Great Real Estate SEO

Written by: Gary Horsman

Real Estate SEO – Content and Linking

Real Estate website owners need to think about and create great content for strong real estate SEO. Then they need to create internal links to their content to help develop the internal link profile of their pages. The last item they need to think about and acquire are external links from relevant content be acquired to show the search engine that website owners external to your site view your content as valuable.

First, realize that the search engines search extensively for great content. When they detect content that they think their searching customers will like they will present it in their search results. This makes them look good (and helps them to make money). This is how they validate their existence.

Google and the other major search engines will defend themselves against low quality content by pushing this low quality content down in the search results (sometimes way down). They have to defend themselves against low quality content because to present low quality content makes them look bad (and they will make less money).

Quality Content & Real Estate SEO

What is high quality content? Let’s look at a few examples that apply specifically to real estate and address the SEO impact of each.

• MLS Property Listing Displays: Your website needs to have fully indexable MLS or IDX data. Make sure that you develop a custom IDX feed as they will prevent the property display content from appearing to be duplicate content. This is very important. Your site will not rank well if Google and the other major search engines view your content as duplicate content.
• Area or Town Related Content: Do not use Wikipedia-ish descriptions of the communities in your area. Develop interesting and unique materials about the communities in your real estate market. Give people a great reason to visit your site and not your competition and certainly not Realtor.com.
• Be Concise (do not be redundant): Matt Cutts, head of Google’s web quality, anti-spam team has stated multiple times that only a few sentences are necessary when the message is clear and unique. Therefore, feel comfortable making your point without too much embellishment. Adding words for the sake of adding words is not a best practice. Trying to stuff your content with keyword phrases could work against you.

Real Estate SEO – Internal Link Profile

What is an internal link profile? When you link your content together you are making it easier for both people and the search engines to find your content. Also, the links build up the amount of relevant content that is linked and this creates a greater depth of content. You can also link your content with keyword phrases and a keyword phrase which is a link gives the phrase more SEO emphasis. The Google algorithm puts significant weight on linking and this includes internal linking.

Real Estate SEO & External Links

The last major exercise is to gain links from relevant external sources. When other websites link to your content the search engines view your content as being more popular – more valuable – the more valuable they view your content the higher they place it in their search results. Links are often the missing factor to gaining position over your real estate competition.

Real Estate SEO – Summary

• Create great content
• Build a great internal link profile
• Gain links from external sources

If you are driving to gain a higher position in search then always start by examining the depth, variety and quality of your content. The essence of real estate SEO or any SEO is the quality of what goes into website content and the linking profile of your web content. 

You amy be interested in our Real Estate Blogging Guide. It is a great way to create online content for your real estate business. Download your free guide.