Toronto Real Estate SEO Expert Consultant Shares Tips For Realtors

If you’re looking for a real estate SEO expert in Toronto and Hamilton Ontario, you’ve come to the right place.

Today I’m going to share my very best realtor SEO tips with you.

As  a consultant for realtor SEO, I’ve seen both the worst and the best real estate SEO strategies. I’ve seen real estate agent SEO plans that succeed spectacularly, and some that fail miserably.

Truth is: When it comes to real estate SEO Toronto is a challenging market.

There are just so many competitors doing real estate SEO in Toronto, as well as in local areas (real estate SEO in Hamilton is fierce too).

But here’s the good news:

Today I am going to make your life so much easier.

I’m going to show you my ten-step plan, including some of the best tips from my realtor SEO consultations.

Follow this plan and you’ll win big from your real estate SEO in Toronto.

As a real estate SEO expert Toronto and Hamilton are my main markets. It’s my job to help get you generate real estate leads and conversions through online marketing for realtors. And in this guide I’m going to show you all you  need to know about real estate SEO in Toronto (well, I’ll keep some secret sauce for my clients, but I will teach you a great deal).

But to start with, you might like to learn the basics of SEO first.

The Value Of Real Estate SEO in Toronto 

In 2018 you absolutely must be doing real estate SEO in Toronto, Hamilton, and all other big cities in Ontario.

Then again, as a real estate SEO expert in Toronto and Hamilton I am bound to say that, aren’t I?

Listen:

There’s just so many benefits of SEO for realtors in Toronto. to miss out on. That’s why a lot of realtors hire a real estate SEO expert in Toronto for consultations—people like me.

Imagine generating leads for real estate just by waking up and turning on a computer. It would be oh so easy and oh so profitable, right?

That’s precisely what happens when you learn how to do real estate SEO. Toronto is an online market. You’ve got to be online to win.

Sounds great. Problem is this:

Through my consultations I’ve seen many so called real estate SEO experts in Toronto using strategies that simply do not work. And it’s usually because those real estate SEO strategies are missing part of the puzzle.

When it comes to doing SEO for realtors, you need to get the complete picture, which a consultation can give you.

Listen, Toronto, real estate SEO is the future, and it’s time to get your head in the game.

Enter this guide.

This is the best guide to real estate search engine optimization in Toronto, written by a real estate SEO expert and consultant (hi).

In this guide I’ll show you the ten-step real estate SEO expert strategy that will get you the results you’re looking for. This is how I work with clients in consultations as a real estate SEO expert in Hamilton and Toronto. And the same tips will work for your real estate business too.

Here it is, Toronto: A Real Estate SEO Consultation In Just 10 Steps 

Follow each of these steps in turn. They’re all essential when it comes to doing SEO for realtors. These are the most basic points I cover in my real estate SEO consultations.

1: Understand the basics of realtor SEO 

It doesn’t matter whether were talking about real estate SEO in Toronto, Hamilton, or Mosambiek, the basics of SEO are the same. And the fundamentals, like natural link building, are still key.

Just like when you’re building a house, you’ve got to have the right foundations.

When it comes to doing real estate SEO, Toronto realtors need to nail the basics first.

So here’s the deal, Toronto, real estate SEO is about creating online content that matches what both your potential customers and Google (and other search engines) want.

That means the following:

• You must have a website that is actually usable
• You must produce content that matches what home buyers actually type in Google
• You must produce high quality blog posts for real estate topics (being overtly salesy will not work)
• You must do online marketing for your real estate blog. This includes earning backlinks (links from other websites) and doing social media marketing
• You must tie everything together so that your online marketing and SEO strategy actually helps your real estate business.

There are a million and one technical aspects involved with real estate SEO. Toronto and other competitive markets demand that you know these aspects. But they are all pointless unless you have good content to begin with.

If you nail all the above points you will be setting yourself up for a successful real estate SEO strategy.

So before you move on to the expert real estate SEO tips below, make sure you’re meeting all the basics first.

So how can you achieve all those things?

Let’s move on to step 2.

2: A real estate SEO expert strategy requires an optimised site

As a a consultant and expert in real estate SEO in Toronto and Hamilton, one of the main issues I see is this: the realtor’s blog is technically unsound.

Listen, Toronto, real estate SEO needs a darned good site to start with.

To successfully use SEO for realtors, the site itself must be good (it does not need to be perfect—indeed, there is no such thing—it just needs to work well).

Website optimisation is a big topic and its very important to your real estate SEO strategy. Real estate experts will tell you all about the importance of GZip compression and advanced UX theory but the main point is real simple: the main point is that your site just plain works properly. 

Making your site load quickly is essential. Thankfully, you can make your site relatively fast with just a few tips and tricks.

Here’s what to do:

• Get a good web host (I use SiteGround)
• Test your website in Page Speed Insights and GTMetrix
• Remove any WordPress plugins that are not essential (this will improve your site speed).
• Remove unnecessary images and compress all other images (I use Imagify for this)
• Install a caching plugin such as Total Cache
• Choose a good real estate WordPress theme

Your site will now load quickly, which will help with your real estate SEO strategy.

Next: design your real estate blog properly.

Web design is an advanced topic that any real estate SEO expert in Toronto or elsewhere will take seriously. But you can still benefit by just following the basics.

The following are the most important aspects of web design when doing SEO for realtors:

1. Stick to the basics (do not incorporate any “clever” design gimmicks because they will almost always fail)
2. Keep your menu at the top and not fixed
3. Make your logo visible but not massive (less than 200x100px is preferable)
4. Make sure your articles start above the fold (the section of the page that is visible before scrolling)
5. Use pop-ups sparingly if at all
6. Make it immediately obvious what your site is about
7. Make sure your site is mobile friendly. Test it in Google’s Mobile Friendly test.
8. Anytime you make changes, run A / B testing to see if the change created a favorable result

3: As a real estate SEO consultant, trust me when I say you should check your SEO keywords

Keyword-research is one of the backbones of search engine optimization for real estate agents.

This is still very much a fundamental thing, but your expert real estate SEO strategy will not work unless you are creating content around the right keywords. That’s why as a real estate SEO consultant I use very many powerful tools to optimise keywords.

People search Google using keywords. These are the specific words they type into the search engine (such as Google). You want your real estate website to come up top for these keyword terms.

To achieve that, you first need to know the most important SEO keywords for real estate. And this will vary by region (for instance, keywords for real estate SEO in Toronto will be different to keywords for real estate SEO in Hamilton).

There are tools that will help you with this, such as Google’s Keyword Planner.

Another quick and free option is to simply start typing search keywords into Google and see what the auto-complete comes up with.

A simple Google search revealed some of the best keywords for Toronto real estate SEO.

These are some of the words that your Toronto real estate SEO should focus on.

If you would like help with this, contact me for a real estate SEO consultation and I’ll be happy to help.

As a Toronto real estate SEO expert, these are the keyword terms you would try to include in your real estate SEO strategy.

It is best to then create a spreadsheet listing all the different keywords and highlighting keywords that are particularly important for our real estate SEO strategy.

Let’s now examine precisely How to use keywords in real estate agent SEO.

4: Next, our your real estate SEO expert strategy needs to be organised

Once we know what our real estate SEO keywords are, we need to use them strategically in our site and on individual blog posts.

This is both an art and a science.

To properly use keywords in real estate SEO, we need to take all our keywords and break them into themes.

For instance, if we’re doing real estate SEO in Toronto, we might have a list of keywords that include the following:

Some of the common keywords I see as a real estate SEO expert in Toronto

The actual list of keywords for Toronto real estate SEO will be much longer than this. As a real estate SEO expert in Toronto I have several hundred keyword ideas. But the above give us some examples to work with for the purpose of this guide.

Once we have this list, we then go through it and group the keywords into themes.

For instance, “Toronto Real Estate market” would be one theme and “Toronto Real Estate Prices” would be another.

We now know what people search for.

And of course, this all happens to be the content that we should create.

Next, we need to actually create the content for these keyword themes.

5: Determining the right blog content for our real estate SEO strategy

From step 4, we now have a list of different keywords. And we have divided those keywords into different themes.

For instance, one theme to write about for the content for our SEO is this: “Toronto real estate market” and this theme would include different keywords around that topic.

For instance:

If our theme is “Toronto houses for sale” our keywords might include:

• Toronto houses for sale downtown
• Toronto houses for sale west end
• Toronto houses for sale by owner

With these keywords and themes we now know the following things:

1. What themes to write about
2. What keywords to include in blog posts about those topics
3. Ideas about what good tags and categories might be for our WordPress real estate blogs

For instance, because “Houses for sale” is a big theme, we might choose to make this a category. We could then continually update that category with new houses for sale.  And we could use the sales locations from this theme (such a downtown and west end) to create our WordPress tags.

We could also create high quality blog posts related to each of these keywords, and a pillar post for the main theme. This would give us one large blog post about buying houses in Toronto, and other blog posts specific to buying houses in the west end or downtown.

The key here is to optimise site structure.

Any real estate SEO expert worth their salt will make sure to organise keywords into ideas, blog posts, categories and tags. And that’s precisely what we have done.

Because we have been smart with our real estate SEO strategy, we now have keyword optimised posts that are thematically related via categories and tags. Oh boy is Google going to love our real estate SEO. Hamilton and Toronto houses are going to be selling faster today!

But these efforts will also help with another important aspect of SEO for realtors: helping generate real estate leads online because our blog is so much easier to understand.

6: Now our expert real-estate SEO strategy needs some blog content 

If you’ve been following along, you now have a cheat-sheet for the content of your real estate blog.

• We know precisely what content we should create
• and we even know how the content will be organised into tags and categories

Now we need to create the actual blog content.

As a professional real estate SEO expert in Hamilton and Toronto, I am very passionate about creating SEO optimised blog content for realtors.

Let me share my main tips for creating blog content for a real estate SEO strategy.

How to create the perfect blog posts for real estate SEO

Now it’s time to create our real estate blog content.

Listen, Toronto, real estate SEO is only partly about the technical aspects. It’s also about good old fashioned writing and content product.

It’s going to be easy now to produce content for the real estate website because of our list of keywords, which we did in the previous step. Thanks to that, we know our blog post content from the keywords and themes we created above.

So let’s take one specific article idea and write the blog post.

Let’s say we are going to create the pillar post article (one of the main and lengthiest articles on the blog) for the topic of buying houses in downtown Toronto.

A pillar post is one of the main articles on a site. It’s a lengthy, in-depth, and indispensable piece of content. Its soul purpose is to thrill the pants off your prospective clients. So, er, it’s gotta be good… really, really good.

Here’s how to write the pillar post (and other content for a real estate blog)

1. Have a purpose and stick to it always
2. Choose a style for your blog posts. Yes, you’re writing a real estate blog post about buying homes in downtown Toronto. But what’s different about this? Why is your piece of content so much more fascinating than every other real estate agent’s post on the same thing? Maybe it’s a funny piece about what goes wrong when you by the wrong place. Maybe it’s a personal story full of emotion about that elderly client who lost her husband but found happiness when she met her new neighbours. Make this piece blinking awesome and unique.
3. State the purpose in the headline so people know what this real estate blog post is about specifically.
4. Have it professional written. Yes you can probably write adequately. But so many people think that just because they understand the basics laws of the English language that they know how to create a gripping piece of content that will make potential clients eager to work with them. This usually is not the case. A professional writer will create content that makes customers and clients eager to do business with the blog owner (you). Have t professionally written. Contact me for details.
5. Research the heck out of the topic. Yes, you are a real estate expert. Yes, you know your job. But here’s the deal: You want other people in your field to link from their blog to yours. And to do that you need to produce content that amazes them—your competitors. The more research you put into your article the more backlinks it will achieve and the higher it will rank in Google.

Now write your article. Divide it into headings and subheadings. Write in an entertaining but informative way.

A big part of successfully using SEO for realtors is to know how to write. You might like to read my guides on this:

• Read my guide 15 Rules For Effective Writing.
• And my example of a real estate ad

7: Page-Level SEO for real estate agents

You’ve now written at least one of your blog posts and hopefully it has been professionally edited.

Time to do  page-level SEO for real estate agents. Toronto realtors too often have good content with bad page-level SEO.

This is one of the main things I check as a real estate SEO consultant.

This is the step at which you take your article and, essentially, make Google understand it properly. In a nuthsell: you’re translating the blog post for the search-engine robot.

There are many advanced techniques that a real estate SEO expert  in Toronto (or in your city) will use to achieve the perfect on-page SEO, but you can improve your Google rank just by following the basics.

There are a few key steps involved with this:

1. Use your real estate SEO keyword strategically
2. Use Latent Semantic Indexing keywords
3. Use local SEO

Google and other search engines interpret your content by looking at the most common keywords, the juxtaposition of one keyword to another, and the placement of those keywords.

This is a very in-depth topic that real estate SEO experts like myself love to analyse. But you’re busy with your real estate business, so let me show you the quick and easy ways to make Google rank your real estate blog higher in search:

When doing SEO for realtors, make sure you do the following for each blog post:

• Include the keyword in the URL
• Include the keyword in the heading
• Include the keyword in a subheading
• Make the keyword represent around 1-2% of the overall text
• Use various modifications of the keyword, (e.g. “Toronto SEO real estate expert” becomes “real estate SEO expert in Toronto”

Next, use latent semantic indexing.

This is the process through which Google and other search engines relate keywords by theme.

Sounds complex.

To make it easy, write broadly around your keyword while including topics and ideas that are related to that keyword. In other words, if you’re writing about real estate you’re probably also going to talk about the market, houses for sale, maybe different types of houses, and synonyms for “real estate”.

Next, we use local SEO for real estate agents. Toronto and Hamilton realtors (and realtors elsewhere) should have content that is local-optimised for their market.

Most real estate SEO experts like to make this sound far harder than it actually is.

In essence, we want Google to understand where our real estate agent is located so our website ranks highly in search for people searching from that area.

The way to do this is to discuss the business’s location in the blog posts (“realtor in the downtown core Toronto”, for instance).

We can also use local SEO for real estate agents when it comes to doing our Schema markup, earning backlinks, and creating our social media profiles.

• NOTE: When you’re selling a property, make sure it’s local optimize for the location of the property and not of your business. If the property is in Oakville but your real estate business is in Toronto, create the local SEO for Oakville, not Toronto.

8. One of the core components of expert real-estate SEO is creating an internal and external linking strategy

Internal and external linking are incredibly important to our real estate SEO. Toronto realtors too often have good content with poor internal link structure.

“Internal and external linking” refers to the way we link our articles to one another, and our ability to earn links from other people’s websites to ours.

The former is much easier than the latter simply because we can create links as we see fit.

How to do internal linking when using SEO for realtors

The key to internal linking is to link between related pages [here’s a guide]

Thankfully, in step 4 of this expert real estate SEO guide, we created our themes and keywords. We can use this data to create our internal link strategy.

Because of that preparation, we now know how our articles relate to one another, and we can easily create our internal link strategy.

The keys to successful internal linking are:

• Link between related pages
• Create more links to your important pages and less links to other pages
• Don’t link directly to tag and category pages (WordPress will do this for us)
• Deep link (link to pages that are deep in the site structure)
• For anchor text (the text of the link) use variations of the target-pages keyword (if the page we’re linking to is this very page about real estate SEO in Toronto, we might use the anchor texts “Toronto SEO real estate” and “realtor SEO in GTA” for example).
• Read my guide to effective internal links

Earning backlinks for real estate SEO is an all together different beast.

This is where you truly need a real estate SEO expert on-board because earning links from competitors is not easy.

If you would like to learn my secret strategies I recommend one of my real estate SEO consultations. Contact me using this site.

Building backlinks for a real estate website involves creating blog content  other websites will want to link to.

Some of the best ways to earn natural backlinks for real estate agent SEO are to create:

• infographics
• emotional stories
• product reviews
• guest posts on other realtor’s blogs, and other strategies.

Read my guide to getting high quality backlinks.

9. Now let’s use Schema so that we can optimise our real estate SEO for Toronto (or your region)  

Schema markup is code that you put on your website to tell Google and other search engines important information about your site.

This can be very beneficial to our real estate SEO strategy. Realtors should definitely make sure their schema markup is correct. You will probably need to hire a real estate SEO expert to do this properly (contact me for details). Or ask an SEO consultant to verify it during a consultation.

The quickest way how to add Schema markup fr a real estate websites is to use a WordPress Schema markup plugin (here). The best way, however, is to manually add Schema code markup to the real estate blog using JSON-LD.

For example, the schema markup for this very site is as follows:

<script type=”application/ld+json”>

{

“@context” : “http://schema.org”,

“@type” : “LocalBusiness”,

“name” : “Paul M Harrison Online Marketing”,

“image” : ” http://pmharrison.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/mp-harrison-logo-3.png g”,

“email” : “paulh@PMHarrison.com”,

“address” : {

“@type” : “PostalAddress”,

“streetAddress” : “Garside Ave. S”,

“addressLocality” : “Hamilton”,

“addressRegion” : “Ontario”,

“addressCountry” : “Canada”,

“postalCode” : “L8K 2W6”

}

}

</script> </script>

• You can also use schema markup for real estate SEO on the individual properties you’re selling. This is one way to improve search engine visibility when doing SEO for realtors.

10. Social media optimisation and Google Business Listing for real estate SEO

The final step of our expert real estate SEO strategy is to use our social media profiles as signals for search engines.

By making sure you have the name, address, and description on your Facebook, Instagram and other social media profiles you will increase your trust with Google, which is vital  when using SEO for realtors.

As well as social media profiles you can also use Google My Business to generate some leads. \

I’ve created a complete guide to help you set up your Google Business Listing.

And that is our 10 step  Real Estate SEO strategy from Toronto’s leading SEO expert and consulant

You now have the perfect 10-step real estate SEO, Toronto. With this strategy you can start to use online marketing to your advantage. And you can enjoy the benefits of SEO for realtors (lead generation being the most obvious).

If you’re looking to hire a a real estate SEO expert consultant in Toronto or Hamilton, contact me. With my professional services you’ll enjoy the fully benefits of SEO for realtors.