If you’ve ever rolled your eyes whenever a tech-savvy real estate agent starts talking about digital marketing and rapidly fires jargon like real estate keywords, SERP, PPC, CTR, CPM, CPL, or ROAS, you’re not alone. Well, I’ve interviewed people for digital marketing positions who couldn’t even define the jargon they themselves were using in the interview! Not real estate agents mind you, but digital marketing professionals. Clearly there’s a problem here.

So in order to demystify some of the jargon and strategies you’ll face when you start learning how to promote your real estate agent business online, I put together this in-depth article explaining what keywords are and how to find the best ones to generate home buyer, seller, renter leads for FREE.

Since keywords and keyword strategy is surprisingly complex, let’s start with the basics:

What Are Real Estate Keywords?

Real estate keywords are words or short phrases that Google and other search engines use to categorize content online. Generally speaking, the real estate keyword(s) used in an article will represent the main subject of the article or webpage. Keywords on their own are useless because they need to reside in content in order to be meaningful for users. A blog post is the VEHICLE that builds up your inventory of keywords that real people SEARCH for.

What Are The Best Real Estate Keywords?

Unfortunately, finding the best real estate keywords for your geographic farm area is going to take a lot more work than copy/pasting a list from a website. There are two very simple reasons why keywords from a generic list like this will not get you any leads from your website:

1. Generic keyword lists only show what the most people are searching for. They DO NOT mention that most of them are almost impossible to rank for. Even PropertyGuru & Zillow have trouble ranking for some keywords!
2. Even if by some miracle you manage to rank near PropertyGuru, Zillow, Trulia, your local MLS, or giant chain brokerages like Keller Williams and ERA, getting traffic outside your farm area is not going to help you close more deals. Period.

Still, it’s important to get an idea of what kind of keywords rank in Singapore, so all caveats aside, here’s a list of some of the best performing real estate keywords.

List of 14 Best Real Estate Keywords in Singapore

Keywords	Searches per Month (SG)	Difficulty (ahrefs, June 2022)
Real Estate	2,800	95
Homes for sale near me	1,000	59
Houses for sale near me	2,000	53
House for sale	2,000	50
Real estate agent	1,000	57
How to buy a house	1,000	49
Condos for sale	600	17
Townhouse for sale	500	5
Realtors near me	700	3
Cheap houses for sale	700	22
Bank Auctions	400	5
Waterfront homes for sale	750	8
Real estate agent	700	67
How much is my house worth?	500	60

Understanding Search Volume & Keyword Difficulty Estimates

Since the goal of your website is to get traffic and leads, the main criteria that professional bloggers use to measure the editorial value of a keyword is the number of searches it gets per month on Google.

Search Volume: Potential Monthly Traffic

This number is called the keyword’s search volume. As you might imagine, the higher the search volume the more potential traffic you can get from writing about it, but search volume alone only tells us how many people search for a term.

As you can imagine, the higher the search volume, the more websites trying to compete for the top spots in Google for that term. The reason why is clear; if you rank No. 1 for a very high volume keyword, your site will get a ton of traffic.

Keyword Difficulty: How Hard it is to Rank For a Keyword

Luckily, SEO software companies like Moz and Ahrefs came up with a way to measure how hard it is to rank for specific keywords. This is called keyword difficulty. Generally speaking, the higher the search volume, the higher the difficulty since there will be more competition, but some keywords with relatively low search volume can have very high difficulty.

Understanding EAT Signals & Domain Authority

Before we dig into how to research and use keywords, let’s take a quick look at other factors Google uses to rank websites.

EAT Signals

EAT is an acronym coined by Google that stands for expertise, authority, and trustworthiness—three criteria that Google uses besides keywords in order to decide which article from which website gets ranked highly. How Google measures EAT is a bit too complicated to get into here, but it’s still important to understand that Google values EAT highly. Much more highly than keywords!

Domain Authority

Domain authority is less about the EAT of your company and more about the trustworthiness of your website. Things like age of website (older is better), the quality of writing, other high quality sites linking to yours, and low spam scores all contribute to a site’s domain authority.

Here’s a quick example: The National Association of Realtors has been online since the mid-nineties and is pretty much the most trustworthy source for real estate information in the country. Therefore, Google ranks content from NAR very highly. If NAR decides to write an article on dual agency, chances are it will rank very well and very quickly.

Why These Real Estate Keywords Lists Won’t Work.

Hopefully by now if you’ve been paying attention, you’re starting to realize that while keywords are crucial, ranking on Google is a lot harder than just having the right keywords. Believe it or not, this is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to how Google picks search results. They even use artificial intelligence, and their exact criteria for ranking remains a closely guarded and always-changing secret.

Even if you are writing for a site like PropertyGuru, Zillow or Inman, your goal for your website is not just traffic. You only want relevant traffic that has the potential to convert into leads and deals. That means ranking No. 1 for a real estate keyword in Florida might get you some traffic, but it will be useless to you if you live and work in Michigan!

Don’t worry though, luckily you know us, and we have firsthand experience building huge six figure monthly traffic sites by ranking articles on Google… In fact, chances are you’re probably reading this because you found us on Google, right?

DIY Keyword Research Tools You’ll Need to Find The Best Real Estate Keywords

OK, if generic keyword lists like the one above won’t help you rank higher on Google, how can you find the keywords that will?

Simple. With a lot of research, a lot of time analyzing Google search results pages (SERPs), and patience, you’ll come up with a list of relevant and targeted keywords that you can use to plan the content you’ll create for an entire year.

Unfortunately, effective keyword research requires proprietary tools in order to get the best data quickly. Since Google doesn’t really publish their search criteria and only offers search volume for customers who buy their PPC ads, a handful of SEO software companies have swooped in to fill this void for a fee.

Here are the top three paid keyword research tools I use every day in order to plan our evergreen (traffic comes mostly from Google searches) content for YKC and our clients.

Ahrefs

What it does: Search volume & keyword difficulty, site audits, rank tracker + more
Cost: Starting at USD $99 per month
Ease of Use: Easy, Beginner

My favourite SEO tool for keyword research is Ahrefs. Ahrefs has very similar tools that competitors like Moz offer, but its data is much more accurate (according to my own research, that is). It also gives you questions people ask along with the keywords. You can even set automated email alerts for keywords, backlinks and unlinked mentions. Plus, I find the Ahrefs interface super easy and their blog is chock-full of amazingly helpful training and resources. If given a choice to pick only 1 SEO tool, I will always choose ahrefs over the rest any day.

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Moz

What it does: Search volume & difficulty, domain authority, page grader, local market analytics + more
Cost: Starting at USD $99 per month ($79 per month if paid annually)
Ease of Use: Medium, Advanced

One of the earliest SEO tools, Moz actually invented its own domain authority metric which is widely used in the industry. You can also use Moz to find what other sites are ranking for, as well as who is linking to them.

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SEMrush

What it does: Competitor research, keyword analytics, backlink tracking + more
Cost: Starting at $99 per month
Ease of Use: Hard, Professional

SEMrush is the go-to tool in the SEO industry for spying on your competitors’ websites to see and track what keywords they rank for as well as getting lists of other sites that link to your competitor’s site. However, the interface is extremely cluttered and very unintuitive, which makes it very hard to use, even for someone as experienced as me.

Cheaper Alternative: Hire a Freelance Keyword Researcher on Fiverr

Why it might make sense: SEO software is expensive and takes time to learn, use and get results
Cost for keyword research: $5-$150 (may not be one-time)

Of course since writing evergreen content and optimizing it for Google is not your main gig anyway as a fulltime realtor, shelling out for expensive SEO software you don’t really know how to use might not make much sense either. There’s also the fact that even once you’re an expert at the software, finding great keywords still takes a lot of time, patience and effort.

By hiring someone on Fiverr to do your keyword research for you, you can get a simple spreadsheet of keywords and article ideas that will give you a road map for the year for less than the price of a month of SEO software. More to the point, the person you hire will probably find the good stuff much faster than you can on your own.

Just make sure to ask them if they’re using the software listed above, and get a list of keywords with search volume, keyword difficulty, and maybe some lists of what keywords your biggest competitors already rank for.

Click below to head over to Fiverr and find someone to do your keyword research starting at just five bucks.

Visit Fiverr

How to Research & Find The Best Real Estate Keywords for YOUR Farm Area

OK, now that you have a better understanding of why generic lists won’t work and the tools you need, let’s take a look at finding and evaluating keywords to use for your blog.

1. Understand That The Days of “Tricking” Google are Long Gone

Before we get started, we have one more important caveat for you. While it might have been possible to “trick” Google by stuffing a bunch of keywords on one page, or ranking for keywords that are not real estate related, those days are long gone. Instead, focus on finding keywords that will get you local traffic, and will also be of interest to your potential leads.

Read 6 Risky Black Hat SEO Tactics to Avoid (And Their White Hat Alternatives)

2. Research Keywords Your Competitors Already Rank For (DIY or Freelancer)

The first step to doing keyword research is the research your local competitors. Are they ranking on Google for local keywords? You might be surprised to learn that many real estate companies, even very successful ones, don’t bother trying to rank on Google.

While you can always gather a list of keywords and run Google searches to see who ranks for which keyword, there is a much easier way to figure out what your competitors rank for: SEMrush.

All you need to do is plug your competitors domain name into SEMrush, scroll down to the ‘Top Organic Keyword” section, then click on “View Full Report.”

Now you have a list of all the keywords your competitors rank for on Google. You can even sort by an estimate of how much traffic they get from ranking certain keywords, the article that ranks, and of course the search volume and difficulty rankings.

Once you have lists run for your competitors, you can either save as a spreadsheet or save in SEMrush. If you’re working with a Fiverr keyword researcher, be sure and ask for a spreadsheet like this from competitors.

One caveat here is that SEMrush’s search volume and difficulty ratings are not quite as accurate as Ahref’s or Moz’s. Since most hyperlocal keywords will only have a handful of searches per month, accuracy is pretty important. Go for ahrefs data.

Read How Accurate Are the Search Traffic Estimations in Ahrefs? (New Research)

3. Research All the Keywords You’ll Need for One Year of Content (DIY or Freelancer)

Fire up Ahrefs Keyword Explorer and start plugging in some general search terms about real estate, then try and drill down to local and hyperlocal searches.

Ahrefs will of course give you pretty accurate search volume and keyword difficulty, as well as an estimate of cost per click for social media advertising, parent topic, related questions, as well as keywords using similar terms and SERP features.

Once you find keywords or groups of keywords that have relatively high search volume and relatively low difficulty, then save as a spreadsheet to use in Excel or Google Sheets, or save to Ahrefs as a keyword list. Just remember that hyperlocal keywords with search volume of only 20 or 20 searches per month might only get you 10 page views, but since these will be “down funnel” results (people who are closer to making a purchasing decision) that traffic will be worth its weight in gold. Even better, difficulty should be low enough that ranking quickly is possible.

What to Search Ahrefs for

One of the tricky things about Ahrefs is that the results you get back are only as good as the information you plug in. Here’s some tips for what to look for to get better results:

• Hyperlocal keywords
• Keywords that offer specific types of local property (waterfront, landed, etc.)
• Common questions your leads ask
• Real estate search terms + your farm area name
• Instructional keywords (how to buy a house, how to get approved for a mortgage etc.)
• Questions about your farm area
• Questions about working with a Realtor
• Questions about types of homes
• Questions about common home repairs
• Questions about home values and what affects them

If you’re working with a keyword researcher, ask them for keywords using similar criteria.

See How to Do Keyword Research for SEO

4. Research SERPs for Your Keywords (DIY or Freelancer)

While you should get this automatically when you run keyword searches in Ahrefs, sometimes you might want to check for yourself. One reason why checking the SERPs yourself is important is that Google changes its algorithm regularly and frequently, which might change who ranks for your keyword, or what SERP features there are like snippets, local pack, “People also ask” drop downs, videos, and more.

Search Intent

One thing you should pay particular attention to when looking at SERPs is trying to figure out what the search intent is for people searching for those keywords. For the most part, Google will try and rank articles, videos, or other content in order to provide the “best” answer to the question searchers are asking.

For example, if someone searches for “How to Sell My House,” and you find lots of how-to guides on the front page, then it’s likely that searchers are clicking on how-to guides (and you should put up a how-to guide as well if you want to rank for this keyword). If someone searches “Best Realtor in Singapore” then you’ll be more likely to find list posts. Take note of what kinds of articles rank well for your keywords, and remember to bookmark the top five to take a deep dive into later when you're ready to write.

4. Plan Your Content For the Year (DIY)

OK, by now if you’ve followed along with our keyword research strategy, you should have a list of keywords with search volume and difficulty from Ahrefs, a list of what your competitors rank for and an estimate of how much traffic they get, as well as a basic overview of what kind of content is ranking for those keywords.

The next step is to sit down and prioritize the content you think will have the biggest impact on your audience. There are two main strategies for prioritizing content. Prioritize the content that has the highest search volume and lowest difficulty, or prioritize the content that is most important to your audience.

For beginners, I recommend prioritizing content that is important for your audience. You will probably not rank right way, but you can also blast this content out via email, social media, paid ads, etc.

How SEO Experts Use Real Estate Keywords in Their Content

Of course even if you spent a ton of money or time finding amazing keywords, they will be useless for your business unless you know how to use them. While this topic will be covered in more detail in later articles, here’s a quick best practices guide for using real estate keywords.

Useful Tool:

ahrefs free SEO tools

What it does: This selection of free SEO tools will help you with various SEO tasks, such as keyword research, on-page SEO, link building, and more. 
Cost: While limited compared to a paid Ahrefs account, they’re still immensely valuable for anyone who’s just starting out in SEO. USD $99 monthly cost for premium version (recommended)

1. Write for Your Audience First, Google Second

Always remember that your main goal here is to educate your reader first, and show up on Google second. In fact, if your article is spammy, it won’t rank on Google for long as Google regularly tests how many people click on articles on the front page and even how long they stay on the page. If everyone bounces from your article right away, Google will rank other articles above yours.

Remember, the customer is not a moron. She's your wife.

2. Pay Specific Attention to Titles, Meta Descriptions & Sub Headings (H2, H3, H4 etc.)

There are three key places you want to add keywords to your blog posts. In order of importance: The title, the meta description, and the H2s of your article. Try to use the keywords naturally in all three places. Don’t jam them into sentences or articles that don’t match the search intent of the reader you spent so much time researching in step 4!

3. Use a Table of Contents to Make it Easy to Read

Adding a table of contents (like how I've done in this post) is not only a best practice, it helps users quickly get to the sections they want and helps Google structure your data as well. Notice how adding a table of content makes a post more readable and compelling? So, always organise your posts.

4. Don’t Use a Real Estate Keyword For More Than One Blog Post

If you download the Yoast plugin for WordPress, this is one of the first warnings you’re likely to get. Generally speaking, it’s a bad idea to write more than one article targeting the same keyword. Even worse, NEVER try and rank subtle variations of the same keyword in different articles thinking you’ll trick Google. You won’t. You'll end up cannibalizing your own keywords and traffic. It's far better to write a new blog post for another real estate keyword.

5. Avoid Keyword Stuffing

The idea here is to use keywords naturally in your articles which should give you something like a 1% keyword density. In other words, if your article is 100 words long, you should use the keyword one time in the body copy. As long as you have the keyword in the title, meta, and H2s, then you don’t need to worry about how many times you use the keyword in the body copy. Just use it whenever it’s natural to use it in a sentence or paragraph.

6. Remember to Include EAT Signals

Since you want your articles to signal EAT (Expertise, Authority, Trust) to Google, you should always include EAT signals in your articles. At a minimum, your WordPress author biography should have your credentials including industry designations, and you should quote and link to other real estate experts in your articles.

7. Write Blog Post Content Above the Fold

Users want to get to your post RIGHT NOW. Therefore make sure your blog post is visible above the fold, which is the area immediately below the url. Notice how this post is also configured to appear above the fold.

See How to Rank Higher On Google In 2022

8. Get Backlinks to Your New Blog Post

If all you do is create new content (even with high traffic keywords), you run the real risk of not growing your organic traffic. That's why you need backlinks. Make sure you do email outreach to request backlinks from others. (Just don't be patronising or self-centred. Really.)

Read "I Just Deleted Your Outreach Email Without Reading. And NO, I Don’t Feel Sorry."

9. Link to Your New Blog Post From Older Blog Posts

Linking to your new blog post from your older blog posts can help you rank better as it helps Google “read” and categorize the content on your site. This is another thing the Yoast plugin will recommend and make it quite easy for your do this by yourself. I've done exactly this in the previous point above.

See Real Estate SEO: The Ultimate Guide for 2022 (10 Steps to Fast Ranking)

10. Review Keywords & Update Your Blog Post Once per Year

Finally, if you want to rank on Google long term, you’re going to want to update your blog posts at least once a year, more often for important pages. Go back and change the date, add relevant new information of news, and try and make your article more readable and useful for your readers. You may opt to click on 'Republish', which will publish it as a new post.

Read Republishing Content: How to Update Old Blog Posts for SEO

Your Turn

What did you think of my guide to researching and using real estate keywords? Let me know in the comments.

Learn How To Get More Real Estate Leads, Get More Listings, Close More Sales, with Less Resistance AND still have a LIFE!

Get more exclusive real estate agent training here https://www.yasserkhan.sg/

YASSER KHAN

Author, Coach & Trainer

Yasser Khan earned less than $1,000 in his first year as a full time property agent. With no money for the $2 train fare to his Broker's office, he was forced to walk 25 kilometers on foot. Worse, he got evicted at midnight with his wife and baby son by the roadside. Desperate, he bought a $16 Sales book and took massive action. That single investment in himself gave him an OBSCENE ROI of $160,000 in just 11 months. Today, Yasser is on a mission to make the real estate great career again and helps ambitious agents quadruple their commission income within 90 days.

Yasser Khan is a real estate coach at YasserKhan.SG, trainer at PropertyAgentUniversity.com and the author of Property Agent Secrets Book who teaches Realtors how to make more Money, have more Time and enjoy more Freedom without all the B.S. plaguing the industry today.  

Yasser Khan’s approach to coaching is highly personalised, holistic, no B.S., and for “PROS ONLY… amateurs not allowed.” He believes that true success means winning in every single area of your life (like Financial, Family, Social, Physical, Mental, Spiritual and Fun).

When Yasser isn’t coaching, he loves playing GOTY PC Games with top-of-the-line Razer products and being a kid again with his 3 naughty children (actually, boss babies...), traveling to and across scenic Pakistan, enjoying hot & spicy food, taking pictures of the Milky Way with his favourite Canon DSLR and reading up all about Dinosaurs (especially T. Rex)

One of the most common questions property agents ask after building their websites is if real estate search engine optimization (SEO) is still an effective lead generation strategy today. Let me put this bluntly. While ranking your content on search engines is much harder than it ever used to be, you can still easily outrank your competition by investing lots of time and intelligent effort, using basic, foundational SEO strategies that most real estate agents either don’t know or don’t bother with.

I put together this guide to help you get started. I’ve included ten proven real estate SEO strategies to help your content rank better in Google (and other) search results. I’ll also cover the most frequently asked questions and common SEO mistakes to avoid. Here’s what you’ll learn:

What Is Real Estate SEO?

Real estate SEO is the strategy real estate websites use to improve their ranking on search engines like Google, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, and Bing. The higher your website ranks on a search engine, the more people will see it and hopefully click on it. This translates into more website visitors, and if your site is well optimized for lead capture, then hopefully more buyer and seller leads show up in your CRM for you to follow up with.

See Search Engine Optimization: A Beginner's Guide from Ahrefs

Deep Dive: How Google & Other Search Engines Rank Content in 2022

In 2022, Google uses advanced artificial intelligence (AI) to decide which websites and pages rank on the first page of the search engine results page (SERP). Since Google wants to deliver the best and most relevant results, they continually tweak their AI and algorithm to make sure the most helpful results rise to the top on the search engine results page.

Google's top 3 ranking factors are

1. Backlinks,
2. Rank Brain and
3. Keywords.

Of course, publishing content that answers common questions that your target audience is searching on Google is not enough by itself in order to rank well in 2022. After all, hundreds of thousands of competing websites are likely to publish content similar to yours. As a result, Google also considers factors like the expertise of the person writing the content, the quality of the website, how easy the content is to read, among other factors.

A bit of warning though, this strategy is not going to work if you're going to create multiple websites for multiple real estate projects (new launch condos) and then try to rank each one for keywords. You'll end up wasting a ton of time and money and it will actually hurt your ranking on Google. Rather than using such a shotgun approach, it is much better to concentrate all your forces to just 1 main website, like a sniper. You'll achieve your sales goals much faster (and cheaper) that way.

Check out

Google's Rank Brain Explained in Detail

10 Steps to Fast (and Perfect) Real Estate SEO

Now that you have a better idea of how search engines rank content, let’s dive into the ten steps to fast and perfect real estate SEO.

1. Run an in-Depth SEO Audit on Your Website

The first step to any SEO project is to fully audit your current website to see if there are any technical issues that might cause Google to rank your content lower or ignore it entirely. There are a few ways to do an SEO audit for your website.

The easiest way to do an SEO audit is to hire someone from a site like Fiverr to run the audit for you. After they run the audit, they will send you a report that will go over any issues that might be holding your site back from ranking on search engines. Expect to pay around USD $50 for a site audit on Fiverr. Some SEO freelancers or companies will do this for free, but they will also try to upsell you to paid services without explaining the actual issues with your website.

Here is a Fiverr freelancer who runs SEO audits for $35 with a Zoom call to talk through issues that need to be fixed:

Visit Fiverr

If you’d rather DIY your SEO audit, you will need to invest in a few free and paid tools to do it. Here is a quick rundown of the tools you will need:

SEO Site Audit Tool	What It’s Used For	Pricing (USD)
SEMrush Site Audit Tool	Runs detailed SEO audits for your website, tracks ranking on Google, competitor research	$119.95 per month
Google Page Speed Insights	Tests how fast pages on your site load on desktop and mobile	Free
Google Search Console	Determines if your site is indexed properly on Google	Free

Here are a few issues to fix that an SEO audit might turn up:

• Meta descriptions
• Image alt text
• Image compression
• Keyword usage
• Heading structure (H1, H2, H3, etc.)
• Duplicate content
• Broken links
• Security: HTTP vs HTTPS

While I don’t recommend it, if you want to run your own SEO audits in the future, you can use this in-depth guide from SEMrush to set up and run your audit.

2. Fix Issues Found in Your SEO Audit

After you have your audit, you can then start fixing any issues uncovered in the audit. These might be easy fixes, like deleting duplicate content or fixing broken links, or more complex issues like HTTP vs HTTPS. Fix what you can and hire out for the rest.

One of the easiest improvements you can make on your website is to make it load faster. This is something anyone can do with Google’s free Page Speed Insight tool. Run the most popular pages of your website through the Google Page Speed Insights tool. If they load slowly, try removing or reducing the size of large images or infographics. You can also try removing WordPress plugins or portal widgets from pages that load slowly. If all of your pages load slowly, you might need to upgrade your web hosting plan from a shared plan to a VPS or dedicated server.

VPS (virtual private server) plans will run you around $20 USD per month and will offer significantly faster landing times than shared hosting. Dedicated hosting plans will run you around $100 USD per month and will offer significantly faster loading times than VPS plans. If your website gets a lot of traffic, you might want to consider dedicated hosting. If not, VPS hosting should do the trick.

Issues you may need someone else to fix for you might be those pertaining to redirects or technical issues. Just hire someone to fix this permanently and get it over with.

3. Set Up Your Google My Business Account

After you’ve run your SEO audit and fixed any issues that came up, the next step is to claim your Google My Business account. Google My Business is Google’s tool for indexing local businesses for search on Google Maps. This is important in 2022 because Google Maps results are almost always at the top of search results pages (SERP) for searches related to real estate. For example, when I search “real estate agent” from Singapore, Google puts a map of nearby real estate agencies at the top of the SERP:

If you want a chance of showing up here, you need to set up your Google My Business account. You can get started here: https://www.google.com/business/

While this won’t guarantee your site shows up at the top of the search results, but if you don’t fill out your Google My Business profile, you will never show up!

4. Research High-Traffic Keywords You Want to (and Can) Rank For

After you’ve completed your audit, fixed invisible SEO issues and set up your Google My Business profile, the next step is to research the keywords your local audience is actually searching for. Once you know what your audience is searching for, only then you can create content to address their questions and concerns. For example, if your audience is searching for “affordable condos in Singapore,” you can write an article or create a video explaining how to find affordable condos in Singapore.

Use a Keyword Research Tool Like Ahrefs

The best way to do keyword research is to use a keyword research tool like Ahrefs. Ahrefs isn’t free but is the best SEO investment you can make to help plan what content to write for your website (and do much, much more than that). You can also hire a freelancer on a site like Fiverr or Upwork to do basic keyword research for you. Most freelancers will be already using a keyword research tool like Ahrefs to research keywords.

Research SERP & ‘People Also Ask’ Results for Your Keywords

Once you have a list of keywords you want to target, research the SERP for each keyword to see what kind of content is ranking for those keywords. Are they articles or videos? How long are the articles? What kinds of websites are ranking for these keywords? What other content are they creating? What keywords do they seem to be targeting? Finally, how can you improve on the content currently ranking on the first page for your keywords?

 Pro Tip

Google’s “People Also Ask” section on SERPs can be a goldmine for content ideas. These are questions that Google’s algorithm thinks are related to the main keyword. Here are the “People also ask” results for the keyword “Condos in Singapore”: Each one of these questions would make a great blog post.

To learn more about keyword research, check out this in-depth guide.

5. Create a Content Cluster Strategy

Generally speaking, search engines rank content created by subject matter experts higher than content created by amateurs. For example, when people search for “best cancer treatments,” search engines will display results from top oncologists before your cousin John who thinks crystals and herbs cure cancer (no, it doesn't.) One of the ways that search engines determine your expertise in a subject area is by looking at how much content on the subject you have on your website, and how well organized that content is.

This is where content clusters come in. Content clusters are groups of articles organized from top-level subjects like “condos in Singapore” that then drill down to more specific related topics like “Condos in Bukit Merah” or “How to qualify for a condo in Singapore.”

Pillar Content, Subpillar Content & Cluster Content

Creating content clusters is simple. Start by identifying your most general local keywords. These will be your “pillar pages.” Then organize more specific content related to that pillar page underneath the pillar page. Once you have your cluster mapped out, start writing the content for your pillar pages and planning to write content for your subpillars and cluster content. Once you write your subpillar and cluster content, link to them from your pillar page.

Here’s what a cluster map might look like for an agent who sells condos in Singapore:

Pillar content:
Condos in Singapore

Links to:
Subpillar content: Best neighborhoods to buy condos in Singapore, How to get approved for a mortgage in Singapore, Most affordable condos in Singapore, Waterfront condos in Singapore, etc.

Links to:
Cluster content: Condos in Sengkang, Condos in Paya Lebar, Condos in East Coast, Holland Village Neighbourhood guide, etc.

RELATED ARTICLE

100 Viral Real Estate Blog Ideas for 2022 (+ Examples and Expert Tips)

6. Create Useful & Compelling Articles, Videos & Infographics

Now that you have a cluster strategy mapped out, the next step is to create the content for your website that others will want to link back to.

Create Pillar Content First

Start by creating your pillar content. Your pillar content should address general topics that you will expand on in your cluster content.

For example, a pillar page about condos in Singapore should be a high-level overview of buying condos in Singapore. Try to think of questions your audience might have about buying a condo in Singapore and answer them in your article. Answers that require more detail will be addressed in your cluster content, so a general overview will be fine for your cluster content. What are the general price ranges by neighborhood for condos in Singapore? How competitive is the market? What should buyers look out for? What should sellers be aware of?

How Long Should Your Content Be?

There is no hard and fast rule for how long your content needs to be to rank on Google, but studies show longer content tends to outrank shorter content. Research from HubSpot showed that the best-ranking articles on Google were over 2,000 words. Just do your best to answer the questions you think your audience will have about the topic and remember to address more specific answers in your subpillar and cluster content.

Article vs Video Content

While articles usually rank better than videos, for some keywords at least, videos will outrank articles. This is why researching SERPs before you start writing content is so important. If a SERP for a keyword you want to rank for has videos ranking at the top of the page, then making a video for that keyword is a no-brainer.

The best approach is to embed a video in an article. For example, after you finish writing your pillar content for “condos in Singapore,” record and embed a quick YouTube video summarizing the content.

Use SEO Best Practices as You Write

Always use SEO best practices for creating content for your website. These include using structured headings like H1, H2, H3, or numbered lists, using keywords in the first paragraphs of your articles, writing in simple, direct language, always keeping content above the fold and focusing on answering readers’ questions in the most direct way possible. Getting creative with your writing can be tempting, but for most articles, a bare-bones “just the facts” approach will work much better. People are busy! They just want to learn what you have to teach them as quickly as possible. For reference, just look at how I've structured the headings on this blog post and generously used targeted keywords in both the headings and throughout.

If you’re using WordPress, a free SEO plugin like Yoast will make following SEO best practices much easier, even when you write. I'm using the premium paid version and it works great in suggesting the best keywords to target and assigns me an SEO score so I know how much more work I have to do (or not).

7. Always Work on Getting Backlinks to Your Content

One of the top 3 major ways search engines decide where to rank your content is by the number and quality of other websites that link to your homepage or directly to your blog posts. This is why getting other sites to link to your website is crucial for SEO. This is also why Distribution Trumps Content. You may write the best content, but if nobody can find it, then it will never rank! If all you do is write content and never promote it, then you will always struggle with getting organic traffic. To use Rand Fishkin's terminology, you will get a 'Spike of Hope' after you publish a post, then a 'Flatline of Nope' and you'll be in this vicious cycle for years. If you focus on getting more backlinks, your content will give you exponential returns over time.

Link Quality Counts More Than Quantity

Generally speaking, quality counts for more than quantity when it comes to links to your website. For example, a link from a well-respected site like the Singapore Times might be worth 100 (or more!) links from smaller websites. It’s not easy, but putting in the work to get high-quality links to your website will have an unbeatable return on investment (ROI) for SEO.

Links from websites that are related to your pillar content are also more valuable for ranking than more general sites. For example, if you’re writing about condos in Singapore, then a link from PropNex might be more valuable than a link from the Singapore Post. Since you are writing about real estate, a link from Realtor Magazine, CEA or NAR would be even more valuable.

Link-building Strategies That Work in 2022

One of the best ways to get links from high-quality websites in 2022 is to use HARO. HARO (Help a Reporter Out) is a website where journalists submit questions when they need expert quotes for articles they are working on. Getting quoted as a real estate expert along with a link to your site is actually much easier than you might think. Journalists are almost always on tight deadlines, which means they sometimes scramble at the last minute to get good quotes from experts.

To get backlinks from HARO, subscribe to their email and pitch journalists when they need quotes from real estate experts. If they accept your pitch, ask them to link to your website. Easy, right? The key is to respond to journalists’ quote requests as soon as they get posted. This will greatly increase your odds of getting your quote accepted.

To learn more about getting links from HARO and other sources, check out our in-depth guide to strategic PR below.

8. Update Your Best Performing Articles on a Schedule

Since your local real estate market can change from quarter to quarter or even month to month, search engines generally rank up-to-date content higher. So once you have your content written, create an update calendar to make sure that content stays fresh.

For pillar pages, you should schedule updates at least once per quarter. For subpillar and cluster content, you can get away with updating once or twice per year. When updating your articles, spend a few minutes researching what changed since your last update, and then address those changes in your article. If you're using WordPress, there is even an option for you to Republish that article.

9. Regularly Audit Your Website for SEO Issues

Even if your content is ranking well, you still need to regularly audit your website to look for any issues that might affect your rankings. For example, articles or videos you link to might change their URLs, leaving you with dead links, or your articles might start to load slowly if you install a new plugin. Scheduling yearly or quarterly SEO audits can find these issues before they start to affect your ranking. The best way is to use the Weekly Email Alerts feature in your ahrefs account that will automatically email you whenever there are any issues with SEO.

10. Stay Sharp About Google's SEO Changes

This goes without saying that Google changes the rules of the game at its own whim. Therefore, every time Google changes its algorithm or releases a major update like Panda, it will affect your search engine traffic. Ignorance (and inaction) is going to cost you dearly. Therefore, stay sharp and always make informed decisions. No one else is going to fix this for you. Simply create google alerts relating to 'algorithm update' or 'Google search update' and get such news straight to your inbox. Or subscribe to popular SEO websites. Make it easy on yourself.

How Much Does SEO Cost?

Like most great lead generation strategies, real estate SEO can be done for free (but with a catch). Writing great content that puts the reader first might take up a lot of your time, but there are no real upfront costs. Honestly, in my opinion, you're better off outsourcing things you're not good at and things that do not directly produce income, like article writing.

That said, if you are serious about using SEO as a lead generation strategy, investing in some basic tools or hiring freelancers will be a huge help. Here is a quick rundown of some SEO tools and services you might want to consider as your rankings grow:

DIY SEO Tools 2022: Recommendations & Pricing

Type of SEO Tool	My Pick	Cost per Month in USD
Keyword Research Tool	Ahrefs	$97 per month
Upgraded Web Hosting	Bluehost VPS	$29+ per month
WordPress SEO Plugin	Yoast	Free or $99 per year

Hiring SEO Freelancers

Since ranking your website on search engines can take years of hard work, you might be tempted to skip the line and just hire a freelancer to do SEO for you. Having hired many SEO freelancers in the past, this is not something I recommend for individual Realtors. Like any good freelancer, good SEO freelancers can be extremely expensive. The best SEO freelancers charge $5,000+ per month! Beware the “affordable” SEO freelancers. Some use dishonest tactics that might help you rank on Google for a week or so, but can also result in your site getting blacklisted from Google’s search results.

That said, there are many SEO tasks that you can and should outsource to freelancers on a site like Upwork or Fiverr. Here are a few tasks that you can safely outsource as the need arises:

• Keyword research
• Google My Business profiles
• Article editing
• Reducing image sizes
• Submitting your pitches to HARO
• Basic link-building outreach

Visit Fiverr

How Long Does It Take to Rank in Google and See Results?

It depends. Really. This is kind of like asking, “How long will it take until I can speak French?” You might see some results right away, while others can take years. There are two basic factors that determine how quickly you will see results from your SEO efforts:

1. How Competitive the Keywords You Are Targeting Are (Keyword Ranking Difficulty)

The first criteria is how competitive the keywords you’re targeting are. For example, if you’re trying to rank for “Singapore Property,” your chances of seeing results right away (or at all!) are very, very low. This is because there are many real estate portals like PropertyGuru or Zillow and well-established real estate agencies and brokerages that also want to rank number one for those keywords. Your chances of outranking Property Guru, Zillow or 99c0 for these keywords is virtually zero. These companies spend millions of dollars to rank their content on search engines.

However, if you’re trying to rank for “best neighborhoods in Central Singapore,” you will see results much faster since you will have much less competition on the SERP.

See How to Use Real Estate Keywords to Get FREE Leads From Google

2. The Quality of Your Content, Website & Backlink Profile (Existing Content)

The second criteria that determines how quickly you will see results is the quality of your content, website, and backlink profile. Let’s tackle those one by one:

• Your content: If your content does not offer useful information related to the topics people are searching for, you might never see results.
• Your website: Even if you have great content, if your website loads slowly, is not optimized for mobile, or uses complicated code, you will have a hard time ranking.
• Your backlink profile: Part of the way Google and other search engines judge the quality of your content is by looking at how many other websites link to it. More high-quality links = better chances of ranking highly.

How long does it take to rank in Google? (A study by Ahrefs)

Bottom Line: Is SEO Good for Realtors?

In short, yes. As long as you’re willing to put in the time and smart effort to audit your website, research keywords, create content clusters, and produce great content, then SEO can be a very effective way to generate leads and raise brand awareness with your website. But this is a long-term game requiring some money and lots of time investment. SEO has a perception of being free, but it has a huge time cost involved.

Learn How To Get More Real Estate Leads, Get More Listings, Close More Sales, with Less Resistance AND still have a LIFE!

Get more exclusive real estate agent training here https://www.yasserkhan.sg/

YASSER KHAN

Author, Coach & Trainer

Yasser Khan earned less than $1,000 in his first year as a full time property agent. With no money for the $2 train fare to his Broker's office, he was forced to walk 25 kilometers on foot. Worse, he got evicted at midnight with his wife and baby son by the roadside. Desperate, he bought a $16 Sales book and took massive action. That single investment in himself gave him an OBSCENE ROI of $160,000 in just 11 months. Today, Yasser is on a mission to make the real estate great career again and helps ambitious agents quadruple their commission income within 90 days.

Yasser Khan is a real estate coach at YasserKhan.SG, trainer at PropertyAgentUniversity.com and the author of Property Agent Secrets Book who teaches Realtors how to make more Money, have more Time and enjoy more Freedom without all the B.S. plaguing the industry today.  

Yasser Khan’s approach to coaching is highly personalised, holistic, no B.S., and for “PROS ONLY… amateurs not allowed.” He believes that true success means winning in every single area of your life (like Financial, Family, Social, Physical, Mental, Spiritual and Fun).

When Yasser isn’t coaching, he loves playing GOTY PC Games with top-of-the-line Razer products and being a kid again with his 3 naughty children (actually, boss babies...), traveling to and across scenic Pakistan, enjoying hot & spicy food, taking pictures of the Milky Way with his favourite Canon DSLR and reading up all about Dinosaurs (especially T. Rex)