Geo Location and SEO for Real Estate

When performing search engine optimization for Real Estate websites, there are a few difficult challenges to face right off the bat:

• Incredible competitiveness of most key phrases containing the term “Real Estate”
• The diverse geo locations often requested by real estate clients
• The number of other real estate companies actively using SEO to boost rankings
• The number of sites using blackhat techniques to achieve rankings

Online Real Estate Competition

Online competition for Real Estate companies and individual agents may not come from expected sources.  A search for the term “Pittsburgh Real Estate” yielded results that included not only well known names like Howard Hannah and Prudential, but also numerous aggregation sites like Zillow and Homes.com.   A search for the term “Real Estate” placed these types of sites above any actual realtor’s websites.  These sites optimize heavily,  rank highly and then sell traffic and leads to realtors.  It is against these sites that private realtors and small real estate companies must compete.

The good news is that most of these companies’ optimization efforts are off-page.  A smaller real estate company can focus entire pages of good content on a location or specific keyword and, by doing so, can create a great resource that search engines will rank higher than other sites featuring sub-par content.

Diverse Locations for Real Estate.

Often times, one company will have offerings in several different locations. Whether they are trying to corner the market in several cities, several states or even several countries, the challenge remains the same: creating a web presence in all of those areas.  Diversifying on this level often means that both on page and off page SEO efforts need to be segmented.  Keyword lists have to be created for every location and link building efforts must be split up to contain those segmented keywords.  The good news is that by using a lot of on-page optimization, even smaller local real estate companies have a good chance of beating out the 800 lb gorillas of their industry in the SERPS.

Actively Optimized Company

Real Estate is one of the industries that has optimized for the search engines the quickest. In many other industries, the bare minimum of on page optimization and link building would be sufficient to beat out both actual industry competitors as well as online competitors.  Real estate and real estate-related websites need full blown SEO campaigns in order to to compete online.

Competitors Using Nefarious Optimization Tactics

As with any ultra-competitive field, there are those who will do almost anything to rank highly for real estate keywords.  They employ shady techniques on their sites that succeed in temporarily gaining them rankings for competitive keywords. These methods that go against best practices only provide results until either Google and the other Search Engines realize what’s going on or a competitor reports them.  Therefore, although you may find yourself temporarily loosing rankings to these types of sites, it is not advisable to duplicate their efforts. In most cases, a domain gets banned for breaking the rules. That means starting everything over again from scratch.

Seo Levels the Playing Field

SEO is an invaluable search engine marketing strategy, especially for local real estate agents and small firms.  The same search for “Pittsburgh Real Estate” that I mentioned positioned the local Northwood Realty first, above Howard Hannah and Prudential Preferred. That is the power of on page and off page SEO for Real Estate.