How do you want your potential customers to find your real estate agency listings today?
According to the National Association of Realtors, 51% of home buyers found their home through the internet, 28% found the home through a real estate agent, while 7% through an open house sign.
The tides are turning as more people turn to the internet before buying homes in the United States.
Technology has transformed the way people make decisions, including how they acquire new properties or put up properties for sale.
How is your real estate agency meeting the needs of this internet-savvy generation?
Having a website is no longer enough. You need to make sure your website is visible so that property buyers and sellers can easily find you. You need to rank on top of search engine result pages (SERPs) for this to happen.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the best way to get your real estate company website to the top of search results.
(Source: Medium)
Do you want to practice successful real estate digital marketing this year?
We’ll show you how SEO for real estate can help. If you’re in a hurry, you can use this outline:
- Six Reasons Why Your Real Estate Agency Should Start Investing in SEO
- What You Need To Do To Have a Successful SEO
- SEO Case Studies
Let’s get into the juicy details.
Six Reasons Why Your Real Estate Agency Should Start Investing in SEO
In the world of the internet, only websites with a high ranking will generate high leads.
It is not magic but reality.
SEO, also known as Search Engine Optimization, involves steps real estate owners can take to increase traffic and improve their website ranking on search engine result pages (SERPs).
The world has gone digital. People prefer to shop from the comfort of their homes, and that also includes real estate. When someone wants to buy or sell a property, the first thing they do is to go to the internet. The next thing will be to use search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.
This behavior is that people know that the best place to get an agent or look for a listing is the internet. Google, which is the most commonly used search engine, provides results based on SEO.
To stand out in the real estate business in today’s market means that you must be willing to invest in real estate SEO. SEO for real estate websites will help you compete favorably with less stress.
(Source: Mangools)
Let’s look at six reasons why your real estate agency needs to start investing in SEO.
1. SEO Keeps You Ahead of the Competition
SEO for real estate will take you several steps ahead of your competitors.
Real estate is, no doubt, a multi-billion dollar sector. So naturally, many people want to cash in on the enormous returns that real estate gives.
Real estate SEO is a very lucrative market, and many have not yet tapped into it. If you start NOW, you will be several steps ahead of those who are yet to take their real estate business online.
There are thousands of real estate agents looking for the same customers you need. Investing in SEO will not only keep you ahead of your competitors, but it will also bring specific people looking for what you offer in your real estate business and will help you convert them.
Investing in SEO will guarantee that you establish your real estate on the web before your competitors know what is going on.
Are you still marking time?
2. It Generates Better Web Traffic
What is the sense in settling for good when one can have better?
You see, as another online marketing tool, SEO investment makes marketing easier for the real estate business. So, while other marketing tools may generate traffic, real estate SEO will generate high-quality, organic traffic.
SEO for a real estate website makes your business visible to many people interested in it. As soon as they search for any related information, the search engine makes your website available for the person. The next thing that follows is a click.
As people searching for real estate information increase, your website will appear on search engines and get more clicks.
What does this mean?
It means that the traffic your website generates will be higher than it was when you were not using SEO for your real estate marketing.
3. It is Free
You’re probably wondering, “Is SEO free?”
Well, it is free for so many reasons.
When compared to other means of advertisement both on the internet and offline, you will see that SEO for real estate agents is technically free.
‘Technically free’ in the sense that you will not pay for the content. Even after publishing it online, you will need not pay anyone to get it to rank.
Isn’t that cool enough?
We know that advertising on mass media is expensive. But that is not the only problem; there is a duration for your advert placement, after which the media house may suspend it, except you renew your contract with the media house.
You will also incur similar expenses when using pay-per-click (PPC) for your real estate marketing. When you don’t renew payment for the PPC ads, the site removes them.
But this is not the case when you use real estate SEO content for your real estate marketing.
Your real estate blog content starts generating clicks as soon as you launch it on your website. These clicks are essential for your web traffic as they determine the number of customers you will convert.
And the clicks are free!
The real estate blog content keeps bringing traffic to your website and converting customers for you at no cost.
Is that not interesting?
That is not even the best part. One content can remain on your website and keep generating traffic if it remains relevant without causing you a single cent. So you are making money without spending money through real estate blogging.
4. It Magnetizes Customers
Just like magnets and metals attract whenever they are close to each other, that is how SEO works with people who want to do real estate business.
Before coming to the search engine to look for real estate information, every potential customer is looking for a real estate agency that will ‘catch their eye.’ SEO is the magnet that makes that attraction happen.
First, SEO will help you single out the metallic customers – these are customers looking for the specific offers your real estate agency provides. It will specifically target people looking for real estate agents around your location, people looking for the type of building you have available, and people looking for properties in your business location.
You don’t waste time on a market where you don’t have people looking for what you are selling. Thanks to SEO, you can target the right real estate customers rather than those scrolling through.
5. Sure Return on Investment
No investor wants to invest money in a business without expecting a return on investment (ROI). Unfortunately, investing in real estate can be risky, and many people have lost money despite real estate being a multi-billion dollar sector.
However, using SEO as a marketing strategy will guarantee a $0 loss and maximum profits.
Because of the high traffic that your website will generate from using SEO, the chances of converting your visitors are higher. Remember, these visitors are not just people scrolling through your website; these are people who are interested in either buying real estate or selling real estate.
The more people you convert, the more ROI you get.
6. It Boosts Brand Awareness and Protection
High-quality SEO content builds trust and establishes your brand as a reliable source of information. Any time a user reads your content and gains knowledge from it, they will interact with your brand and likely return for more knowledge. Their interaction will your brand will increase brand awareness and increase conversion rate.
More so, your real estate business will enjoy brand protection by using SEO to control your brand reputation online.
What You Need To Do To Have a Successful SEO
SEO for real estate is essential because it will help the real estate website perform and optimize better. The result is that it will have a higher chance of being on the first page when potential buyers or sellers are searching for a real estate agent or looking for any listing.
Practicing excellent and successful SEO involves two key factors:
1. A Good On-Page SEO Practice
An excellent on-page practice involves strategies you employ to optimize your web page content for search engines and internet users. Some available on-page SEO practices that can help optimize your web page are uniform resource locators (URLs), contents, internal links, and tags.
(Source: The UK Domain)
A good on-page SEO practice also has to do with having your real estate web page filled with helpful content relevant to the needs of your target customers. These contents could be videos, blogs, whitepapers, images, etc.
The strategy Google employs to get people to use your web page is by using specific keywords available on your page. You can optimize your page by identifying some of the real estate keywords you know customers will search for whenever they want to do business and add the keywords to your web page’s contents.
(Source: Infographic World)
Content “is king” – there is no doubt about this in the world of website marketing. No matter how good your real estate properties are, people may visit your website but not get converted if you lack engaging content.
Your content is like the nicotine of your website; users become more addicted to it as they go through your content. As users become addicted, they will keep coming back for more content. Therefore, the chances of introducing others to your website are also high as they keep coming.