3 minute read

Having worked as an SEO consultant for many years, i first got into the game doing SEO work for many of Victoria’s real estate agents.

The beauty of SEO for real estate agents is that it was one of the first industries in Australia to really capitalize on the local suburb based keywords which realestate.com.au was doing quite well.

Google almost any keyword and you will see this site is in the top 2 for all areas.

There are a number of on page SEO tips which i will provide below which can assist in getting your website to rank for all of your service areas.

For the sake of this article i will use a made up company called NBRE  a real estate agent in northern beaches

Title Tag

Rule of thumb is not to put all your eggs into one basket, a maximum of 70 characters should be in your title tag

A good title tag for this example will be  –

Real Estate Northern Beaches, Manly – NBRE

A bad title tag is below, (and believe me there are plenty of sites that do this)

Real estate northern beaches, real estate manly, manly real estate, real estate palm beach, palm beach real estate

Keep your title tag short and simple!

Meta Description

Your meta description should be about 150 characters long and be informative about the company and not a field to keyword spam

Content

Write great content, with a keyword density of 2% (keyword density is the frequency the keyword is mentioned across the total word count)

Don’t list all your suburbs you service at the bottom of the page

Many web designers apply this as an SEO tactic (one of many reason why they shouldn’t be doing SEO) eg – we service, real estate manly, northern beaches, sydney, balmain etc etc

It is a tactic which doesn’t work so please avoid it, many real estate agent websites i have worked on in Victoria have this at the bottom of the home page, not a good tactic.

Landing Pages URL structure

If you are a agent who services many areas it may be worth while creating a specific page on each suburb, 0ne key point to note is the URL structure to use.

A good URL should look like this –

www.example.com/manly

A spammy URL looks like this –

www.example.com/real-estate-manly

Adding exact match URL landing pages are seen as spammy and are not good after recent changes in Google.

If you need further inspiration on good internal URL structure go to realestate.com.au

Backlinks

I would strongly suggest all the backlinks to your site which you can manage to get, for example maybe one of your colleagues interstate or in another area you dont service, to be your URL or brand name only.

This is vital, keyword rich backlinks can result in over optimisation, many websites that heavily used anchor text like ‘real estate manly’ for example have now been penalized in Google.

If you are looking for more information on SEO please visit the website of Maps Gurus SEO the team of search engine optimisation specialists have many years of experience doing online marketing for real estate and buyers advocates as well.

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6 Comments

  • Peter Watson
    Posted September 11, 2012 at 10:17 am 0Likes

    Nice tips John. I particularly like the point about meta description. I see too many times webmaster trying to stuff keywords in this field. It simply looks nasty and has a negative effect on CTR.

    The Meta description is used to draw the user from the results page to your site and is a very important element of search marketing.

  • Charlie Gunningham
    Posted September 11, 2012 at 10:48 am 0Likes

    Great post John – nice and simple, with the important stuff emphasised.

    I am constantly amazed at how many real estate agents (or rather, their web designers) have “Welcome to XYZ Realty” as their title tag – do they have no clue how important these 80 characters or so have in SEO?! Obviously not. Google Pages also helps, as do direct links (with adequately named anchor text) to properties for sale/rent. etc

  • Real Estate Agent Support
    Posted January 18, 2013 at 9:01 am 0Likes

    This is one great post John! This must be really helpful to all real estate agents who are starting with their respective real estate websites and wanted to optimized it. I would highly recommend your blog!

    And to those agents seeking more tips, you guys can visit: http://www.realestateagentsupport.com 🙂

    • John Vlasakakis
      Posted January 18, 2013 at 2:30 pm 0Likes

      Thank you for your kind words.
      definitely check out our website which we will update on a regular basis now with content and tips.

  • David Trounce
    Posted April 23, 2014 at 9:35 am 0Likes

    I have seen some good, solid results for real estate clients after setting up their Google Places Page and optimizing their site for local SEO using similar methods.

    Real Estate is notoriously difficult to rank for becuase of the need competitiion of keywords. This has led to some pretty ugly stuffing

    I also see a lot of Agents trying to be all things to all men. Trying to beef up their content with articles about all kinds of unrelated material.

    My adivce: Stick to your main game.

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