Get Local SEO for your Real Estate Website

Next in our series on SEO for real estate professionals, we get local. The last 2 blogs in this series have given an overview and explanation of SEO and its importance to real estate agents, as well as the role keywords play in determining the quality of a website in an online search. As important as SEO is, real estate is all about Location, Location, Location. This means getting local with your keywords and terms is going to give you the best results. This blog will go into some detail about local search engine marketing - what it is and tips to ensure your presence is boosted for local search results.

Let’s start with an understanding of local SEO and why it is so critical for your real estate business. Google’s own research indicates that nearly 50% of all searches have an element of what they call “local intent”. For example, unlike someone specifically searching for the best running shoe, which could come from anywhere in the world, people searching for a new home, checking the value of their home in preparation to sell, or researching new neighborhoods for the next move, will put in location-based words into the search.  Search engines like Google are designed to understand what their users are looking for and automatically include localization as part of the results, if not otherwise specified.

Real estate professionals will get the greatest visibility and improved traffic to their website when their listing appears in the “local pack’ or “3-pack” - the block of results that show up just after the map on the results page. If you’ve ever done a local search, you’ve undoubtedly seen this separate listing of businesses. You may notice the businesses listed show review ratings, phone numbers, hours of operations, and other elements that can easily be found on a website.  This is, however, not where this information is curated for search results. It comes from a business’ Google My Business profile

This is becoming more important as Google continues to refine their search results process and map functions become increasingly accessed.

This aspect of setting up your local presence can get complicated, made more complex by the presence of Google ads. This is not required in order to have a local presence in the search results, but you may get that impression as you are setting up your Google local page. If all of this seems overwhelming, you’re not alone. Reach out and let us help you get your real estate business found online and through local search results.