Estate Agent SEO – What is it?

Estate Agent SEO – What is it?

Search Engine Optimisation

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), or Organic Search, for estate agents is a set of marketing practices designed to improve the appearance, positioning and traffic to your website’s property listings and pages in organic (non paid) search results.

The better visibility your pages have in Google, Bing, and other search engine’s search results, the more likely you are to gain attention and convert this traffic into enquiries, booking confirmations and property viewings.

Recommended by Google

There’s something quite powerful about your property pages showing up naturally at the top of a Google organic search. It feels like Google are recommending your services over other estate agents. To a certain extent, they are, as Google identifies you as the ‘go-to’ resource for ‘estate (insert location)’, due to the relative cumulative effect of over 200+ ranking signals in relation to your website.

According to Similar Web, organic search gets over 20 times more clicks than any paid Google ad, and 70% say that Organic Search is better for driving sales than PPC. Every marketer knows being found organically through Google’s search engine results in a better click-through rate, dwell time, and ultimately what is essential: more leads.

Continuous Monthly Traffic

Looking at the keywords below using Google’s Keyword Planner you can see just a few terms relating to estate agents in the location of Sheffield, and how many times the keywords are being searched for every month. The total monthly traffic for these 5 keyword phrases alone is 5,590. This isn’t unique to Sheffield, and monthly searches will be higher in many locations. Could a slice of this pie allow to let your property portfolio quicker and more profitably?

71% of all that traffic will go to the estate agents on the first page of Google’s search results page, according to Moz. If your local competitor are already on the first page, can you afford not to be?

92% Market Share

You may have also noticed that when people talk about ‘SEO‘, ‘Organic Search’, ‘Natural Search’, they talk about it synonymously in regards to Google. That’s because Google has 92% of the search engine market share. Other search engines, such as Bing, can be valuable, but it makes more sense to place your attention where most of your market is focused.

How does Estate Agent SEO work?

How does Estate Agent SEO work?

Science and Art

SEO is both a Science and Art in that it requires a technical (on-page SEO) and creative (off page) skillset.

On-page SEO

On-page SEO, or on-site SEO, involves strategically aligning page-specific elements like title tags, headings, URL’s, content, and internal links with keywords, such as ‘Nottingham estate agents’. On-page SEO is known as the technical tasks of the discipline. There are over 100+ factors that come into play, with no one task being enough to rank you no.1 on Google. Start thinking about the cumulative affect of all factors being judged simultaneously.

On-page SEO is important because it tells Google about your website and how it provides value to a user, for example, searching for an apartment to buy in Nottingham.

For this to happen, search engines need to crawl, index and rank (in that order) your websites to determine how relevant your site is to the keyword ‘Nottingham estate agents’. Search engines such as Google can also determine if the users experience will be positive by looking at your on-page SEO.

Off-page SEO

Off-page SEO can be thought of as any effort/activity taken outside of a website to improve its search engine visibility.

Link building is often touted as a big part of off-page SEO, and it is, but there’s much more to it than that.

The ability of your estate agent website to rank locally is determined partly by your authority, trustworthiness, and relevance, in relation to your off-page SEO efforts. Search engine algorithms and ranking factors do change, but these 3 factors always remain. Is your website authoritive, trustworthy and relevant to the users search?

Creativity is so important to SEO as it’s this creativity which keeps viewers on the page, and also helps to build relationships, online and offline, which positively reinforce your authority, trustworthiness, and relevance.

Local SEO

46% of all searches on Google have “local intent.”

If a Google user would look for your services in relation to a location, then you’ve entered the realm of Local SEO, A search term like ‘Nottingham estate agents’ would absolutely constitute Local SEO.

The only difference between Local SEO to national (or international SEO) is that your strategy is tailored to being visible in local search results.
Google’s local search gives you the opportunity to stand out. In Sheffield there are current over 50 estate agents competing for a tenants attention. Local SEO might just provide the greatest chance to disrupt the competition.

What’s involved in Estate Agent SEO?

What’s involved in Estate Agent SEO?

In Google’s own words: “we sort through hundreds of billions of webpages in our Search index to find the most relevant, useful results in a fraction of a second, and present them in a way that helps you find what you’re looking for.” But how does it do that and what are some of the most important factors in your SEO?

As nearly all estate agent search activity includes some form of local intent, whether that be a city, town, area, or even street, we will focus primarily on Local SEO factors.

The same principles still apply: add value to the user experience and be a high quality source of information.

Some local SEO factors may hold more weight than others, but all are still important. ‘All things being equal’, in terms of other estate agents websites in the local area, a handful of ranking factors might just be enough to provide an advantage over them.

Estate agents in your local area are investing time and energy into organic search. Your strategy has to set you apart from the local competition. Whichever way you move forward with SEO strategy your must differentiate and exceed what everyone other estate agent in your local area is doing.

A proven Search Strategy for Estate Agents

A proven Search Strategy for Estate Agents

Bricks & Marketing help estate agent brands to grow their businesses using SEO, Pay Per Click Advertising and Conversion Rate Optimisation. We have a combined 15 years experience within the property marketing sector.

Business owners, Managing Directors and Marketing Managers look to Bricks & Marketing when:

Needing piece of mind that the brands SEO and PPC strategy is industry led and bespoke to their needs.

Committed to delivering sustainable growth in online sales and revenue.

Feel their current strategy is stuck in a rut and in need of fresh ideas and outside perspective.

Bricks & Marketing are different from what you will find in the marketplace:

Google’s search algorithm doesn’t work the same in all industries. We understand the unique differences of the property sector due to 15+years of experience in digital marketing within the sector. Our team are heavily invested in knowing the inner detail of how Google interprets estate agent websites, which give us a competitive advantage over a standard SEO marketing agency.

We have evolved with the requirements of what is required for a digital marketing strategy to succeed now and in the future.

We are an officially certified Google Partner, which means our team are trained and certified in Google Ads. This training is to an expert level, required by Google of all of its Partners.

We have experience in building successful SEO strategies for estate agents brands, primarily in the UK, but also across the world.

Our clients become long-term partners. We’ve worked with over 50+ estate agents in our 15 years as an SEO and PPC marketing agency to the property sector. That past experience of knowing what and what doesn’t work is invaluable, and we’ll apply it to your estate agent SEO strategy immediately.

At Bricks & Marketing we understand that rankings, impressions and traffic are important, but not top level business metrics. Leads, in the way of booking confirmation and enquiries, are metrics that grow estate agents. This methodology is at the forefront of everything we do.

Bricks & Marketing lives and breathes everything property marketing.

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