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.