative, helpful blog posts or articles that naturally include more local keywords.
For example, you could create content that answers local real estate market questions, provides market analysis for your area, and highlights local news. This not only helps with local SEO, but also establishes your real estate company as a local expert, helping build trust and credibility.
Backlink Building
Building reputable backlinks, or links on other sites that lead back to a page on your site, is another important part of doing local SEO for real estate businesses.
There are many ways to build backlinks, such as collaborating with other local brands or engaging in guest posting, which is creating helpful content for another company's site that links back to your site.
Even just committing to creating high-quality content on your own site can earn you backlinks, as other bloggers and sites may want to reference and link back to it within their own content.
Reputation Management and Sentiment Analysis
Successfully closing real estate deals and transactions requires a high level of trust and credibility, and there's no better way to build trust and establish credibility online than by gathering lots of positive reviews.
Online reviews can also directly impact rankings for your real estate business's Google Business Profile and other listings, as well as help get new leads by convincing them to contact your business over a competitor's.
So, make sure to encourage satisfied clients to leave positive reviews on your Google Business Profile, as well as any other directories you have a listing on.
You can easily do this in follow-up emails thanking clients for their business. Or, you might give it an extra personal touch by sending customers thank-you gift baskets that contain a personal note along with a QR code to leave a review.
Additionally, reviews allow you to perform sentiment analysis, which provides insights into what customers like and dislike about your business, ultimately helping you improve it and get more positive reviews that can boost your local SEO down the road.
Local Citation and NAP Consistency
Local citations are any online mentions of your business information, including its name, address, and phone number (NAP), hours, and other key details.
Google and other search engines reward businesses that have consistent and accurate local citations and NAP information by ranking them highly, so it's important to manage your business information across all directories and other sites where it appears to ensure consistency across the web.
While it may seem insignificant, something as small as abbreviating vs fully spelling out a street name in your business's address on different listings can potentially impact your real estate company's local rankings. So, make sure to monitor and update your NAP and other key business information, including hours, to ensure it always matches exactly anywhere it appears.
Competitor Analysis
Competitor analysis is a crucial aspect of any marketing strategy, including local SEO for real estate businesses.
By analyzing your competitors, you can gain valuable insights into their strategies, strengths, and weaknesses, which can help you refine your own approach and identify opportunities for improvement that can help you outrank them in local search.
We recommend using Local Falcon to run rank tracking scans and analyze reports for your business and its competitors, which can provide insights into the categories and keywords competing business listings are ranking for, as well as help you identify opportunities to outrank them at a hyper-local level.
Local Falcon's integrated AI, Falcon AI, even takes care of a lot of the competitor analysis for you, identifying vulnerable competitors and providing optimization recommendations that can help improve your real estate business's local ranking.
Image and Video Optimization
Real estate business websites are often full of high-quality photos and videos that help showcase their offerings to potential clients — this rich media offers valuable opportunities to optimize your real estate site for local SEO even more.
Make sure to tag all photos and videos with descriptive alt text that includes locally relevant keywords, which can boost your site's overall relevance in local search for real estate services.
Final Words
To succeed in the fiercely competitive local search market, real estate businesses must prioritize local SEO. This allows them to rise above all the other businesses vying for top positions to attract buyers, sellers, and renters in specific neighborhoods or areas.
By implementing these local SEO best practices, real estate businesses can enhance their online presence, outrank competitors, and attract more local leads, ultimately driving growth and success in the highly competitive real estate market!