10 SEO Must-Haves for Commercial Real Estate Companies

Intro

As a commercial realtor, you don’t want to lose out on the opportunities the internet revolution has opened up for you.

Google gets over 3.5 billion search queries every day.

Most online experiences today start with someone typing a search query like “best investment properties near me.”

With more consumers becoming akin to researching properties online, SEO is an inevitable marketing strategy for your commercial real estate business.

In this post, let’s dive into some valuable SEO tips, tools, and resources that promise great results for your commercial real estate business.

1. Build a Keyword-Optimized Website

A website is your go-to lead generation machine. It’s a place to help prospective customers to find your company and property listings.

To work on creating a search-friendly website you must perform keyword research. You can use a nifty tool like Ranktracker to start researching the relevant search terms.

The strategy helps in understanding the right keyword opportunities in your industry. For instance, take a look at some of these search terms:

commercial space for rent near me

commercial plots for sale in texas

Optimizing your commercial real estate website for the relevant keywords can help you rank for such terms and generate relevant website traffic. Let’s learn how to do it:

• Work on including your primary keywords in the URLs, titles, and meta descriptions on specific website pages.
• Optimize your website content with targeted search terms and similar phrases across pages.

There are other steps you must take to make your website search-friendly. Let’s learn more about them.

2. Make Your Site Easy-to-Navigate

Here’s an SEO golden rule you must remember:

A user-friendly website is a search-friendly website.

Therefore you must create a site structure that makes it easy for visitors to find information.

• An easy-to-use _menu _that points to your site’s primary pages is the hallmark of a navigable commercial real estate website.

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• Next, you must implement strategic internal linking to allow users to move from one page to another with ease and simplicity.

• Another vital aspect of a user-friendly website is mobile responsiveness. Many of your commercial real estate customers use mobile devices to look for property listings.

​​More than half of global internet traffic (52%) comes from mobile devices.

Hence, a site that works well across devices is an inevitable SEO success factor.

• Furthermore, you must work towards optimizing your site’s load speed. A slow-loading website is embarrassing and results in users leaving a site for good.

3. Create a Google Business Profile

Google is the largest search engine and the biggest directory of businesses. The best part is that Google allows business owners to list their companies and websites for free.

Creating a Google Business profile helps you optimize your site for local search results. It makes it easier for prospective real estate buyers and investors to find your business,” says Patrick Cohen of Carcover.

To build a Google Business profile for your commercial real estate business, simply head over here and follow these simple steps:

• Add your business’s name, address, and contact details
• Select the regions you operate your business in
• Pick your business category
• Add business photos and your website link
• Link to your social media pages

Congrats!

Once you have a Google Business profile, it offers searchers a comprehensive search listing where they can learn a lot about your business.

Plus, it’s where existing customers can write rave reviews about your company—this would undoubtedly improve your real estate sales and potentially increase your net operating income (NOI).

4. Search-Optimize Images and Videos

When posting images and videos of your listed properties, optimize them for Google searches.

• You need to keyword-optimize the Alt text and captions of all your website images. Compress images before uploading them on your site.
• If you have videos on your site, make sure you transcribe them and publish the text alongside the videos. This improves the rankability of pages with video content.
• Adding captions to all audio and video content is beneficial too.

5. List Properties on Your Website

As a commercial real estate broker or investor, your goal is to get buyers for your property inventories. To meet that end you have to promote each property that you have for sale or for rent.

Work on building separate website landing pages that showcase each of these properties.

• You should ensure that you’re putting up high-quality property pictures.
• Talk about the benefits of buying or renting the said property.
• Add links to similar property pages on each of such landing pages so that prospects find it easier to browse through all the options.
• Optimize every such page for the relevant search queries.

“Whenever you start publishing blog content on your website, make sure you promote these pages with relevant internal linking strategies,” according to Brian Hong of BigEasySEO.

• Finally, promote your website’s property listing pages on your social media pages and social media communities relevant to commercial real estate business.

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This way you can get visibility for individual listing pages and start getting queries from potential customers.

6. Syndicate Listings to Commercial Real Estate Property Marketplaces

There are many commercial property listing platforms and marketplaces.

Some of the notable ones include LoopNet, CREXi, Commercial Brokers Association, CommercialCafe, Catylist, Biproxi, Bevitas, OfficeSpace, QuantumListing, Rofo, OfficefFreedom, Showcase, PropertyCashin, CIMLS, Instant Offices, Digsy, CityFeet, PropertySend, RealityZapp, Ten-X.

Syndicating your commercial properties on SEO-optimized platforms is a great way to get optimum visibility in Google search results. Moreover it’s an essential way to get backlinks for your property listing pages and improve their search rankings.

Property-listing syndication is an essential off-page SEO strategy for every commercial real estate business.

7. Build Your Own Commercial Property Marketplace

Commercial realtors who wish to take their SEO to the next level must work towards building an online real estate marketplace.

To create a commercial property marketplace, you need to have a dedicated listings section on your website. This section will include property listings from other commercial realtors like you.

PropertyCashin is an excellent example of a commercial real estate marketplace.

What are the advantages of creating your own commercial real estate marketplace?

• A search-optimized real estate marketplace helps paves the way for you to target a wider range of search terms in your industry. It’s a surefire way to obtain leadership in the SERP space.
• Another big advantage of a marketplace is that you can monetize it by offering paid listings and features to other commercial realtors and commercial property investors.

Building a commercial real estate property marketplace is a terrific SEO strategy to reap rich and long-term dividends for your business.

8. Start Publishing Helpful Content

One of the pillars of successful SEO for commercial real estate is thought-leadership and audience-driven content marketing.

• Start by working to understand your target audience. Learn about their current challenges and informational needs. You can build key audience personas by talking to your existing customers, doing keyword research, and tracking social media conversations in your niche.
• Work on creating a unique brand voice. Whether you write long-form blog posts or publish short form content, make sure you align it to a set of core emotional values—your brand values. A strong content voice gives unique flavour to branded content. It helps differentiate your content from other commercial real estate brands.
• Explore different content formats to engage with your target audience. For instance, you can experiment with content formats such as virtual and video tours of your property. Try posting infographics and live videos to make your content life-like and entertaining.
• Getting search rankings for your content isn’t easy. But if you work on publishing fresh content that excites your target audience, you’re bound to succeed. For instance, you can publish listicles that showcase the 10 best commercial properties in your region. Or write about the latest regional news or news relevant to the commercial real estate industry. You can even publish content that showcases commercial real estate investment prospects of a specific location.

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• Don’t forget to promote your content on your business pages on social media platforms.

9. Optimize Your Content For Google Featured Snippets

Google featured snippets help online searchers to get the relevant information quickly and easy. The search engine uses this feature to present information in the form of bite-sized listicles, images, questions, and answers, tables charts.

If you align your content with these formats, you’re likely to get your site featured right on top of Google’s search results.

To optimize for this cool feature, you must also ensure that you optimize your content for the relevant long-tail niche search terms.

And don’t forget to implement structured data on your site using schema.org. It’s a simple SEO technique to let search engines know your business category and content niche.

Final Thoughts

In a competitive commercial real estate landscape, SEO is a powerful strategy to help you get ahead and generate the desired level of sales for your business.

Just remember that you need to consistently invest in SEO and content marketing so that you can retain SERP leadership in local as well as national searches.