3 SEO Best Practices for Real Estate Agents in 2022

The harsh reality is that if your website doesn’t appear in Google’s list of the top 10 results for your keywords, you’re basically invisible to searchers on Google. HubSpot reports that 75% of people simply never bother to search past the first page. This is why it’s important that you rank in the top 10, so your website shows up on the first page. There are a number of different tactics you can take to raise your ranking on Google. If you don’t get this right, you can basically forget about ranking on the first page.

When setting up your website you it’s important to follow SEO best practices so that it will appear much more often in searches. Once you’ve built the foundation, you can focus on other SEO strategies, like incorporating the most effective keywords and link building.

This article will be geared toward real estate agents and the 3 SEO best practices to incorporate to keep your search rankings at the top in 2022:

1. Increase Page Speed

If people have to wait for your website to load, many of them will simply move on and this will cost you sales. Google prioritizes a good user experience and rewards fast loading pages with higher rankings. There are a number of free tools available that you can use to check how fast your pages load, including Google’s PageSpeed Insights, which will score your page speed.

If your page speed needs improvement there are other free tools available to help you do that. We can highly recommend GTMetrix. This tool will help you understand why it takes so long for your pages to load and provide suggestions on what you can do to speed things up. One solution might be to simply compress your images.

Additionally, there are quite a few other things you could do to get your web pages to load more quickly:

• Activate browser caching
• Minify JavaScript and CSS files
• Reduce the amount of redirects
• Remove unnecessary plugins
• Shorten server response time

1. Use Long-Form Content

Google prefers long-form content and therefore it will rank higher on the search engine. A number of studies back this up, including the SEMrush study, which is the most recent. Researchers analyzed top-performing articles on Google and found that those containing 3000+ words generate 3 times more traffic, have 4 times as many shares, and acquire 3.5 times more backlinks than articles with 901-1200 words, which is considered average. This shows a strong correlation between the length of an article and search performance. This is why it’s important to publish 1-2 highly detailed long-form articles with the kind of information that Google users would find very helpful.

Google prefers content that meets the needs of users. So, rather than focusing on SEO, you can more effectively keep and convert readers by posting long-form content. But you certainly don’t want to ignore the importance of SEO. While writing your blog, use keywords that combine keyword difficulty with search volume. Long-tail keywords typically suffer from low search volume, however in certain instances they can reach your target audience. If the search volume is way too low, you can try mid-tail keywords that score low to medium in terms of difficulty.

1. Enhance Your User Experience

Google monitors how users react to your content. This is why improving the user experience could certainly help in raising your search rankings. As we’ve already discussed, page speed definitely has an impact on the user experience of people visiting your website.

 

Here are some other helpful tips to improve the user experience on your site:

• Use subheadings: By appropriately using subheadings (H1, H2, H3) you help Google gain a better understanding of your content, which improves its accessibility to readers.
• Content should be visually appealing: Studies show that good visuals go a long way in helping visitors understand your content more clearly. Try using relevant graphs, videos, screenshots, photos, and other images.

• Do not use popups: Few people appreciate popups because they’re so intrusive. They’re not only terrible in terms of SEO, but they drive away visitors. For several years now Google has made it a point to penalize sites that use them. If you need them to build your email list, then have exit-intent popups. Or, limit them only to users who’ve stayed on your site for at least 5 minutes.
• Incorporate white space: A great design incorporates plenty of white space. In fact, Crazy Egg has found that by placing white space on the margins, both left and right, as well as between paragraphs, comprehension improves by 20%. By using white space, you can improve your website’s visual appeal while making your content easier to read and understand.