#377 – Mail-Right Show: Best On-Page Real Estate SEO Strategies For 2023

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Best On-Page Real Estate SEO Strategies For 2023

The basics of real estate SEO fall in line with general on-page SEO techniques. Sure, elements like slugs and image alt-tags are essential, but you probably already have a basic familiarity with them.

This article will dive deep into these essential strategies and provide you with a highly detailed and hyper-current understanding of how to best leverage them

Episode Full Show Notes

[00:00:06.940] – Robert Newman

Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to the Mail-Right podcast. It’s episode 376. And as usual, my amazing, amazing, amazing podcast partner has had to be patient for approximately 25 minutes as I completely lost track of time. So here we are. I’m present. Who’s the hero of this particular podcast? My partner, Jonathan, why don’t you go ahead and introduce yourself to the audience, man?

[00:00:33.700] – Jonathan Denwood

It was okay. I was captured with my email. Endless list of emails, isn’t it? Thanks for that, Rob. I’m the co-founder of Mail-Right.com. We build beautiful websites on WordPress semi or full custom. Plus, we got a suite of marketing tools that get you some fantastic leads and keep you in front of your web-based customers. Over to you, Robert. All right.

[00:01:01.180] – Robert Newman

My name is Robert Newman. I’m the founder of Inbound rem. Com and a 14-year veteran in general of the real estate marketing industry. I specialize in attraction marketing and SEO. Without any further ado, we’re going to get into my home sweet home territory today. We are going to talk about real estate SEO on page trips, tips, strategies, and hacks that are still effective, if not really effective in 2023 because Google has definitely been changing some of the things that they are measuring and or the weight of some of those things, and some things are getting continued to gain traction. So without any further ado, let’s get into… This is going to make some people’s eyes glaze over. So, John, I’m going to stay away from the highly technical speak and stick to stuff that people can understand simply. So here’s one of the biggest hacks in the entire world, everybody, on the page. Here’s something that Google did five years ago. They went to a natural language recognition system, otherwise known as semantic keyword recognition. But they have to make everything as complicated as possible for you to understand. Everything. So they didn’t say, we’re better at recognizing what you’re trying to say, nor did they tell you how they’re doing it.

[00:02:37.510] – Robert Newman

So guys, guess what? They’re doing 80 % of their semantic or of their natural language recognition of the title of the post, the title of the page. And what else do they look at? The subtitles in Google speak, because they got to be dumb this way. It’s H2s, H3s, and H4s for the handful of you that are highly technical. They take those signposts inside any piece of content that they’re reading. And what they do is they then take the keyword density and they recognize all the relatable keywords to the signpost that you put up. Otherwise known as semantic keyword recognition. But what does this mean in the absolute most basic layman’s terms? It means that actually, 80 % of your content recognition comes off the title of the page. If you spent two hours thinking of the title and researching it and 20 minutes writing a thousand words, I’d probably tell you, well done. Well done. That’s the way to do it. Titles and headers are everything in SEO right now. Everything. They also pick up something called semantic keyword depth comes from how many headers do you have in your content. So in other words, how many H2s, H3s, and H4s?

[00:04:20.040] – Robert Newman

How many signposts that you have with content under them that Google can mix up the keyword density and understand? Did you actually produce something relevant for that signpost? Because if the answer is yes, if they look at the keyword density and discover that the right number of words are being used, they will go, Oh, well, then you might be a valuable resource for this thing, this other thing. So this is in on… Do you have any… Jon, any questions, any comments?

[00:04:50.520] – Jonathan Denwood

No, but I think you’re making it pretty clear because I think Google, haven’t they got the most PhD people of any company in the world. And like you say, they seem incapable of writing literally anything in reasonably easy language, don’t they? They just don’t seem up to it, do they? It’s like a glorified university department, the whole company, isn’t it?

[00:05:23.530] – Robert Newman

Yes, it is. And that’s basically what Google is. It’s a data science factory, and they do a very good job of employing a lot of data scientists and rocket scientists and professors and really high level intelligence that basically tries to sort. They are sorting through the whole world’s set of information. It’s one of the most complicated jobs that’s ever existed. It’s taking the entire world’s worth of information and categorizing it and organizing it for all of us. That’s what Google does. So so that’s a step number one. And it’s got to be one of the biggest. Now, here’s another way, though. If you were looking for a creative way to send other little signposts, you might ask yourself the question, Well, are there any other ways that Google picks up these signposts off the page, Robert? Because we see content with all this different stuff in it, like images and videos and blah, blah, blah, blah. And the answer is yes. More and more often right now, John, on page signals include multi media. So graphs, charts, images, though images have been overused. And most people don’t know how to put a creative image inside their blog post.

[00:06:42.420] – Robert Newman

So they’re for the most part a waste of time and space. Infographics are still big, still productive. So all those things, multi media elements are huge on page SEO factors. Another multi media element, which is oftentimes spreadsheets, clickable elements on a page are all multi media factors that improve the signals that you send. But a real strong signal is a somewhat creative or self took image that is properly tagged, that is still an incredibly powerful signpost inside of content. All of our best training content on my site, John, forever has been all the stuff that I image tagged that was real estate quotes and real estate memes. I’ve ranked for those posts for five, six years now straight, like without break. Anything with lots of images, with lots of sign posts that make it clear about what’s on the page Google tends to love. But it’s a lot of work tagging all those images and doing that stuff. So saying that you’re going to do 50 images like I did for those two posts. Now, if somebody had said, oh, Robert, you’re going to rank for five years off that work, I would say, okay, it’s worth it because it was worth it.

[00:08:04.270] – Robert Newman

So it’s a give or take. So real estate SEO strategies, like the image optimization is another big hack. Image compression, which is on my… I have a blog post about this. You can see what we say about that specifically. One of the things that I’ve noticed that is really taking off that is an interesting on page trend is actually how to titles. Kyle handy, who some of you listening to this show will know, he gets 80,000 visits to his site per month off how to videos, how to blog posts. He has got far more traffic than I do. And I think it’s because he makes his posts simple. He speaks directly to real estate agents, and it’s all how twos. Have you ever looked up Kyle? Yeah. He came on the show with us at some point, didn’t he?

[00:09:01.140] – Jonathan Denwood

Yes. I have to try and have him back.

[00:09:04.420] – Robert Newman

You should, man. He’s a big deal now. B y traffic and audience size, he’s a huge deal. You should get him back.

[00:09:14.420] – Jonathan Denwood

On if you can. He came on the show. That’s what helped him.

[00:09:17.550] – Robert Newman

Right. We launched his career, man. Kyle Handy is 100 % due to us. No, I’m just kidding. That was a very big joke.

[00:09:27.090] – Jonathan Denwood

Don’t get upset. Don’t write.

[00:09:30.210] – Robert Newman

To me. Don’t call me. All right.

[00:09:39.070] – Jonathan Denwood

But get to it. I think the images is really important to the alter tag, the description. And I think what you’re saying is linked to the first point in having the titles, spending time on the titles, spending time on the subtitles, tagging the images and also putting some video on the page. That’s a lot of work. Writing something, researching the title, the sub headers, having some decent images, using Canva. Canva tip. If you want to get some good images, Canva is a great resource. And then getting some video. But we’ve been hammering on about video for about two years now, haven’t we? I think the audience probably is getting a bit tired of us talking about video, but it’s really related to this. If you want a really great page that Google is going to love, get all these factors and plus some video. Would you agree, Robert?

[00:10:50.680] – Robert Newman

Yeah. On page signals, ladies and gentlemen, are definitely all important, but we’re trying to appeal to what I believe, and this is not necessarily supported by documentation, but I believe that Google has been leveraging AI more and more and more inside their search ranking. And I think without proof, I think without proof, I think that the way the AI is working is user behavior based. What could an AI track that would be user based that Google has data access to? How long does somebody stay on the page? How do they interact with the page? How do they interact with the page? Do they keep coming back to the page over and over again? These user interaction signals, which used to be less than 3 % of the algorithm. Now, the last time that I saw a lot of other SEOs document it, they had raised up to 8 % of the algorithm. Most other SEOs agreed that was about 4 or 5 years ago. My guess is that user behavior signals are now 20 to 30 %. And I think that by the time everything is said and done, there can probably be upwards of 50 %.

[00:12:03.280] – Robert Newman

So when you’re creating something on the page, if you want to know what I think the biggest hack is, how do we make something that’s going to make somebody stay there a second longer? And that plays directly into your video comment, John. Somebody will definitely stay on the site longer if they watch your video. Maybe as long as 30 seconds to two minutes, depending on how good of a job you’ve done. So video is very important because 30 seconds to two minutes is forever in the world the internet. Really great real estate sites rarely have hang times from users for longer than one minute to one minute and six seconds. And that’s above average. Average is 30 seconds for a real estate website. Oh, my God.

[00:12:46.870] – Robert Newman

So you should start tracking your own analytics, John, and seeing how your sites do in comparison to those numbers I just gave you. Without any content from a client, our sites average between one minute and 30 seconds, so three times better than the norm, all the way up to two minutes and 20 seconds, which is really high on the normal scale. And clients who are installing content, oh, my God, they can be upwards of three to five minutes. I have clients with the average hang times on their websites for five minutes, and those clients are doing extraordinarily well because remember, that’s averaged out over the many thousands of people that come to the site. So if you’re saying five minutes, that means that the average engaged user is on there for 15 to 20 minutes, and the person who accidentally ended up there and like, o opsie, and left immediately in one second, that averages those two people out or three people. All right. Let’s get the time. We’re a few seconds away. You know what, John, I’m going to make a judgment call. We’re going to go to a break a minute earlier. We might cut this show two minutes short because I’m on a very tight timeline today.

[00:14:00.860] – Robert Newman

So, ladies and gentlemen, wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, please stop, take a moment and do me and John a favor and leave us a thumbs up, whatever. Give us a chance to get your feedback. More and more often, John, I’m hearing people reference the show. I used to say to you that I never heard of anybody referencing the show when they called into me. I got to tell you, I’d say for this year, the numbers between five and 10 % of my inquiries mentioned the show. So it’s happening. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much. We will be right back. Stay tuned. Do you want quality leads from homeowners and buyers right in your own neighborhood? Then you need MailW rite. It is a powerful but easy to use online marketing system that uses Facebook to generate real estate leads at a fraction of the cost you’d pay from our competition. We stand behind our work with a no question asked 30 day money back guarantee. So don’t delay, get started today. Go to mail. R ight. Com. Welcome back to the Mail. R ight podcast. Today is episode number 376. We’re deep in my field of expertise, which is why John is a little quieter than usual.

[00:15:13.230] – Robert Newman

We’re talking about SEO hacks that can go onto your page. So if you want to get some bonus example, title tags, things like that. Title tags are great titles to blog posts. That’s what we’re talking about. It’s blog posts. So let’s say you’re doing a blog post and you’re in need of a good title, you can always hit the Inbound rem website and get some ideas that we had for free. Same thing goes for headings, which is the H2s and the H3s that I mentioned, which is just the little sub sections of a blog post. And then we’re going to start talking about things that don’t make sense, metadata. Skip that for the time being. But one thing that we did that was really cool, I thought, John, you have to let me know what you thought, we did include something that I had never seen on any other blog post about SEO strategies, which was user interaction strategies for real estate SEO. And then we included a list of things you can add to a page that gets people to interact with the page. Did you read the post? Did you see that bit?

[00:16:39.930] – Robert Newman

And if you did, what did you think of that? And if you didn’t, what do you think of that anyway?

[00:16:44.630] – Jonathan Denwood

I didn’t read it that specific bit, but it was linked to a question I was going to ask you anyway. Because what’s your view of mini surveys and mini quizzes, asking free question set up? People seem to like it. And have you utilized that on a regular basis with your clients doing mini quizzes, surveys?

[00:17:15.470] – Robert Newman

No, I’ve never used it, but that’s more a lack of bandwidth to apply it inside our ecosystem. So would I use it? Yeah, potentially, maybe I would absolutely use it. There’s no I think it could be a good strategy. Here’s how I would use it. If the desire was sincere to serve the audience, but you needed to do some research before you could potentially help people, that’s what the survey was about. I would do one of those within no seconds flat. If it was a sales survey that was meant to set somebody up for a sales call, I’d be a little bit more reluctant. I’m not saying it doesn’t work. I’m not saying it can’t work, John. But I really am not like, as time is going on, I’m becoming less and less a fan of push strategies inside the world that we live in right now. They’re just not very popular. And they’re getting a lot of resistance from the audience at large. What’s resistance? Dropping out of the forum and never looking at another email that you ever sent again, unsubscribing from your email marketing list. The list goes on. Those are all signs that you have missed the mark with your marketing.

[00:18:31.940] – Robert Newman

You have strong open rates inside emails and things like that. Those are all great ways to decide whether or not your marketing is hitting its intended target. How do your response rates, are they above normal? Do you know what normal is? Now, guys, here’s some example for some user interaction features. Toggle drop down boxes, video, which we already said, social media share. There’s lots of tools that you can plug into most WordPress sites that allow you to have social media iconography right on the page. Most of our competitors don’t do that. John and I’s like, you can’t get that versatility on the page. Comments and responses, once again, not all that common with our competitors. Calculators, newsletter signups, contact forms, drop down FAQs, IDX and interactive maps, internal links, external links. Download like infographics or ebooks, which we do use, John. I’m pretty proud of that fact. Quizzes and surveys, which you already asked me about. Image or client review carousels.

[00:19:47.140] – Jonathan Denwood

We.

[00:19:47.320] – Robert Newman

Do use those as well. Work extremely well. Podcasts, we do not use those, but we’re doing a podcast so you and I both inherently understand the value. And chat boxes. These are all things that you can do to enhance the value of your website to the world at large. I know people that have incredibly small amounts of traffic, like 100 people per month as an example, John. So they’re not doing that great at attracting people to their podcast, to their profiles. But believe it or not, that very small stream of traffic oftentimes generates some business, like some business. Like enough, one or two clients per year for having 100 people per month listen to you, saying that you’re going to get a few clients off that is pretty incredible. Digital marketing works usually by the tens of thousands. You’re measuring the success of videos by thousands of views. Do really heavy informational content. And I’ve noticed that your views drop, but your response rate goes way up and the quality of your leads is very high. My close ratio, most of my clients close, it’s like 50 %. It’s ridiculous. Honestly, it’s ridiculous. It’s an incredibly large number.

[00:21:04.410] – Robert Newman

So you’re not spending your time qualifying or quantifying leads. You’re spending your time talking to people who are already qualified to some degree or another, probably a very high degree. John, that’s been the tips. There is another pro tip that the head of my branding content team, his name is Ben, everybody. Some of this stuff, Ben comes up with himself. I no longer come up with everything. I do 80 % of it. I do a video, John, and then Ben creates a blog post out of it. He does this world class job. If you’ve read my blog, you’ve seen his work. He’s absolutely insane in terms of the level of quality of his work. Best I’ve ever seen. But one of those things he does is every now and again, he finds something. He usually adds his own little piece to the blog post. And he did so on this post. And I thought it was very clever, and I’m going to repeat it, but I can’t take credit for it. He took that idea that interactivity was really important to Google, and he said, You should be asking for input from your clients. Ask them on the blog to communicate to you.

[00:22:35.790] – Robert Newman

Ask questions of your audience inside your content. Now, our content is really deep and I don’t know if it’s working correctly for us or not, but I will say this, we’ve started to get a lot more interactivity off the blog, off the website. I do like it. Whether or not it’s really impacting us well for SEO, that remains to be seen. Whether or not it’s increasing lead count, without question, it’s improving both lead quantity and quality. So does it impact us well? Yes, it does. Does it have the desired effect of improving our SEO? Not sure about that. But for those of you listening, making sure that you’re trying to engage your audience, John just gave a great example. Put a button on there that says, Take a quiz, help me out, let me do some market research. Would you be willing to do me a favor? I’m trying to do some market research. Anything that engages your audience is probably going to be number one, maybe a high quality sign for SEO, probably would be my guess. But for sure, creating interaction between you and your audience is one step closer to creating a customer relationship.

[00:23:50.700] – Robert Newman

Would you agree with that, Jon?

[00:23:52.580] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah. And I was thinking of some fun quizzes. I f you did a bit of evergreen content about a certain area in the city or region that you’re covering, and you say, you could have three questions. What are the main things? Do you love the parks, the mountains? Why did you move to Rio? Did you move for the skiing, for the biking, or for the gambling? It’s just some fun questions and getting some into reaction on your post. I’ve seen a few people do. I haven’t done it on my own properties. It’s something maybe I should look at because I think it just gets them engaged a bit.

[00:24:44.980] – Robert Newman

I agree with you. And honestly, that everything you’re saying is right on the spot on. I especially love asking clients on real estate or geo specific blogs, some of the stuff that John mentions, verged on genius. Why are you thinking of moving here? But here’s one thing I would say. It is far more likely you’re going to get response if you try to figure out what the broad categories are and make it as fast as just clicking in a button. Don’t make anybody type. Just put in radio buttons where you can just click a button, put that in. You want it to be done in five or 10 seconds. There’s no way you’re going to get anybody to hang on to your blog longer than that. So super fast. But like John said, really specific to both the area and the blog. I think that’s brilliant. I think that would work very well.

[00:25:41.040] – Jonathan Denwood

I think it was going to happen in the next couple of years, Rob, with AI, is when they choose a particular of those three examples I gave you and they clicked it, the content will change on the page.

[00:25:56.770] – Robert Newman

Yeah, you know what? You’re probably right. That would be if they haven’t done that, they would be doing that. And since we’re going to spend… So, ladies and gentlemen, we’re going to cut off the show today at about 27 minutes because John and I have three minutes of something I need to talk to you about real quick. And then I got to go. But the bonus content today is just going to be talking about some future hacks. I’ve been talking about this one a lot. I’m going to contribute mine. You just gave me a great one. I think you’re right. I think AI or some chat GPT background thing is going to switch up the content based on your answer. I think you’re 100 % correct on that. Here’s what I think, though. I think that chat GPT is also going to change. We’re going to see a little bit more traffic go back to Bing. We’re going to see people in the Google Ecosphere using chat GPT or GPT tools a lot. And here’s what I want you all to hear. You heard it here first. We’re going to watch people translate that into ads, a lot more audio ads.

[00:26:58.620] – Robert Newman

It’s going to be audio ads. You’re going to speak a thing into your phone. The AI is going to recognize what you mean or think that it knows what you mean, and it’s going to translate your search better. It’s going to have a better intuition about your search than Google does, which means that for a little while chat, GPT is going to start taking over voice search a little bit more, in my opinion, which is going to lead us to more audio ads. So that’s my prediction.

[00:27:31.100] – Jonathan Denwood

The future. I’ve got mixed feelings. Well, not mixed feelings. I just think how it’s being presented at the present moment is understandable but a little bit shallow because what I think is going to happen is, I think it’s going to affect the middle, but I think there’s going to be a certain degree of searches that AI or chat is going to answer. But people do want to learn. If they’re serious, they do deeper searches. It’s more research. You’ve got a whole group of searches, which is a quick answer. They’re just looking for a quick answer. And then you got a whole smaller, but they’re further along the purchase journey where they’re doing comparative searches and they actually want to go to sites that show some leadership, some knowledge on the subject and give them information. They’re doing a deeper dive. What do you think of that? Is that making?

[00:28:38.670] – Robert Newman

Since Rob? Yeah. No, I do. I think it does make sense. I don’t disagree. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, Jonathan and we are out of time for today’s show, so we’re going to wrap it up. Jon, if somebody would like to reach out to you, how would they do that?

[00:28:52.550] – Jonathan Denwood

I’ll go to the mail hyphen write. Com website and book a demo with me and Adam, and we can show you our great platform. Back over to you, Rob.

[00:29:03.090] – Robert Newman

Beautiful. And if you’d like to learn a little bit more about me, go to inboundrem. com. Click the About or Services pages, and either one has a long video either about me or the company. Either way, you should be able to learn all that you need to know. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for tuning in. We really appreciate it. We’ll see you here next week and we’ll be talking. We’ll dig into something exciting for real.

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The Hosts of The Mail-Right Show

Jonathan Denwood & Robert Newman

https://www.facebook.com/mailrightusa

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Robert Newman

InboundREM

https://inboundrem.com

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