May 31, 2021

You may have seen a shift in the real estate market for the past decade. For one, people now look for properties online. This usually occurs at the beginning of the buyer’s journey. And the reason varies from knowing who the project developer is to where the project is located. This explains why real estate agents must have a website. Otherwise, you are doing yourself a disservice. Mind you; a well-optimized website could do wonders for you. This includes driving website traffic, generating qualified leads, and closing in sales. That said, we have listed down ten website optimization tips real estate agents should keep in mind: 1. Make It User-Friendly Imagine this: You visited a website, and it kept on loading for ten seconds. What would you do? It would only make sense to leave it and move on to another website. This leads to a higher bounce rate, which can hurt your website’s search engine ranking. Mind you, a website that takes three seconds to load increases it’s bounce rate by 32%. Hence, you should ensure that your website is loading fast. You can run your website on free online tools like Pagespeed Insights or GTmetrix. Doing so lets you figure out whether your website is loading fast. These tools also list down some recommendations on how you can improve your site’s page load speed. 2. Publish Valuable Blog Posts You may have heard it once, but we will repeat it. Content is king. In case you do not know, websites with a blog have 434% more indexed pages. An indexed page is any web page that a search engine bot has visited, analyzed, and added to its database. That way, bots can retrieve the pages and add it to their search results when someone looks for it. Say, someone typed in “affordable houses in Santa Monica, California,” and you happened to have a blog post about it. There is a big chance that your blog post will appear on the search result. How is this possible? For one, blog posts allow you to incorporate your target keywords. Another reason is that you get to practice link building using your content. The process can take hours to discuss. Hence, we suggest looking for a reputable agency that offers SEO services for real estate agents. 3. Host Virtual Tours A virtual tour is an excellent add-on for a real estate website, especially now that there is a pandemic. For one, you can showcase how a real estate property looks like. This can entice a site visitor to book an open house visit. Second, virtual tours allow you to produce video content. And videos are effective in promoting a product or service. So much so that 9% of small businesses in the US use YouTube advertising. In addition to this, here are some quick tips that can make your virtual tour successful: Use real home footage instead of digital illustrations Ensure that your home tour video is interactive Consider publishing a 3D home tour video Make a mobile-responsive home tour video Following these tips will make it easier for your prospects to decide whether they want to buy a house you are selling. 4. Practice SEO It does not matter if you have a well-designed website when no one visits it. This is where search engine optimization could come in handy. What SEO does is ensure that your website will appear on relevant search results. For instance, you are selling a 3-bedroom house in Colorado. Using proper SEO practices, your website will appear when someone typed in “3b house Colorado for sale.” However, doing SEO alone can be cumbersome. That’s because SEO is multi-faceted, and there are many factors to consider in making a website rank. Hence, we advise that you have a marketing agency that provides real estate SEO Services. 5. Make It Mobile-Friendly Besides ensuring that your website will appear on relevant search queries, it would also be ideal for making it mobile-friendly. For one, around 20% of Google searches on real estate happens on mobile. That’s why you need to ensure that visitors can access your real estate website using their smartphones or tablets. It can be as simple as using a mobile-responsive web design theme. Nonetheless, you should also optimize your website’s page load speed. As mentioned earlier, a slow website has high bounce rates. And high bounce rates can hurt your search engine ranking. But more than that, you are not providing an excellent web user experience. Other than running your website on PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix, you can also do the following: Delete any Flash or script elements that can increase your page’s load time. Remove any ad interstitials that prevent site visitors from accessing your content. Make your website intuitive and easy to use by adding non-intrusive CTA, short menu, specific search field, and more. Compress large images and add keyword-rich ALT text. Use Accelerated Mobile Pages to improve your website mobile page speed. 6. Use Structured Data Markup A structured data markup allows you to display rich snippets on search results. So, instead of just texts, you can display images on search results. What structure data markup you use will depend on your website’s structure. Nonetheless, there are various real estate markups that you can take advantage of. You can visit Schema.org for more information. 7. Earn Featured Snippets Featured Snippets is like positioning your website on rank zero. As long as your website is already ranking on the first page of search results. What makes featured snippets different from rich snippets? Rich snippets are like organic search results in steroids. Featured snippets, on the other hand, are answers to a search query. Let’s use our previous example of “affordable houses in Santa Monica, California.” If you use the right markup, it is likely that your blog post about affordable houses for sale in Santa Monica will be on rank zero. The best part? It lists down the first few points of