Optimizing Your Real Estate Listings with GTS Horizontal

: How to Make Sure Your Home Listings are discovered in Search

While home buying may be about “location, location, location,” home selling is about doing everything you can to attract interested parties to your real estate listings. Whether you’re trying to draw the biggest crowd to an open house in hopes of getting multiple offers, or trying to find the right buyer for a unique property, you’ve got to position your listing to get found in search. Here’s how to do it.

: Optimizing Real Estate Listings

House hunters aren’t just searching for two-bedroom apartments or downtown condos, they’re searching for specific properties in specific locations. Many times they will drive by a home, and search for that exact address. To get your listings found by the right people, you need to capitalize on this by making sure every listing has the right amount of details to get found in relevant search results. To do this, you’ll use SEO or search engine optimization tactics.
SEO can:

• Return your listing when users search for apartments in your city
• Help your website get indexed by Google, so you beat out MLS aggregates and get more direct traffic
• Help you capture leads even after a sale by referring new home buyers and sellers toward your brokerage

Simple SEO for Real Estate Agents/Professionals
SEO does not need to be intimidating. In fact, with the right real estate platform, many of these SEO benefits are built-in.
In essence, SEO entails accurately describing the property using keywords and phrases, taking advantage of photo and video content to entice viewers, and pushing out the listing to the places where it will earn you traffic.
To get started optimizing real estate listings, do the following:

• Include the neighborhood and address in the listing title
• Place the city, street name, and zip code in all tags for the listing – title, body, URL, and header
• Officially post the listing on your site 48 hours before it hits MLS to get indexed before competing listings
• Add the neighborhood and address to image titles and descriptions to give search engines more keywords
• Push listings to local news outlets, community blog, and social media channels to draw attention
• Create a friendly page for sold listings that will attract users to active listings.

These actions provide search engines with geo-specific data about property listings and tether this data to your website. When a house hunter searches for properties in a neighborhood, your relevant listings will pop up. While these tips will help users find your specific listing, site-wide SEO can also improve your entire website’s return in search results. If you’re looking to get a leg up on other brokerages in your area, this is a must!

Make sure that all website copy, including your Contact page and your welcome page includes relevant keywords that a house hunter might use to search for realtors near them. Consider adding a blog to your website to drive traffic, promote listings, and give you more places to put relevant keywords.

These tips might sound time-consuming, but work through them. Over time, you’ll get used to the extra effort of optimizing listings and find that it comes easily!