SEO 101 – Real Estate Investor SEO Terms
Real estate investor SEO terms can be frustrating. It seems like a game of uncertain, always-changing rules. It doesn’t help that every real estate guru has a different opinion on what matters for SEO.
Let’s change that – TODAY!
Below are the most common SEO terms and concepts you should focus on as a real estate investor. Below you will find a concise definition of each SEO term and how to start thinking about them for your real estate investor website.
Editors note: when possible, I will include screenshots of how to do some of this work in Carrot.
On-Page SEO Terms
On-page SEO is the process of optimizing both the visible content and the source code of a webpage to rank higher in search engines. For real estate investor SEO, mastering on-page SEO is key to driving targeted traffic from motivated sellers and buyers.
Alt Text
Alt text (alternative text) is a written description of an image used by search engines and screen readers to understand what the image is about. Every image on your website should have relevant, keyword-rich alt text to improve SEO and help users with accessibility needs. Without it, you’re missing easy opportunities to rank better.
Anchor Text
Anchor text is the clickable text in a hyperlink, often underlined or in blue. Google relies on anchor text to understand what the linked page is about. Real estate investors should use descriptive, keyword-focused anchor text to direct users to valuable internal or external pages, boosting SEO relevance.
Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is the percentage of website visitors who leave without interacting with your site—whether by clicking to another page or engaging with your content. A high bounce rate signals that your website isn’t meeting visitors’ expectations. If your real estate listings or lead forms don’t encourage engagement, you’re losing out on potential leads.
Branded Content
Branded content refers to content that promotes your real estate business, products, or values. It’s a direct way to build authority and trust with search engines while boosting your brand’s visibility.
Branded Keywords
Branded keywords are search terms directly associated with your real estate business or services. Ranking for these terms is crucial for maintaining visibility and building brand authority online, especially when competitors try to outrank you for your name.
Canonical URL
A canonical URL tells Google which version of a webpage should be treated as the primary one when you have duplicate or similar content. For real estate investors, using canonical URLs properly ensures that your content isn’t penalized for duplication, helping protect your SEO efforts.
Content Hub
A content hub is an interlinked collection of related content centered around a specific topic. For real estate investors, a content hub can cover topics like selling a home, tax implications, or neighborhood insights, establishing your authority, and improving search rankings.
Cornerstone Content
Cornerstone content refers to the key articles on your site that you want to rank highly in search engines. For a real estate investor, these might be guides on selling a home quickly or understanding local market trends. These pages should be well-written, comprehensive, and SEO-optimized.
Duplicate Content
Duplicate content is any content that appears in more than one place on the internet. This can confuse search engines and negatively impact your rankings. Avoid duplicate content by focusing on original, valuable information relevant to your market.
Evergreen Content
Evergreen content is content that remains relevant and useful over time, such as a guide on how to buy a rental property. Real estate investors should focus on creating evergreen content to continually drive traffic and leads, without worrying about the content becoming outdated.
H1 Tag
An H1 tag is an HTML heading that typically marks the title of a webpage. It’s critical for SEO because it signals to search engines the main topic of your page. Every page should have one, well-optimized H1 tag that reflects the focus keyword of the page.
Header Tags
Header tags (H1 to H6) are used to structure your webpage, separating content into headings and subheadings. Proper use of header tags improves readability for users and helps search engines understand the page hierarchy and context.
Internal Link
An internal link is a hyperlink from one page on your website to another. For real estate investors, internal links guide visitors to important pages like property listings or lead forms, while also distributing link authority throughout your site, helping with SEO.
Informational Query
An informational query is a search where the user is looking for information rather than a product or service. Creating content that answers these queries can position you as a trusted expert in the real estate space, driving more organic traffic.
Keyword Cannibalization
Keyword cannibalization happens when multiple pages on your website compete for the same keyword, causing them to underperform in search rankings. Avoid this by consolidating similar content or ensuring each page targets a unique keyword.
Keyword Clustering
Keyword clustering involves grouping similar, relevant keywords to target in your content. This strategy helps real estate investors rank for multiple related keywords and improves overall topical relevance in search engines.
Keyword Density
Keyword density refers to how often a keyword appears concerning the overall word count of a page. While you should naturally incorporate keywords, avoid overstuffing them into your content, as it can harm your rankings.
Keyword Difficulty
Keyword difficulty is a metric used by SEO tools to estimate how hard it is to rank for a specific keyword. Real estate investors should focus on keywords with lower difficulty to capture niche search traffic.
Keyword Ranking
Keyword ranking refers to the position of a webpage in search results for a particular keyword. Higher rankings result in more organic traffic, so real estate investors should consistently track and optimize their content for better rankings.
Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing refers to the excessive use of keywords in content in an attempt to manipulate rankings. This practice is outdated and penalized by search engines, so focus on providing valuable content instead of overloading your pages with keywords.
Keywords
Keywords are the words and phrases that describe the content of a webpage and what users are searching for. For real estate investors, targeting the right keywords is essential to driving the right traffic—buyers, sellers, and investors—directly to your site.
Link Text
Link text, or anchor text, is the visible, clickable text in a hyperlink. It plays a significant role in helping search engines understand the content of the linked page. Using clear, relevant link text helps with SEO and improves user experience.
Long-tail Keyword
Long-tail keywords are specific, low-volume search queries. For example, “buy a house in Vancouver WA” is a long-tail keyword. Real estate investors should focus on long-tail keywords to attract highly targeted traffic with less competition.
LSI Keywords
LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) keywords don’t exist. What matters are related, semantically relevant terms that search engines use to understand the context of your content.
Meta Description
A meta description is an HTML attribute that provides a summary of a webpage. This description appears in search results and helps drive clicks, so real estate investors should ensure their meta descriptions are compelling and include relevant keywords.
Meta Keywords
Meta keywords are tags that give search engines additional information about a page’s content, though most modern search engines like Google no longer use them for ranking purposes.
Meta Redirect
A meta redirect is code that tells a browser to redirect a user from one URL to another after a specified amount of time. Use meta redirects carefully to avoid negatively impacting user experience and SEO.
Meta Robots Tag
A meta robots tag is an HTML snippet that tells search engines how to crawl and index a webpage. Real estate investors should use this to control which pages search engines see, especially for sensitive pages like lead generation forms.
Meta Tags
Meta tags are pieces of code that provide search engines with important information about a webpage. They play a crucial role in SEO, so real estate investors should ensure they are properly optimized on every page.
NAP
NAP stands for Name, Address, and Phone Number. Consistent NAP information across all online platforms is crucial for local SEO. For real estate investors, having accurate NAP information ensures you show up in local search results when people look for property services in your area.
Navigational Query
A navigational query is a search where the user is looking for a specific website, such as “Zillow login.” Real estate investors can benefit from creating content that helps people navigate to your site easily.
Negative SEO
Negative SEO involves unethical tactics used by competitors to harm your website’s rankings. While rare, real estate investors should monitor their backlinks and performance to spot any unusual activity.
Nofollow
A nofollow tag tells search engines not to pass ranking authority from one site to another. Real estate investors should use this tag carefully, especially when linking to less reputable websites.
Noindex Tag
A no-index tag tells search engines not to index a specific page. Use this tag for pages you don’t want appearing in search results, such as thank-you pages after a lead form submission.
Pillar Page
A pillar page is a comprehensive resource about a broad topic, usually linked to more detailed articles in a topic cluster. Real estate investors can use pillar pages to establish authority on major topics like selling a home or understanding market trends.
Title Tag
A title tag is an HTML element that specifies the title of a webpage. It appears in search results and browser tabs, making it one of the most important on-page SEO factors. A strong, keyword-optimized title tag for real estate investors can greatly improve click-through rates.
Topical Relevance
Topical relevance refers to how closely the content of a webpage matches the subject of a linked page. Ensuring topical relevance when building backlinks or creating content helps search engines trust your site as an authority in real estate.
Off-Page SEO Terms
Off-page SEO refers to any efforts made outside of your website to improve its search engine rankings. For real estate investors, off-page SEO helps build credibility, attract more visitors, and improve your visibility across the web.
Backlinks
Backlinks are links from one website to another, and they act as votes of confidence for your site. Search engines analyze the quality and quantity of backlinks to determine how trustworthy and important your website is. Real estate investors should focus on earning backlinks from credible, relevant sites to boost their rankings.
Crawler
A crawler is a program that systematically browses the internet to discover and process web pages. Search engines use crawlers to index websites and determine their rankings in search results. Ensuring your real estate site is crawlable and free from errors is essential for getting indexed properly.
Dofollow Link
A dofollow link is a link that passes on SEO value, or “PageRank,” to the linked website. These are the links you want to earn because they help boost your site’s authority in search results.
Domain Rating (DR)
Domain Rating is a metric that measures the strength of a website’s backlink profile, determining how authoritative it is. For real estate investors, a higher DR indicates that your website is seen as trustworthy, improving its ability to rank for competitive terms.
Carrot doesn’t show DR but does show authority rating which is a similar metric.
External Link
An external link is a hyperlink that points from your site to another site. While these don’t pass as much value as backlinks, linking to high-quality, relevant sites can improve the credibility of your own content.
Google Business Profile
A Google Business Profile is a free business listing that appears in Google Maps and search results. Real estate investors must optimize their profiles to show up in local searches and attract leads from nearby homeowners or buyers.
Guest Blogging
Guest blogging involves writing and publishing blog posts on someone else’s website. It’s a great strategy for real estate investors to build backlinks, increase exposure, and establish authority in the real estate niche.
Inbound Link
An inbound link is any link from another site to yours. These are crucial for SEO because they send signals to search engines that your site is credible and valuable. Real estate investors should focus on earning inbound links from industry-relevant websites to improve their rankings.
Link Building
Link building is the process of getting other websites to link to yours. For real estate investors, earning links from trusted sources—like local business directories or industry blogs—can boost your authority and increase your chances of ranking higher.
Link Juice
Link juice refers to the SEO value that one page or website passes to another through a link. More link juice from authoritative sites means better rankings for your real estate website, so aim for high-quality backlinks.
Link Profile
A link profile is the overall assessment of all the backlinks pointing to a website. It includes the quantity, quality, diversity, and relevance of the links. Maintaining a clean and diverse link profile is essential for real estate investors to avoid penalties and ensure long-term SEO success.
Local Citation
A local citation is any mention of your business’s name, address, and phone number (NAP) online. For real estate investors, accurate and consistent local citations across directories and platforms help improve local SEO rankings.
Local Pack
The Local Pack is a feature that appears in search results for local queries, showing Google business listings related to the search. Real estate investors should optimize their Google Business Profile to appear in the Local Pack and attract more local leads.
Local Search Marketing
Local search marketing is the process of boosting a local business’s visibility in online search results. Real estate investors rely on this strategy to show up for searches like “sell my home fast in [city]” and attract motivated sellers in their area.
Local SEO
Local SEO focuses on optimizing your online presence to rank higher in relevant local searches. For real estate investors, this is key to generating local leads and staying visible in your target market.
Organic Traffic
Organic traffic refers to visitors who come to your website through unpaid search engine results. The more real estate investors optimize their site with relevant content and backlinks, the more organic traffic they’ll attract without paying for ads.
Paid-Link
A paid link is a backlink that you pay for. While buying links can seem like a shortcut, it’s a risky practice that can lead to penalties from search engines if detected. Real estate investors should focus on earning links organically instead.
Technical SEO Terms
Technical SEO involves making adjustments to your website’s backend to help search engines find, crawl, understand, and index your pages. For real estate investors, getting the technical side right is key to ensuring your content ranks and attracts leads.
Content Delivery Network (CDN)
A CDN is a globally distributed server network that speeds up access to your website by delivering content from the closest server to the user. Real estate investors should use a CDN to ensure fast-loading pages, improving user experience and boosting rankings. You can tell Carrot uses a CDN to deliver images across their websites when looking at the URL in your media library.
Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals are a set of metrics used by Google to measure user experience on your site, including loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability. For real estate investors, improving Core Web Vitals is essential for staying competitive in search rankings and providing a seamless experience for visitors.
Google Penalty
A Google penalty is a punishment applied to websites that violate Google’s webmaster quality guidelines, either manually or algorithmically. Real estate investors must avoid shady SEO tactics that could lead to a penalty, as it can cause your rankings to plummet, making it harder for potential leads to find you.
HTTPS
HTTPS is the secure, encrypted version of HTTP, which protects data transferred between a user’s browser and the website. For real estate investors, using HTTPS is critical—not only for security but also because Google gives a ranking boost to secure sites.
Indexability
Indexability refers to how easily a search engine can find, crawl, and store a web page in its database. If your real estate site isn’t indexable, it won’t show up in search results. Ensuring your site is fully indexable is foundational to your SEO efforts.
Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA)
Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) is a technique used to analyze the relationships between terms and content. While not directly tied to Google’s ranking system, understanding how related terms can enhance content relevance can give real estate investors an edge in optimizing for user intent.
Page Speed
Page speed refers to how quickly a web page loads. Google rewards fast-loading websites with better rankings, so real estate investors should prioritize optimizing their page speed to keep visitors engaged and search engines happy.
PageRank
PageRank is Google’s original algorithm for determining the importance of a webpage by analyzing the quantity and quality of links pointing to it. Earning high-quality backlinks helps improve your real estate website’s PageRank, boosting your chances of ranking higher.
Rich Snippet
A rich snippet is an enhanced search result that displays extra information—like images, ratings, or other data—alongside the usual description. Real estate investors can use structured data to increase the chances of their pages appearing with rich snippets, making their listings stand out in search results.
Robots.txt
A robots.txt file tells search engines which parts of your website they can or cannot access. Real estate investors should use this file to ensure that search engines are only indexing the pages that matter, while excluding sensitive or unnecessary content.
SEO Audit
An SEO audit is the process of evaluating your website’s performance in search engines, identifying issues that may be holding back your rankings. Real estate investors should conduct regular audits to ensure their site is fully optimized for SEO and free from errors.
Sitemaps
A sitemap is an XML file that lists all the pages on your website you want search engines to index. For real estate investors, submitting a sitemap ensures that search engines can easily find and rank your most important pages, like property listings and local market guides.
TrustRank
TrustRank is an algorithm that analyzes links to separate high-quality, trustworthy sites from spammy ones. Building a strong TrustRank by earning reputable backlinks is crucial for real estate investors looking to establish authority in their market.
Website Authority
Website authority is a metric used by SEO tools to gauge the overall strength of a website, often measured by Domain Rating (DR). Real estate investors should focus on building website authority by creating valuable content and earning high-quality backlinks, as it directly impacts how well you rank.
Other SEO Terms
This section covers key SEO terms and concepts that don’t fit neatly into on-page, off-page, or technical SEO but are still crucial for real estate investors looking to dominate search result.
Google Algorithm
The Google algorithm is a complex set of rules that Google uses to rank websites when a user performs a search. Understanding how the algorithm works can give real estate investors a competitive edge in optimizing their content to rank higher.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free tool from Google that tracks how visitors interact with your website. Real estate investors should use this tool to monitor traffic, identify which pages perform best, and make data-driven decisions to improve user experience and lead generation.
Google Autocomplete
Google Autocomplete suggests search terms while you type into the search bar. For real estate investors, leveraging these suggestions can help identify trending queries and inform content ideas that attract more visitors.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a free tool that helps you monitor and troubleshoot your website’s performance in Google’s search results. Real estate investors should use it to track rankings, find errors, and optimize for better visibility.
Carrot makes it really easy to see this data by directly integrating it into your account so you don’t need to leave to find it.
Google Webmaster Guidelines
Google’s Webmaster Guidelines provide best practices for helping Google find, index, and rank your site. Real estate investors should follow these guidelines to avoid penalties and ensure their website remains in good standing with Google.
Landing Page
A landing page is the page a visitor arrives on after clicking a link in a marketing campaign. Real estate investors should create landing pages designed to capture leads by providing relevant information and clear calls to action.
People Also Ask
“People Also Ask” is a feature in search results that shows related questions to the user’s search query. Real estate investors can create content that answers these questions to capture more traffic and establish authority on key topics.
Related Searches
Related searches are additional search terms shown at the bottom of the search results page, related to the keyword you entered. Real estate investors can use these related searches to discover new keywords to target for content creation.
Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs)
Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) are the pages shown in response to a user’s search query. Real estate investors must understand how to optimize for SERP features like snippets and local packs to improve visibility.
Search Intent
Search intent refers to the reason behind a user’s search. For real estate investors, aligning content with the right search intent—whether informational, navigational, or transactional—ensures you capture the right audience at the right time.
Search Results
Search results are the list of webpages returned by a search engine in response to a query. Real estate investors should aim to rank their website as high as possible in these results to increase organic traffic and lead generation.
Search Term
A search term (or search query) is the word or set of words entered into a search engine by a user. Identifying the right search terms that sellers or buyers use can help real estate investors tailor their SEO strategy effectively.
Search Visibility
Search visibility is the estimated percentage of clicks a website receives based on its organic rankings. The higher your search visibility, the more traffic and leads your real estate site will generate.
Search Volume
Search volume measures how often a particular search query is entered into a search engine each month. Real estate investors should focus on targeting keywords with high search volumes to capture a larger audience.
Top-Level Domain (TLD)
A top-level domain (TLD) is the part of a domain name that comes after the final dot, such as .com or .net. Real estate investors should choose a professional and recognizable TLD to build trust and credibility with visitors.
Transactional Query
A transactional query is a search made by someone looking to purchase something but hasn’t decided where yet. Real estate investors should optimize for transactional queries by creating content that addresses buyers’ needs and drives conversions.
User Intent
User intent refers to the purpose behind a user’s search. Understanding user intent is essential for real estate investors to create content that directly addresses what potential buyers or sellers are looking for, ultimately improving conversion rates.
White-hat SEO
White-hat SEO refers to using ethical, Google-approved SEO strategies and techniques. Real estate investors should always practice white-hat SEO to build long-term, sustainable growth and avoid penalties that can sink their rankings.