Don’t let these common errors keep potential clients from finding you online.
Nowadays, success as a luxury real estate agent comes down to more than charisma and connections or even skill and experience. Half the battle is learning how to get in front of the right people. And increasingly, the best way to get new eyes on your business is through the internet!
While social media marketing is popular right now, perhaps even more important is your luxury real estate website. Conducting a Google search is still often the first course of action anyone looking for a new service provider or professional in their area takes. That’s why if you rank well in Google searches, you get to enjoy the perks of having new eyes on your website — and on your business — without paying for ads. SEO for realtors is one of the most powerful tools you can leverage if you do it right! As you work to increase the organic traffic to your website through SEO, watch out for these six common mistakes.
Forgetting Mobile
In the last couple of years, the mobile experience has become one of the most important means for accessing online content. Over 50% of web traffic comes through mobile devices now. In order to be sure your users can learn what they need to know from your site and ultimately get in touch with you, your website needs to be configured for mobile performance and optimization.
Pages loading too slowly is one of the main reasons websites get penalized in Google’s rankings, and Google undoubtedly factors in mobile loading speeds! Your web pages need to load in three seconds or less in order to stay in Google’s good graces.
Getting Stuck in the Past
SEO best practices and strategies change constantly. This can certainly be frustrating for business owners and online marketers, but it’s nonetheless an essential truth to recognize. Unfortunately, many real estate professionals learned all about SEO five or ten years ago, set up their sites using that knowledge, and haven’t pivoted their strategies to keep up with changing algorithms and preferences.
For example, keyword stuffing, the practice of repeating keywords over and over on a webpage and its metadata, used to be rewarded by search engines. However, search engines have since caught onto this spammy strategy and attempting to use it will only result in lower rankings. There also have been less extreme changes to SEO best practices. Though these different approaches might seem small at first, they all add up to create an entirely different strategy from the one that would have worked best even just a few years ago.
Sticking to Text Only
With so much talk about keywords, many people often forget about other types of content that can also rank in SEO. For example, video content, podcasts, and graphics all play into SEO rankings as well. In fact, some experts believe that video content ranks in Google even more quickly than text content!
This may mean it’s time to change up your marketing strategy. If you’ve been sticking to blogs and written content simply for the sake of SEO, reconsider! Do you genuinely like creating written content best? If so, keep at it and let your authentic voice shine through. But if not, allow yourself to explore other strategies and get creative. Could you contact podcasters to grow your reach through crossover audiences? Would you enjoy starting a vlog or an educational video series? These types of content do extremely well on all sorts of platforms while also giving your SEO a healthy boost.
Competing with Yourself
If you focus on only a few main keywords throughout your entire site, you may be setting yourself up to eat at your own rankings. Because Google has to figure out which page to rank highest, if you have duplicate keywords on other pages on your site, both your pages may slip further down in the rankings simply because they are “keyword cannibalizing” one another.
This common mistake can easily happen by accident since it often makes sense to use the same few words and phrases to describe yourself, your background, the area you serve, and your services. For example, you might use the keyword, “luxury agent in (your location)” a few times on all of your main website pages. It’s important to recognize that instead of increasing the chances of these pages ranking, you might actually be sabotaging your own efforts this way.
You can avoid this mistake by assigning each web page its own specific keyword to focus on. This will help search engines differentiate between your content and allow you to rank for a variety of different search terms at once.
Neglecting Metadata and Backlinks
Oftentimes, SEO doesn’t just come down to what you can read or watch on the page. It also depends on the backend details of the site such as metadata and tags, and aspects that are even more difficult to control, like backlinks.
Correctly creating unique and descriptive title tags goes a very long way in making your page searchable and highly-ranked in search engines. Meta descriptions communicate directly with search engines to tell them which users might find your page useful. Making sure these explanations are accurate allows the right people to come to your site and stay there to consume your helpful information. Just like your keyword planning should vary for each page in order to avoid “cannibalizing” your own site, the keywords in your meta descriptions and title tags should also be unique and should fit the appropriate lengths for their respective fields.
Another commonly overlooked strategy for boosting SEO is working to earn backlinks. Backlinks are links to your page from other sites. These are understandably hard to control since you don’t have much of a say over what shows up on other sites! However, prioritizing the need for reputable backlinks in your overall marketing strategy can give you a leg up. For example, working to be featured in trusted publications in your niche or your area can land you with an extremely powerful backlink to your website.
Getting featured on podcasts or as a guest real estate expert on blogs or online articles can also result in a much higher ranking for your webpage as you build up a solid log of backlinks. While it can be tempting, purchasing backlinks can ultimately hurt you instead of help you. Stay the course to earn true features and legitimate backlinks for a much safer route to higher rankings.
Ignoring the End Game
Finally, many real estate professionals see their SEO rankings fall simply because they’re thinking too hard about their SEO rankings! That is to say, they focus less on user intent because all they’re thinking about are their keywords and their metadata.
At the end of the day, search engines reward sites that provide the best information people are searching for. That’s the whole point! So, if you post a blog about applying for mortgage pre-approval, but all the content on the page is a cheap repackaging of the same few keywords, users aren’t going to stay on your page very long, and Google is going to notice!
Considering user intent by creating a smooth and helpful online experience for the people who do find your website is the best way to marry your content marketing efforts with your SEO strategy.
Overall, Google uses various algorithms to determine the expertise, authority, and trust of any given site, which is why understanding SEO strategies can be so complicated! The good news is, there are countless tools on the internet to help you strategize and measure your website’s SEO. From Google Keyword Planner to Semrush, these tools will help you grow your organic audience and steadily accumulate more warm leads.
However, the complex and ever-changing nature of SEO makes it difficult to juggle best practices with the other duties of your luxury real estate career! Many people outsource this aspect of their business by hiring trusted real estate SEO services instead of trying to do it all themselves.
Work With Us
Luxury Presence is one of the fastest-growing digital platforms for real estate professionals. Our team specializes in the type of strategic, thoughtful content marketing that will help you build your brand, close more deals, and expand your network. Get in touch with us today!
