Top Five Common SEO Tactics Hurting Your Google Ranking and How to Avoid Them

Growing your online presence is crucial for real estate agents, especially now. SEO, or search engine optimization, is one of the best ways to generate high-quality leads.

SEO drives 1,000% more traffic than organic social media because people use search engines with a specific intent to find information.

As real estate agents, we focus on local SEO, targeting a specific area and audience for lead generation. Organic lead generation is vital, especially with changes in the market and regulations affecting other lead sources.

Keyword stuffing involves overusing a keyword in an attempt to rank higher in search results. This tactic is outdated and can harm your ranking significantly. Google’s algorithm has become sophisticated enough to detect unnatural keyword usage, and it penalizes such practices.

For example, if you’re trying to rank for “Houston real estate agent,” you might be tempted to insert this exact phrase into every possible part of your webpage. You’d find it in the title, meta descriptions, headers, and throughout the body text in a way that doesn’t flow naturally. This might have worked a decade ago, but today, it leads to a poor user experience. When visitors read content stuffed with keywords, it feels forced and awkward, reducing the credibility of your website.

Instead of keyword stuffing, focus on writing naturally. Use keywords where they make sense and contribute to the content’s readability. Modern SEO emphasizes user experience, so ensuring that your content is informative, engaging, and naturally written is key.

Aim for a keyword density of around 1-2%, which means your target keyword should appear once or twice per 100 words. This ensures your content remains relevant without seeming forced.

Backlinking is an essential part of SEO, as it signals to Google that your site is credible and valuable. Natural backlinks occur when other websites link to your content because they find it useful. However, some people try to shortcut this process by buying links from other sites. While this might provide a temporary boost, it can lead to severe penalties from Google.

• Buying links can be compared to buying followers on social media. It might make you look popular in the short term, but it doesn’t build genuine engagement.
• Google’s algorithms are adept at detecting purchased links.
• If your site is associated with link-buying schemes, you risk being penalized, which can drop your site’s ranking or even get it blacklisted from search results.

To build backlinks naturally, focus on creating high-quality content that other websites will want to reference. Guest blogging, collaborating with influencers, and creating shareable infographics or videos are effective strategies.

Engage with your community, provide valuable insights, and your website will organically attract the backlinks that improve your SEO.

Duplicate content is content that appears in more than one place on the internet. This can confuse search engines, as they don’t know which version of the content to rank. As a result, all versions of the duplicate content can be ranked lower. For real estate agents, this often happens with IDX (Internet Data Exchange) websites, which display the same property listings across multiple sites.

Imagine you’ve written a fantastic article about buying homes in your area, but you find the same article on another site. Even if you own both sites, this duplication can hurt your rankings. Search engines value unique, original content, and penalizing sites with high amounts of duplicate content helps them maintain a diverse and useful search index.

To avoid issues with duplicate content, always strive to create original content. If you’re using IDX listings, consider blocking these pages from being crawled by search engines using a “robots.txt” file. Additionally, tools like Google’s Search Console can help you identify and manage duplicate content issues. For your own content, take inspiration from other sources but ensure that your final product is unique and provides your perspective or additional value.

Redirects are a way of sending users and search engines to a different URL than the one they initially requested. While redirects can be useful, using them excessively or deceptively can harm your SEO. Sneaky redirects send users to different content than what they expect, which can be frustrating and lead to a poor user experience.

For instance, you might have a URL that promises a guide on “buying homes in Houston,” but it redirects users to a sales page for a specific property. This tactic can mislead users and erode trust in your site. Search engines aim to provide the best possible user experience, and sneaky redirects undermine this goal.

Use redirects sparingly and transparently. They’re appropriate for fixing broken links, consolidating similar pages, or directing traffic during a website redesign. When you use redirects, ensure they enhance the user experience and lead to relevant, expected content. Tools like Google Analytics can help you monitor how users interact with your redirects and ensure they’re providing value.

Hidden text involves using text that is not visible to the user but is readable by search engines. This can include making text the same color as the background, using CSS to hide text off-screen, or setting the font size to zero. While this might seem like a clever way to include additional keywords, it’s considered deceptive and can lead to penalties.

For example, if your webpage background is white, you might hide keywords by setting the text color to white as well. Users wouldn’t see these keywords, but search engines would. However, search engines have become sophisticated enough to detect this tactic, and they penalize sites that use hidden text because it’s a form of manipulation.

Instead of hiding text, focus on creating valuable, visible content. Use keywords naturally within your content, and make sure all text is accessible to users. Providing a high-quality user experience is essential for modern SEO, and hidden text strategies undermine this goal. Remember, search engines are designed to serve users, so aligning your practices with user-focused strategies will yield the best results.