The real estate market is a highly competitive one and real estate agents need to always be up on their toes if they need to be at the top of their game.
It may sound daunting and challenging, however, if an enterprising and resourceful agent knows how to find and use the right strategies, it can provide them with the leverage to succeed in their business.
SEO: A major success element in the new normal
Let’s face it, every real estate agent agrees that SEO is a constantly evolving process that measures up and adapt to the changing needs of online activity and the changing behaviours of the market and consumers.
Based on the latest industry reports, Google tops the list of the most-used search engine platforms on the planet that accounts for more the two trillion queries every day.
This is what keeps SEO specialists always busy and on their toes for any update or change in Google’s algorithms that influence the search query process.
Everyone who has a stake in the SEO industry must know when such changes are happening and how it works to improve people’s experiences in using search engines.
Thus, it is vital to develop SEO strategies that will take advantage of the search algorithm and other operational updates that are applied so that websites are adapted and optimized to leverage from the processes.
Here are some of the emerging trends in SEO that will help real estate agents get ahead of their game.
Voice search
Optimising your web page for voice search is not only a convenient feature for your page visitors, but it is also going to be your best choice since it has recently been regarded as one of the most popular and highly emerging trends in the search engine industry.
This has been the case over the last several years as technology jumped into leaps and bounds developing smarter computer and mobile devices. A recent study revealed that voice search accuracy has been rated at 95%, making it reliable and trustworthy.
Make sure to work your strategy for voice search to understand key phrases and long-tail keywords, provide relevant and concise answers to FAQ’s, being aware of what people commonly ask, and create compelling content to attract and engage people.
Mobile-friendly
With no less than 88% of searches completed with the use of smartphones, there’s no better way to boost your real estate website traffic by making it accessible for mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets.
Google has considered mobile-first indexing when indexing and ranking sites in the SERP. This is only practical because the latest statistics show that around 52% of searches are made on mobile devices.
This is why your sites need to be optimised for mobile for it to become mobile-friendly and allow you to leverage this mobile consumer behaviour.
Quality content
Keyword stuffing is no longer a good choice when optimizing your pages and Googe can even penalise you for doing so.
There’s just no substitute for quality content if you want to rank high in Google search pages.
When looking into strategizing your pages for content, you may need to include catchy headings and subheadings throughout your content, incorporate links within your articles, and use highly-relevant and trending keywords once or twice throughout your content making sure that they make sense where they are placed.
Branding
Industry experts believe that one of the newest updates in the Google search algorithm is the use of online brands as a ranking element for queries.
There are a couple of ways that the search engine uses brands as a way to differentiate the good from the bad content that it can provide in the query results or the search engine results page (SERP).
First, the search engine can determine if your brand is empty, especially when crawling for unlinked brands. It then analyses all the properties and characteristics that relate to the brand for Google to develop your profile or a picture of your authority in a given subject, field, or topic.
Second, it factors in the context and sentiment of each search component, such as trust, reputation, problem-solving, issue resolution, advertising, etc. For instance, site reputation is a factor for rankings, which means that any sentiment generated for the brand can affect the rankings for the site.
Page speed and user interface
This is one of the technical aspects of Google ranking factors that cater to delivering a positive user experience (UX) for users which can be done by improving your user interface (UI). Desktop page-loading time has been initially applying it in the search algorithm, but with the entry of mobile devices into the picture, it updated the capability to incorporate mobile page speed into the equation.
When optimising your webpage for speed and performance avoid using hard and complex terms and words in your content, ensure your pages are easily accessible or provide clear instructions on how to navigate through the pages, avoid overstuffing content, and provide attractive images, videos, and infographics.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
AI has been largely responsible for making search engines more convenient, relevant, and responsive to the needs of users when navigating through your webpages.
Also, Google has is using its self-learning algorithm Rankbrain to understand user intentions to improve user experience.
To use the power of AI to your real estate webpage, you can use AI tools to help with your SEO, focus on developing content that is related to your real estate business, and make sure to track and monitor your SEO and AI reports regularly.