Real estate is a competitive industry, and more so now that online representation has become necessary. To stay in the competition and rank well on Search Engines, it is important to maximize the exposure of your homepage to end-users. Your home page is your calling card to the world. It makes the first impression to target customers. However, before being viewed, your site must compete with more than 1000 or so sites. In other words, everybody in the real estate industry is focusing on increasing relevance, capturing leads, getting listings, and selling. The following homepage SEO tips will help you to rank and capture the niche or local real estate market.
Here are 11 SEO tips that you can apply to your real estate website homepage:
1. Homepage Design & User Experience (UX)
Make sure your homepage is designed well, easy to navigate to and from other pages, and able to give key information that can answer the initial inquiries of a user. Make sure that the initial visual content is properly tagged including your brand logo. Aside from tagging the pictures and videos, quality is also important. High-def photos and videos go a long way in capturing a real estate customer’s attention, whether a buyer or a seller. Tagging visual content on the homepage will boost SE (Search Engine) visibility.
2. Alt Text for Images
As mentioned in Number 1, it is important to tag your brands’ logo, photos, and videos. In creating your homepage, make sure to utilize ALT tags. These are brief texts limited to about 125 characters. They should provide details for Search Engines and end-users to connect the image to the overall theme of the page and content. Be creative in keyword placement is using ALT tags.
3. Optimize Meta Description
Optimize the keywords of your real estate homepage meta description. The meta description is a snippet of your content. SE ranking usually looks at meta descriptions first to find the keywords of searchers, before searching the website itself. Make the most out of the meta description with good keyword placing and concise content.
4. Engaging Content for Longer Time on Site
Excellent visual content at the very beginning will attract both sellers and buyers. What does this mean in SEO terms? Analytics will show how long a user stays on a certain website; if they stay longer, that would equate to the credibility and reliability of a site, and both are considered in the “ranking game”. A well-represented property for sale, via pictures and videos, will be seen by buyers as compelling real estate to look at; and from the seller’s point of view, you are a reliable, and knowledgeable agent who could represent them.
5. Provide Answers to Common Questions
Answering the initial queries of the target customer is crucial in capturing attention. Remember – a browser (targeted or not) will browse through a website in a short period, from 30 seconds to 5 minutes. Make sure your content is compelling and engaging to make them stay longer or go to other pages on the site. What is the overall message you want to convey? Does the general message answer the inquiry or core inquiry of a user? What can you offer customers? Use these questions to guide you in creating headlines, and then support this with compelling content, carefully placed keywords that target the service and locality. The homepage seems to be a very limiting page to put in keywords. However, good content with a targeted location and the support of carefully tagged visuals, pictures, and videos, optimizes the page.
6. Creative Keywording
Choose several keywords instead of focusing on only one. This allows for flexibility on content creation and still focuses on related words and not just relying on only one. Be creative in keywording especially in targeting location keywords. It is crucial to keep keywords related but not too repetitive, and at the same time writing for your audience (not a machine) aka keyword stuffing — which you can be dinged for. An excellent tool & WordPress plugin for checking your keywords, readability, and more is Yoast SEO.
7. Compelling Call to Action
On your homepage, make sure you use an initial CTA to guide the user to continue with their browsing and eventually with your seller or buyer’s process. An initial CTA is another chance to use keywords and location. Location is important in a real estate niche market.
8. Mobile-Friendly & Speed
Check if your homepage is mobile-friendly. SE (Search Engines) prioritizes sites adaptable to multiple devices. Check to make sure your homepage looks good on a mobile device especially a smartphone, with fast loading speeds and a usable interface. Consumer behavior has evolved since the internet became accessible outside four walls. Search Engines adapt to this behavior by giving priority to mobile-friendly websites. Fast loading and user-friendly interfaces start at the Homepage. Targeted customers usually allot only a few minutes to browse. If your homepage has a slow loading speed, you will lose the opportunity to highlight your listings and the chance to show how you can market real estate to a seller. Real Estate 7 is both designed for mobile and optimized for speed, we also recommend NitroPack as an easy way to boost your site’s pagespeed scores.
9. Schema & Contact Information
Make sure you have the correct schema markup. These should be clearly defined, the brand name, business address, and other information such as telephone numbers and contact person. You want the homepage to represent the company and give the correct data right away to target customers. A business address adds as an SEO factor especially since real estate is a location-centric industry. Keep the schema markup uniform on all pages by using the footer of your website for your personal and office contact information.
10. SSL Certification
Add an SSL certification to your website. This gives your information and users protection and security. SSL is short for Secure Sockets Layer and is a digital certificate that verifies the site’s identity and allows an encrypted connection. A security regulation that creates an encrypted link on web server and browser. It safeguards online information and transactions. This secures users and adds to the credibility of the site. Credibility is a ranking factor in SEO.
11. SEO Auditing Tools
Utilize auditing tools for your homepage. Search engine audit tools will help you spot problems on the homepage. The tools will conduct regular audits of the whole site and make a list of any problem or issue that needs to be addressed for optimization purposes. They identify issues such as broken links, duplicate content, HTML elements, and others. The auditing tools also help you set a priority list of problems to apply appropriate solutions that will impact the website more. There are a plethora of SEO auditing tools available some free, some paid — a few to check out are SEOptimizer, Moz, Ubersuggest, and Ahrefs.
Your homepage is the first port of call online. It is key to establishing a brand and online presence. Make the most of it in giving the best first impression to the end-users, to gain more traffic, credibility, and ranking. Homepage SEO is the first step to penetrate the ever-competitive real estate industry online. SEO has a cyclical pattern that once you get in, whether organically or using ads, will work for your digital marketing goals 24/7. So, optimize and be recognized.
