SEO Dictionary Every New Real Estate Agent Needs

 

Let’s face it. The real estate market is more competitive than ever. As a novice in this industry, you’ve probably gone through a hurdle to set roots in a constantly changing market. One of the challenges every new real estate agent faces is setting yourself apart from your competitors.

 

You’ve probably set up your website and marketing goals by now. While doing so, you must have come across terms like SEO, keywords, and backlinks. But what do they really mean?

 

The SEO world is complex so we’ve put together an SEO dictionary to help you out on your path to success.

SEO

SEO or search engine optimization is a set of actions whose final goal is to rank your site as high as possible on Google search. Why is that important? Because you want your website to pop up on Google’s first page when a potential customer is looking for real estate services.

 

SEO is important for any business, including real estate. You want your website to rank as high as possible on SERP (Search Engine Result Page), as it will have higher chances to attract new customers.

 

Another common term in the SEO industry is ‘organic’ search. It refers to the unpaid visits to your websites, the ones gained through search engines. The opposite of organic traffic is paid traffic obtained from ads.

 

You can put your efforts into onsite or offsite SEO, but the best solution is to do both. Onsite SEO refers to all the things you can do on your actual website, while offsite SEO refers to all the things you do away from your website to improve the rankings (e.g., link-building).

 

Keywords

Keywords represent one or more words, or even a whole phrase entered in any search engine. It’s the thing that people type in when trying to find information, products, or services. For your customers to easily find you on Google, or another search engine, you need to optimize your website for keywords related to real estate. You want to offer potential customers the right information, as well as credibility. Choosing the right keywords for your website will attract more traffic and potentially more conversions.

 

More words can create a long-tail keyword. Long-tail keywords actually phrase, and they are usually more specific and often entail a higher intent to buy. They can be very effective if the aim is to target a particular part of the population or a niche, and in the real estate industry, that is certainly the case.

 

Anchor text

Anchor text, also known as link text, is a clickable, visible text with a hyperlink. When linking to another page, or a PDF document, you want to use your keyword as an anchor text. Anchor text should indicate users and search engines of what they will see on the linked page. Anchor text provides context, and it’s also an important SEO ranking factor.

 

Alt text

Alt text, or alternative text, is an HTML element that describes what the image represents. The image should complement the content, and the alt-text should make sense of the image when it can’t be seen for whatever reason. Alt text improves web accessibility, whose basic principles impose that every non-text element needs a text equivalent.

 

When talking about alt text, it’s also important to mention that the images posted on your website should be resized through the process of image compression. This is important because big images can slow down your loading speed and have a negative impact on SEO.

 

Backlinks

Backlinks or inbound links are links that lead from one website to another. Backlinks are a very important ranking factor, as Google treats them as upvotes. When a website points back to your website, that’s a signal for search engines that your content is considered helpful and credible enough to be listed within their content.

 

The general rule is, the higher the domain authority of the website which links to yours, the more valuable it will be for your rankings. 

Backlinks are also important because they bring organic traffic to your website and potentially generate conversions.

 

However, you should not mix backlinks with internal links. Internal links are links that go from one page to another on your website. Internal links are also important for SEO, as they allow your users to go deeper into your website, and navigate it more easily.

 

If you are just starting out with your SEO efforts, you might be overwhelmed by all the information, but don’t worry, it’s a learning curve. Great SEO takes time, and you will need patience and persistence, but once you’re there, your real estate business will flourish.