The Ultimate Guide To Local SEO For Realtors: Hyper Local Real Estate Marketing

In today’s hyper-competitive real estate industry, you cannot get away with a “set it and forget it” online marketing strategy, especially in the world of local real estate marketing.

You need to reach potential home buyers, and that requires ongoing optimizations across all marketing channels.

This means that you have to make the most of local search engine optimization (SEO) efforts by fine-tuning your campaigns, tracking results, and improving your efforts every step of the way to drive a flood of targeted traffic to your sales pages and local real estate listings.

We have put together this quick guide filled with the kind of inside information you need to succeed today to help you hit the ground running with local SEO for real estate agents.

What Is Local SEO For Real Estate Search?

Hyper focused local real estate SEO is different than traditional real estate SEO, but it’s vital that you understand the differences, as well as, why it is so beneficial to drill down and target local strategies and tactics that will work best.

While traditional real estate SEO focuses on getting your listings found by the general public, local real estate SEO focuses your efforts on getting your brand and listings found by people near your physical location.

This approach to SEO marketing is vital for real estate agents because local SEO can help you get located in SERPs within your geographic area.

This means that qualified leads will find and engage with your listings so you can drive more sales while spending less.

Here are several step-by-step recommendations that you can take to optimize your real estate website and online listings to get found in Google My Business.

Local exposure can drive more qualified leads to your site and produce more phone calls that you can turn into leads, so let’s take a look at how you can improve your real estate local SEO efforts today!

What Are The Benefits Of Local SEO For Realtors?

More than 7.5 billion local searches are reported every single month (with the number getting higher and higher month after month).

On top of that, 87% of ALL people searching for a home do so on Google looking for local realtors.

If you focus your real estate SEO efforts on capturing the attention of people in your geographic area, you will be able to drive qualified leads to your real estate website and other local listings.

There are a number of benefits you’ll enjoy when leveraging local SEO marketing for your real estate business, including:

• Driving more targeted, organic, and evergreen traffic to your sales pages, listing pages, and other online campaigns without having to spend a mountain of money every week on paid advertisement.
• Standing out in Google and ranking prominently for search engine keywords.
• Attracting new prospects and clients at a lower cost compared to online paid advertising.
• Higher visibility for your listings as well as your local real estate business in general

The key to hyperlocal SEO marketing is to think about how your ideal clients search for listings online.

Most people looking for a home already have a general geographic area in mind, and now they are searching for listings that meet their needs in a specific city or county.

Your customers do not search for generic terms like “homes for sale” home buyers are more likely to search “Orlando homes for sale” or “Orlando homes for sale,” with these local keywords returning more qualified home buyers and better exposure for your business.

Working with top-tier local SEO professionals that understand the real estate world lets you hit the ground running, enjoying results much faster (and for a lot less money) than you’d have been able to come up with on your own

Key Local SEO Factors That You Need to Consider

There are a number of ranking factors that go into deciding your visibility in local SERPs. You need to work with various on-page and off-page factors to make sure your site is SEO-friendly while also ensuring that your citations and directory listings are all consistent.

Image Source: https://moz.com/blog/2018-local-search-ranking-factors-survey

All of these factors have a significant impact on how you rank in local SEO and Google My Business listings.

Here are a few in-depth steps that you can take to make sure your online visibility is optimized to get found in local search results to boost your leads and sales!

1. Make Sure NAP Is Consistent

The first thing you need to do is make sure that your NAP is taken care of when it comes to SEO.

NAP stands for your Name, Address, and Phone Number and these core pieces of info not only need to be prominently displayed on every single page of your online platform, but also need to be a big part of your search engine optimization efforts, business directory listings, and social media presence as well.

Double verify that all of your NAP information is accurate and consistent, too. You don’t want to lose out on any potential traffic – or any potential clients – just because of simple typos that could have been effortlessly corrected.

2. Get Listed On The Most Important Local Directories

Local directories, in particular, are famous for the amount of “link juice” and search engine authority they can provide your website, which is why you need to strive to get listed on EVERY single local directory possible – but especially the most critical and influential directories that we highlight below.

The more listings you have on these directories pushing to your site and your listings, and the higher (and faster) you are going to shoot up the search engine ranks.

• Google My Business
• Alignable
• Better Business Bureau
• Angie’s List
• Merchant Circle
• Whitepages
• CitySearch

The odds are pretty good that your local area also has several independent directories that you want to have listings placed on as well. It’s all about spreading the links around and getting “votes of confidence” for your business, your pages, and your listings from authoritative sites like these.

You can use longtail keywords on your website and Google My Business page to get found by home buyers looking for specific properties in specific geographic areas.

During the keyword research phase, you will notice that these geographic keywords have lower volume, but they will help drive more qualified leads to your real estate listings.

There are many ranking factors that you need to consider if you want to dominate local search engine optimization. Let’s take a look at a few of the most important on-site and off-site optimizations that you can make to improve the online visibility of your real estate local business today!

3. Get Listed On The Most Important Real Estate Directories

On top of the major online directories we highlighted above (as well as the local directories listed above), you’ll also want to be sure that your business is accurately listed – with NAP information – on prominent real estate directories as well.
Some of these directories include (but certainly aren’t limited to):

• Zoocasa
• Trulia
• Zillow
• Homes.com

Almost all of these directories will provide plenty of backlinks opportunities to point back to your website, your social media, your marketing campaigns, and your listings – bumping them higher and higher in search engine rankings when they are optimized for local keywords.

4. Optimize Your Social Media Presence

Social media has become a real juggernaut when it comes to word-of-mouth marketing and advertising, but there’s a lot of value here when it comes to local search engine optimization as well.

Your social media accounts should include NAP details, links to current listings, and feature content that is keyword rich with a hyperfocus on local longtail SEO keywords you want to rank for.

It’s also essential that your social media is regularly updated with new, congruent, and relevant content. The underlying algorithms behind Google’s search engine spider system (as well as other search engine ranking systems) place a lot of emphasis on platforms that are regularly updated with relevant details they can provide those searching for more information.

5. Encourage Customers To Leave Reviews

For obvious reasons, reviews are always going to be a big plus for your real estate business.

On top of those, however, you’re also going to be able to generate quite a bit of local search engine optimization “heat” when you have a lot of customer reviews – especially on directory websites – that include your business name and relevant keywords.

You won’t always have a lot of control over the content that your customers post on these directories as far as reviews are concerned, but you should still be encouraging them to leave honest and unbiased reviews to build your influence, your authority in your market, and increase your social proof as well.

6. Optimize Your Website For Mobile Search

As the new year quickly approaches, your real estate website needs to be developed with a mobile-first design. This is because the overwhelming majority of online traffic is going to be funneled through mobile devices.

Image Source: https://www.augustash.com/our-blog/mobile-friendly-websites-2019

If your website isn’t (right now, this very minute) optimized for mobile traffic – featuring responsive design elements that render correctly on smaller, mobile screens – you are going to be losing ground to competitors that have already made the switch.

Not only will this be a huge usability issue, but search engine spiders and ranking algorithms also consider mobile readiness when it comes to positioning your content in the search results. Have your site optimized ASAP and you can get a big bump the local rankings you are shooting for.

7. Optimize Local Pages On Your Real Estate Website

Local SEO is all about driving qualified leads to your listings, and there is no better way to do this than to optimize your website for local searchers. You can take advantage of local SEO by creating local pages on your site with content specifically tailored for the city and location of people visiting that page.

Your real estate site can have several local SEO pages for each of the cities that you work in. On this page, you should have listings specific for each of the geographic locations. In addition, you can optimize your local pages with some particular tactics like:

• Optimize URL, Title Tags, Headers, Meta Description
• Optimize Internal Linking & Website Architecture
• Create Content Specifically For Local Pages
• Add outbound links at the bottom of each page to other (non-competing) resources

You can build out local pages by focusing on geographic modifiers based on what people are searching for in your area. Then you optimize the content on each page to highlight the specific geographic location by city, state, county, etc.

When combined with the above tips, you will be able to rank higher in SERPs for the areas that you operate in and drive more qualified leads to your listings!