A well thought-out SEO strategy is important for estate agents’ digital presence, as they focus their efforts towards developing long-lasting relationships with potential home owners and tenants digitally.

With nearly all property searches now occurring online, positioning your estate agency as high as possible in Google’s search results is key.

With the right SEO strategy for your estate agent website, not only will you improve your online visibility but you will enhance the number of leads generated organically, in turn increasing instructions won.

So dive into our SEO Guide for estate agents, offering a complete checklist of elements to consider when optimising your website for search engines.

1. Keyword Strategy

Do you know the core keywords to target for your business and how to use them on your website?

Search engines rank your website not only on the content but on the keywords present throughout. Meaning those with a keywords strategy devised specifically for their estate agency will see increased visibility for the right keywords and in turn more relevant quality traffic to their website.

2. Search Engine-Friendly URLs

Are your property search pages and listings easy to find and index by Google?

Having easy-to-read URLs is the first step towards achieving that. All your dynamic pages should have readable URLs not only for search engine bots but users too. This allows users to easily share those pages with friends or social media connections. And it allows search engines to efficiently identify and present your web pages in search results.

3. Optimised Indexing

Are all your important pages indexed properly?

Managing pages extends beyond a simple URL, a key strategy is to verify your website on Google Search Console and use the tool to do regular SEO audits, preventing and fixing any detected errors, whether it’s bad redirects , server errors, duplicate or just poor quality content. Google Search Console also allows you to submit XML sitemaps, which are a great way to ensure all your web pages are properly indexed.

4. Page speed

Is your website loading quickly, especially on mobile?

With the majority of consumers always on the go, the consumer mindset has changed to one of limited patience that is always expecting a swift service. Therefore a website that keeps users waiting is more likely to lose visits and leads.

Focusing on page-speed optimisation is vital in order to efficiently funnel lead generation opportunities while minimising the potential loss of traffic to competitor websites. Not to mention Google rewards with better rankings websites that load quickly, especially on mobile devices.

5. Metadata & Headings

Do you have unique title tags and meta descriptions for each page of your website?

It is very important from an SEO point of view to ensure the content throughout your website is structured using concise and user-friendly headings, title tags and meta descriptions. Although optimising metadata is no longer a major ranking factor, they help make your content unique and engage users to click through to your website.

6. Internal Linking

Do you have good, easy-to-use navigation menus and cross-linking throughout your website?

This is an SEO element that is crucial when it comes to dynamic websites such as estate agency ones. Good internal linking to the most important pages of your website, especially local search pages and listings, allows Google to crawl and rank these pages with priority over other less important ones. This contributes to an SEO tactic called crawl budget optimisation.

7. Local Office Pages

Have you optimised your different office pages, especially if you have multiple branches?

To ensure a digital competitive edge, it is important that estate agents with multiple branches create dedicated optimised office pages. Estate agents must then ensure that the content of every office page is individually tailored to location. From the content to the keywords to the back-end SEO, enriching these individual pages will ensure the right offices appear during local searches. This technique is especially valuable for Local SEO, allowing local branches to rank in Google Maps, in addition to the regular organic search results.

8. Property Search Pages

Have you optimised the most important property search pages on the website?

Property search pages are one of the most important if not the most important type of page to be optimised on an estate agency website. That’s because they essentially funnel the majority of organic traffic from search engines, through keywords with the highest search volumes in the industry such as ‘property for sale in [town]’ or ‘property to rent in [area]’.

For best SEO results, besides effective indexing and the internal linking technique described above, estate agents should focus on optimising these pages with strategic keyword copywriting alongside image optimisation.  

9. Property Listings

Are you overlooking property listings when optimising your website for search engines?

Taking it a step further, estate agents should look at optimising for search engines all their property listings, and that can be done not only through optimising the structure but the content itself.

Keywords in the metadata, headings and property descriptions, cross-linking to other listings and other content such as relevant local information, optimised property images etc. all put your property in front of the right audience at the right time, and that proves to be valuable in getting buyers or tenants but also vendors and landlords.

10. Usability

Have you considered your audience’s website experience?

Estate agents shouldn’t underestimate the importance of the user experience their website offers. Especially to users, but to search engines as well. Google not only judges content but the form in which the content resides.

How easy is it for your audience to navigate your site? Websites that offer a poor experience can be penalised by Google, resulting in lower ranking, which in turn decreases lead generation opportunities.

11. Engaging content

Do you carefully create content that will genuinely appeal to your audience?

A great way to increase your SEO rankings is to consistently provide quality content to users: videos, use of property market stats, local area insights, comprehensive property info etc. Offer your users a reason to return and increase traffic by regularly updating your website content, with local areas guides or a blog section for instance.

By consistently offering engaging content not only do you remind your audience of who you are but you keep top of mind with Google, fresh quality content helps maintain the best rankings.

Do you need help with any of the SEO techniques presented in this guide? Find out more about our experience with SEO for estate agents and get in touch to discuss.