The Best Local SEO Strategies for Real Estate Brokerages and Agents

Marketing a large portfolio of properties comes with a unique set of challenges. You need to establish brand name recognition for key neighborhoods and audience profiles, but these can (and usually do!) vary immensely across your different property groups. A single website that casts too large a net won’t deliver you the qualified, motivated leads that you need to grow your business. 

As a full-service digital marketing agency, SEO Design Chicago has a finely-honed process for growing any real estate business through custom-quoted solutions that balance short-term lead-gen tactics with long-term, organic search reputation growth. 

We’ll cover some of the ways our local SEO for real estate services helps your agency, brokerage, or development company leverage the latest changes in local search to drive qualified leads to your business.

Are local buyers, renters, and investors even seeing your properties in local search results? Find out with a free local SEO analysis today.

Local SEO Boosts Visibility in Local Searches

In the competitive real estate market, it’s crucial that your target customers are directed to your real estate website from their favorite search apps. This is your best source of qualified leads. Forty-three percent of home buyers reported that their very first step in homebuying was an internet search. These searchers are highly motivated, so it’s absolutely crucial that your website is fully optimized to appear in the top few results when potential customers search terms like “real estate agents near me.” 

Why is it so important that your agency or brokerage lands at the top of these search result pages? For any given search query, the very top result on the search page receives about 25% of total clicks. That is an enormous advantage. 

With the advent of multi-channel search, consumers can now search for a property or agency via voice, image, or map searches, along with the traditional keyword-driven search terms.

If you want to win the #1 spot among your local audience, your entire online presence must be fully optimized for local search traffic. 

Google Business Optimization for Real Estate

Claiming, completing, and optimizing your Google Business Profile is low-hanging fruit for real estate companies to improve visibility in local search results. Since Google hosts the vast majority of searches, having your business listed on their official directory is one of the most effective ways to boost your real estate business in the right geographic area.

Our real estate local SEO experts conduct extensive competitor research to determine the most effective SEO keywords to integrate into your GBP to match it correctly to the most relevant real estate searches. For example, if you manage a line of rental properties spread across the Chicago metro area, you don’t want your profile to attract searches from people looking to purchase a single-family detached home out in the suburbs. 

Our team also ensures that your SEO efforts include the appropriate tags, images, basic data, and geographic information. Something as simple as a typo in your address on your GBP can hurt your local rankings and send traffic to your competitors instead.  

Bing Places for Real Estate Agents and Brokers

Bing is often overlooked in favor of Google, but it is an effective SEO tool in its own right. Optimizing Bing SEO isn’t much different than Google’s process, and it gives you access to Microsoft’s entire suite of properties — Bing, Yahoo, and AOL. Since a successful real estate SEO strategy requires you to dominate local search results for a highly specific region, it’s worth it to invest resources in your local SEO performance on any and all channels where a highly segmented group is searching. 

In other words, would you rather have three ideal customers exposed to your agency, or three hundred customers who are outside your main geographic area? Real estate is fundamentally a local business, so you need to focus on local real estate searches across all platforms.

One of the benefits of working with a full-service digital marketing agency like SEO Design Chicago is our custom-quoted packages. We can specifically target your business goals according to your available budget, which is more effective than piecemeal strategies. 

Google Local Service Ads for Real Estate

Many real estate professionals need to see a quicker influx of qualified leads. Timelines can be unpredictable, and sometimes properties become available and need to be promoted quickly.

Digital marketing solutions that include local service ads can be a good solution for short-term lead generation. This service prioritizes your listing for specifically targeted searches like “real estate agent in Chicago” or “available commercial building downtown.” 

These ads won’t replace a solid organic search strategy, but are a fantastic complement for building your online reputation in a specific area or promoting a high-value set of properties. 

Frequently Asked Questions: Tips for SEO Success

Local SEO works best as part of a holistic digital marketing strategy. As customer behavior constantly changes, you need every piece of your online presence to work together seamlessly to promote your business to the right audience. 

We’ll share some of the top SEO tips when it comes to standing out in the local real estate market. 

What is local SEO for real estate, and why is it important?

Local SEO helps your real estate business’s website show up closer to the top of the search results for relevant search terms. Key local SEO strategies include adding local keywords — such as “near me” and “city_name” — to your website, claiming and optimizing your Google Business Profile and other online listings, and ensuring consistency in all name, address, and phone (NAP) information across your online properties. 

Local SEO is crucial for driving qualified leads to your real estate business. If you have a website but it isn’t optimized for local search, there is a very small chance that your target audience will ever see it. They will likely click on your competitors’ links on the search result pages instead, meaning you lose out on potential buyers, renters, or investors. 

How can I get my real estate office to show up in Google Maps and “near me” searches?

The key is to get your business listed in the Google Local Pack. When a customer conducts a search with local intent — signified by including terms like “near me” or the name of a specific region — they are shown a Google Map and three local business listings that most closely match their search intent. If your business is listed on that “top three” list, customers are much more likely to visit you.

You can show up in these results by making sure your NAP information is consistent across all online sources, that you have high-quality customer reviews added to your profiles, and that you have clear, keyword-rich descriptions about your business offerings. 

Do online reviews really impact my real estate website’s local SEO ranking?

Customers are highly motivated by consumer reviews of a business. Because of this, Google ranks businesses with reviews added more highly than businesses without. 

To take advantage of this, we recommend adding your customer reviews to your website, Google Business Profile, Bing Profile, and social media pages. This increases the likelihood of being featured in relevant local searches for real estate agents in your area. 

What’s the difference between SEO and local SEO for real estate agents?

Local SEO is a subset of your overall search engine optimization strategy. SEO focuses on updating every element of your online presence — from the background code to the content and images — to match relevant searches. Local SEO best practices focus on real estate searches in a particular geographic area. In other words, SEO boosts your reputation across the internet, whereas local SEO strategies increase your business’s chances of showing up in local searches. 

How long does it take for local SEO to bring in new real estate clients?

Local SEO isn’t an overnight solution, but it does build upon its own success. Google and other search engines constantly crawl all the sites on the internet, making sure that they have a full listing of what each site is all about and which queries they will match most closely. When you optimize your site for specific search terms and audience profiles, it takes a while for search engines to update their directories and start featuring your site on more SERPs. Once they do, however, you will start to see more clicks to your website, which then tells Google that your site is a good match for these queries. It will then continue to rank you higher, which will lead to more clicks in the future.

It usually takes a few months to get this virtuous cycle started, but once it is rolling, you will continue to see increased leads to your website with minimal additional expenditures, making it one of the best investments you can make in your long-term real estate marketing strategy. 

Ready to improve your real estate SEO strategy? Start now with a free comprehensive local SEO audit!