SEO
4 Of The Best Tactics
The real estate market is more competitive than ever. And smart realtors need a way to stand out from the crowd.
But, the days of throwing up a billboard with a picture of your smiling face and waiting for the leads to come rolling in are over.
Like everything else, real estate has gone digital.
Did you know 97% of home buyers start the process with a Google search?
It’s true. Long before they’ve made the decision to contact a realtor, they’re browsing available houses in the area, checking prices, taking virtual tours – and checking out real estate agencies.
That’s why it’s of utmost importance to have a strong web presence.
But that means more than just having a Facebook profile – you need a real estate website that will stand out from the background noise and land you new clients.
And that starts with getting your site ranked highly by search engines.
But how do you do that?
One of the best ways to improve your position on search engine results pages (SERPs) is by building quality inbound links.
These incoming links, which are also known as backlinks, signal to search engines how important and reliable the content on your site is.
And the higher you’re rated in these categories, the higher you’ll be ranked in search engine results.
Right now, you’re probably saying, “But wait, I’m a real estate agent, not a search engine optimization specialist. I don’t know the first thing about building links!”
Relax, you’re in the right place.
In this piece, we’ll show you four proven ways you can earn quality backlinks.
Challenges The Real Estate Industry Faces With Backlinks
Before we get started on the ways you can create inbound links, we need to address some of the specific challenges of link building in this industry.
The Market Is Overcrowded
You don’t need to be told how stiff the competition in the industry is. But that just makes it even more important that you generate good backlinks.
You’re competing with giant conglomerates – Keller Williams, RE/MAX, Berkshire Hathaway; the average local real estate agent is competing with massive nationwide firms to land clients.
Finding good linking sites is difficult.
When you’re soliciting inbound links, the quality of the linking site is important.
Researching these sites can be time-consuming and building a relationship to earn links can be frustrating.
Metrics Can Be Misleading
It’s a simple fact, not all backlinks are created equal.
As someone who’s not an SEO professional, you may assume any incoming link is a good one.
Or, you may think that a link from an unrelated site with great traffic is superior to a less-trafficked, but related site. It’s not.
Local Search Is Crucial
General SEO is good, but most of your valuable leads are going to be searching for local search terms like [houses near me]. Your backlink strategy should address this.
Now that we have all that out of the way, let’s dive into the four tactics you can use to generate links, improve your website’s visibility, and hopefully, land more deals.
1. Network, Network, Network
The real estate game is all about relationships. It’s about who you know, as much as what you know, or even what’s on the market. Link building is the same.
The Goal: Leverage your local network to get good incoming links.
The entire industry is built on collaboration.
From working with other agents to transfer property on a sale to meetings with groups like the local chamber, no one achieves real estate success on their own.
And since you’ve got the network, why not use it for backlinks?
Reach out to your local sources and build relationships with blogs and websites in the industry and in your area.
The websites and blogs of other real estate agents are a great source of links but don’t forget about business associations, social groups, and even churches in your neighborhood.
Getting them to link to your content may only take a polite, well-worded (and short) email.
By securing these valuable local links, you’ll improve your visibility in local searches.
And just as importantly, you’ll be able to capitalize on these geo-targeted links at the expense of non-local competitors.
Target Audience: Homeowners and homebuyers.
Don’t think backlinks from your network are just for search engines.
On the contrary, when someone links to your content, they’re sending a very strong message that they believe and trust in what you’re doing – something that’s not lost on homeowners and homebuyers.
And the more they see links pointing to your website, the greater name recognition you’ll achieve. Both of those mean one important thing: more clients.
2. Create Geo-Targeted Content
Are you starting to grasp the importance of location-based targeting when it comes to building links and driving traffic to your website?
The Goal: Boost your exposure.
In the last section, we talked about the importance of building your local network.
In this one, we’ll talk about the importance of creating the type of content that will get the eyes of people in your community on your website.
Geo-targeted content could be about a new listing, a new trend in real estate (e.g., the growing popularity of a revitalized neighborhood) or even social life in the area.
A blog post on the 10 best cocktail bars in your city is sure to garner attention, even from people who aren’t actively looking to buy or sell a home.
But when they are, guess who will be top of mind?
This type of content serves as a resource for web searchers and will likely result in a link to your post on the websites and social media accounts of the places you mention.
Target Audience: Influencers who can bring you traffic.
The only limits to creating geo-targeted content are the limits of your imagination.
Create content that has value for people in your area, and it will be picked up, shared, and linked to.
3. Build Your Network With Testimonials And Reviews
Nothing convinces the general public about a company’s legitimacy like testimonials and reviews.
But in this case, you’re not soliciting them to build your own reputation – you’re giving them out.
The Goal: Expand your network by engaging with other businesses.
A quick and powerful way to build links to your realty website is by offering testimonials to other businesses.
Do you have a favorable opinion of your appraiser? Or a favorite dry cleaner? Maybe you love your email marketing program? Give them a positive review on Google, Yelp, and other platforms. And be sure to include a link to your own site in your profile.
And in addition to establishing your authority and providing a boost to your own business, they’ll also cultivate goodwill with the businesses you’re reviewing.
And once you’ve established that positive relationship, most companies will be only too happy to provide you with a backlink.
Target Audience: Other businesses in your community.
Make a list of all the businesses you use, whether it’s online tools or local service providers.
Leave them testimonials on review sites. Then send them an email linking to the review and asking for a backlink. More often than not, they’ll agree.
4. Post On Forums
Buying or selling a home can be stressful and confusing for the people involved.
And, many of these buyers and sellers will turn to forums like Reddit, Quora, and local sites seeking answers to their questions. That’s where you come in.
The Goal: Establish yourself as a real estate authority.
It’s not enough to just promote your business on forum sites.
In fact, if you do nothing but self-promote, it’s likely to have a negative impact on your reputation there, especially in communities like Reddit, where users vote on the quality of content.
Instead, you need to provide valuable information and be genuinely helpful.
Help people find solutions to their problems and establish your credentials before you start using these communities for link building.
Put links only where they feel natural and follow guidelines. Once you’ve created a reputation as an expert, your links will be more appreciated and more likely to get clicks.
Target Audience: Homebuyers and sellers.
Takeaways
Don’t be put off by the idea of building backlinks for your real estate business. It may sound daunting, but there are lots of ways to do it. And this article is just a start.
In addition to the four tactics listed here, there are many other ways to solicit backlinks. For example, you could try:
- Guest posting/guest blogging/appearing on podcasts. The host will give you real estate on their site or podcast to link back to your own site, allowing you to create links and expand your audience at the same time.
- Making your content shareable on social media. Just adding quick share links to your post so it can be shared on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites can lead to new links without a lot of effort on your part.
- Taking part (and posting about) community events like fundraisers. A good way to generate publicity, taking part in local events that are covered by the press can generate incoming links from reputable and trusted news outlets.
- Creating whitepapers and infographics others will find valuable. The best content is the content with the most value. And because humans love to share their knowledge and finds, if you create whitepapers or infographics with relevant information, they’ll be shared organically. And that means inbound links.
Creating links is really all about showing initiative and having the right mindset.
If you use natural tactics to create backlinks, you’ll be able to win the SEO game in the long run. And that’s a win for your real estate business.
More Resources:
Featured Image: khunkorn/Shutterstock
SEO
YouTube Extends Shorts To 3 Minutes, Adds New Features
YouTube expands Shorts to 3 minutes, adds templates, AI tools, and the option to show fewer Shorts on the homepage.
- YouTube Shorts will allow 3-minute videos.
- New features include templates, enhanced remixing, and AI-generated video backgrounds.
- YouTube is adding a Shorts trends page and comment previews.
SEO
How To Stop Filter Results From Eating Crawl Budget
Today’s Ask An SEO question comes from Michal in Bratislava, who asks:
“I have a client who has a website with filters based on a map locations. When the visitor makes a move on the map, a new URL with filters is created. They are not in the sitemap. However, there are over 700,000 URLs in the Search Console (not indexed) and eating crawl budget.
What would be the best way to get rid of these URLs? My idea is keep the base location ‘index, follow’ and newly created URLs of surrounded area with filters switch to ‘noindex, no follow’. Also mark surrounded areas with canonicals to the base location + disavow the unwanted links.”
Great question, Michal, and good news! The answer is an easy one to implement.
First, let’s look at what you’re trying and apply it to other situations like ecommerce and publishers. This way, more people can benefit. Then, go into your strategies above and end with the solution.
What Crawl Budget Is And How Parameters Are Created That Waste It
If you’re not sure what Michal is referring to with crawl budget, this is a term some SEO pros use to explain that Google and other search engines will only crawl so many pages on your website before it stops.
If your crawl budget is used on low-value, thin, or non-indexable pages, your good pages and new pages may not be found in a crawl.
If they’re not found, they may not get indexed or refreshed. If they’re not indexed, they cannot bring you SEO traffic.
This is why optimizing a crawl budget for efficiency is important.
Michal shared an example of how “thin” URLs from an SEO point of view are created as customers use filters.
The experience for the user is value-adding, but from an SEO standpoint, a location-based page would be better. This applies to ecommerce and publishers, too.
Ecommerce stores will have searches for colors like red or green and products like t-shirts and potato chips.
These create URLs with parameters just like a filter search for locations. They could also be created by using filters for size, gender, color, price, variation, compatibility, etc. in the shopping process.
The filtered results help the end user but compete directly with the collection page, and the collection would be the “non-thin” version.
Publishers have the same. Someone might be on SEJ looking for SEO or PPC in the search box and get a filtered result. The filtered result will have articles, but the category of the publication is likely the best result for a search engine.
These filtered results can be indexed because they get shared on social media or someone adds them as a comment on a blog or forum, creating a crawlable backlink. It might also be an employee in customer service responded to a question on the company blog or any other number of ways.
The goal now is to make sure search engines don’t spend time crawling the “thin” versions so you can get the most from your crawl budget.
The Difference Between Indexing And Crawling
There’s one more thing to learn before we go into the proposed ideas and solutions – the difference between indexing and crawling.
- Crawling is the discovery of new pages within a website.
- Indexing is adding the pages that are worthy of showing to a person using the search engine to the database of pages.
Pages can get crawled but not indexed. Indexed pages have likely been crawled and will likely get crawled again to look for updates and server responses.
But not all indexed pages will bring in traffic or hit the first page because they may not be the best possible answer for queries being searched.
Now, let’s go into making efficient use of crawl budgets for these types of solutions.
Using Meta Robots Or X Robots
The first solution Michal pointed out was an “index,follow” directive. This tells a search engine to index the page and follow the links on it. This is a good idea, but only if the filtered result is the ideal experience.
From what I can see, this would not be the case, so I would recommend making it “noindex,follow.”
Noindex would say, “This is not an official page, but hey, keep crawling my site, you’ll find good pages in here.”
And if you have your main menu and navigational internal links done correctly, the spider will hopefully keep crawling them.
Canonicals To Solve Wasted Crawl Budget
Canonical links are used to help search engines know what the official page to index is.
If a product exists in three categories on three separate URLs, only one should be “the official” version, so the two duplicates should have a canonical pointing to the official version. The official one should have a canonical link that points to itself. This applies to the filtered locations.
If the location search would result in multiple city or neighborhood pages, the result would likely be a duplicate of the official one you have in your sitemap.
Have the filtered results point a canonical back to the main page of filtering instead of being self-referencing if the content on the page stays the same as the original category.
If the content pulls in your localized page with the same locations, point the canonical to that page instead.
In most cases, the filtered version inherits the page you searched or filtered from, so that is where the canonical should point to.
If you do both noindex and have a self-referencing canonical, which is overkill, it becomes a conflicting signal.
The same applies to when someone searches for a product by name on your website. The search result may compete with the actual product or service page.
With this solution, you’re telling the spider not to index this page because it isn’t worth indexing, but it is also the official version. It doesn’t make sense to do this.
Instead, use a canonical link, as I mentioned above, or noindex the result and point the canonical to the official version.
Disavow To Increase Crawl Efficiency
Disavowing doesn’t have anything to do with crawl efficiency unless the search engine spiders are finding your “thin” pages through spammy backlinks.
The disavow tool from Google is a way to say, “Hey, these backlinks are spammy, and we don’t want them to hurt us. Please don’t count them towards our site’s authority.”
In most cases, it doesn’t matter, as Google is good at detecting spammy links and ignoring them.
You do not want to add your own site and your own URLs to the disavow tool. You’re telling Google your own site is spammy and not worth anything.
Plus, submitting backlinks to disavow won’t prevent a spider from seeing what you want and do not want to be crawled, as it is only for saying a link from another site is spammy.
Disavowing won’t help with crawl efficiency or saving crawl budget.
How To Make Crawl Budgets More Efficient
The answer is robots.txt. This is how you tell specific search engines and spiders what to crawl.
You can include the folders you want them to crawl by marketing them as “allow,” and you can say “disallow” on filtered results by disallowing the “?” or “&” symbol or whichever you use.
If some of those parameters should be crawled, add the main word like “?filter=location” or a specific parameter.
Robots.txt is how you define crawl paths and work on crawl efficiency. Once you’ve optimized that, look at your internal links. A link from one page on your site to another.
These help spiders find your most important pages while learning what each is about.
Internal links include:
- Breadcrumbs.
- Menu navigation.
- Links within content to other pages.
- Sub-category menus.
- Footer links.
You can also use a sitemap if you have a large site, and the spiders are not finding the pages you want with priority.
I hope this helps answer your question. It is one I get a lot – you’re not the only one stuck in that situation.
More resources:
Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal
SEO
Ad Copy Tactics Backed By Study Of Over 1 Million Google Ads
Mastering effective ad copy is crucial for achieving success with Google Ads.
Yet, the PPC landscape can make it challenging to discern which optimization techniques truly yield results.
Although various perspectives exist on optimizing ads, few are substantiated by comprehensive data. A recent study from Optmyzr attempted to address this.
The goal isn’t to promote or dissuade any specific method but to provide a clearer understanding of how different creative decisions impact your campaigns.
Use the data to help you identify higher profit probability opportunities.
Methodology And Data Scope
The Optmyzr study analyzed data from over 22,000 Google Ads accounts that have been active for at least 90 days with a minimum monthly spend of $1,500.
Across more than a million ads, we assessed Responsive Search Ads (RSAs), Expanded Text Ads (ETAs), and Demand Gen campaigns. Due to API limitations, we could not retrieve asset-level data for Performance Max campaigns.
Additionally, all monetary figures were converted to USD to standardize comparisons.
Key Questions Explored
To provide actionable insights, we focused on addressing the following questions:
- Is there a correlation between Ad Strength and performance?
- How do pinning assets impact ad performance?
- Do ads written in title case or sentence case perform better?
- How does creative length affect ad performance?
- Can ETA strategies effectively translate to RSAs and Demand Gen ads?
As we evaluated the results, it’s important to note that our data set represents advanced marketers.
This means there may be selection bias, and these insights might differ in a broader advertiser pool with varying levels of experience.
The Relationship Between Ad Strength And Performance
Google explicitly states that Ad Strength is a tool designed to guide ad optimization rather than act as a ranking factor.
Despite this, marketers often hold mixed opinions about its usefulness, as its role in ad performance appears inconsistent.
Our data corroborates this skepticism. Ads labeled with an “average” Ad Strength score outperformed those with “good” or “excellent” scores in key metrics like CPA, conversion rate, and ROAS.
This disparity is particularly evident in RSAs, where the ROAS tends to decrease sharply when moving from “average” to “good,” with only a marginal increase when advancing to “excellent.”
Screenshot from author, September 2024Interestingly, Demand Gen ads also showed a stronger performance with an “average” Ad Strength, except for ROAS.
The metrics for conversion rates in Demand Gen and RSAs were notably similar, which is surprising since Demand Gen ads are typically designed for awareness, while RSAs focus on driving transactions.
Key Takeaways:
- Ad Strength doesn’t reliably correlate with performance, so it shouldn’t be a primary metric for assessing your ads.
- Most ads with “poor” or “average” Ad Strength labels perform well by standard advertising KPIs.
- “Good” or “excellent” Ad Strength labels do not guarantee better performance.
How Does Pinning Affect Ad Performance?
Pinning refers to locking specific assets like headlines or descriptions in fixed positions within the ad. This technique became common with RSAs, but there’s ongoing debate about its efficacy.
Some advertisers advocate for pinning all assets to replicate the control offered by ETAs, while others prefer to let Google optimize placements automatically.
Image from author, September 2024Our data suggests that pinning some, but not all, assets offers the most balanced results in terms of CPA, ROAS, and CPC. However, ads where all assets are pinned achieve the highest relevance in terms of CTR.
Still, this marginally higher CTR doesn’t necessarily translate into better conversion metrics. Ads with unpinned or partially pinned assets generally perform better in terms of conversion rates and cost-based metrics.
Key Takeaways:
- Selective pinning is optimal, offering a good balance between creative control and automation.
- Fully pinned ads may increase CTR but tend to underperform in metrics like CPA and ROAS.
- Advertisers should embrace RSAs, as they consistently outperform ETAs – even with fully pinned assets.
Title Case Vs. Sentence Case: Which Performs Better?
The choice between title case (“This Is a Title Case Sentence”) and sentence case (“This is a sentence case sentence”) is often a point of contention among advertisers.
Our analysis revealed a clear trend: Ads using sentence case generally outperformed those in title case, particularly in RSAs and Demand Gen campaigns.
Image from author, September 2024(RSA Data)
Image from author, September 2024(ETA Data)
Image from author, September 2024(Demand Gen)
ROAS, in particular, showed a marked preference for sentence case across these ad types, suggesting that a more natural, conversational tone may resonate better with users.
Interestingly, many advertisers still use a mix of title and sentence case within the same account, which counters the traditional approach of maintaining consistency throughout the ad copy.
Key Takeaways:
- Sentence case outperforms title case in RSAs and Demand Gen ads on most KPIs.
- Including sentence case ads in your testing can improve performance, as it aligns more closely with organic results, which users perceive as higher quality.
- Although ETAs perform slightly better with title case, sentence case is increasingly the preferred choice in modern ad formats.
The Impact Of Ad Length On Performance
Ad copy, particularly for Google Ads, requires brevity without sacrificing impact.
We analyzed the effects of character count on ad performance, grouping ads by the length of headlines and descriptions.
Image from author, September 2024
Image from author, September 2024(RSA Data)
Image from author, September 2024
Image from author, September 2024(ETA Data)
Image from author, September 2024
Image from author, September 2024(Demand Gen Data)
Interestingly, shorter headlines tend to outperform longer ones in CTR and conversion rates, while descriptions benefit from moderate length.
Ads that tried to maximize character counts by using dynamic keyword insertion (DKI) or customizers often saw no significant performance improvement.
Moreover, applying ETA strategies to RSAs proved largely ineffective.
In almost all cases, advertisers who carried over ETA tactics to RSAs saw a decline in performance, likely because of how Google dynamically assembles ad components for display.
Key Takeaways:
- Shorter headlines lead to better performance, especially in RSAs.
- Focus on concise, impactful messaging instead of trying to fill every available character.
- ETA tactics do not translate well to RSAs, and attempting to replicate them can hurt performance.
Final Thoughts On Ad Optimizations
In summary, several key insights emerge from this analysis.
First, Ad Strength should not be your primary focus when assessing performance. Instead, concentrate on creating relevant, engaging ad copy tailored to your target audience.
Additionally, pinning assets should be a strategic, creative decision rather than a hard rule, and advertisers should incorporate sentence case into their testing for RSAs and Demand Gen ads.
Finally, focus on quality over quantity in ad copy length, as longer ads do not always equate to better results.
By refining these elements of your ads, you can drive better ROI and adapt to the evolving landscape of Google Ads.
Read the full Ad Strength & Creative Study from Optmyzr.
More resources:
Featured Image: Sammby/Shutterstock
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