Is your website easily navigable, enabling visitors to find what they’re looking for, sort through multiple results, compare listings, and finally buy from you?
Is your website fast, secure, and mobile-friendly?
Did you set up your website with a proven email funnel, and follow-up system to build strong connections with prospects, while converting them into loyal clients and referrals?
If you’ve answered YES to all of these questions, congratulations! However, you still need to continue reading to discover 3 vital reasons why your real estate SEO strategy remains incomplete, and what can you do to rectify it.
First of all, if you rely on the so-called SEO expert advice or their link building services, then your search engine optimization strategy is likely dreadfully inefficient and invalid.
Here’s what I mean:
Let’s assume you publish exceptional content on your blog, using multiple forms and formats. There are on-page articles, infographics, PDF reports, slides, interviews, audios, videos, podcasts, vlogs, you name it.
You’re already one step ahead of your competitors. However, how strategic are you with this campaign?
Are you in the habit of publishing content haphazardly? Or, do you follow a specific formula to post content in a logical, and organized format?
Do you help your visitors to learn more about something that interests them, helping them to evolve from a beginner to more advanced subject matter in the process?
You can create a section on your real estate website and call it a real estate dictionary, or maybe find a better term, you can even coin your own terms. Here, you can share explanations of the most frequently used real estate terms in your industry.
Another section can cover top real estate contracts and agreements that are essential for buyers and sellers to understand. Your explanations can help clarify any confusion or uncertainty your prospects might experience.
Here are some examples of basic content topics you may want to cover on your website:
Ready to buy a home? Consider these five things first.
How To Create A Renovation Budget
Calling FSBOs and EXPIREDS for the First Time
The Right Way to Assess Land Before Buying and Building on It
Step by Step Guide to Relocating to Austin
Here are some examples of more complex or advanced content topics you may want to consider, once you’ve touched on the basic subject ideas first:
How to Prepare for a Home Inspection When Selling Your House
Estate What Brexit Might Mean for Lafayette Real Estate
Share With Clients: How to File a Flood Insurance Claim
Here’s the Pareto principle into action:
80% of your time and research should be spent on covering basic tips and tailoring your content to newcomers in the marketplace or beginners audiences.
20% of your time should be left for more complex and advanced subject matters and more advanced audiences.
In your basic articles you can refer to advanced topics, and link back to your content, and vice-versa. This approach allows both beginners and more experienced prospects to fully and easily understand the explanations provided on your website.
More often than not, your target audience does not engage with you or does not buy from you simply because they don’t fully understand the industry jargon or the process you want them to grasp. Therefore, they might feel intimidated and leave your website in search for content that is easier to understand, likely from one of your competitors.
Your objective is to intentionally close the gap and explain everything in terminology that is simple to understand.
Chaotic content publishing has more disadvantages you need to be aware of and one of them is this one:
Most of your prospects and clients are probably less informed and savvy in the marketplace than you are. Therefore, they rely on your real estate expertise and opinion, making it essential to explain the basic terminology and subjects to prospective clients before sharing the more complex aspects that are harder to understand.
Here are some solutions to overcome the above:
We both know that any article has 3 parts, namely the introduction, the body, and the conclusion. The same goes for presenting advanced topics or hard-to-grasp subjects.
You start off with something which your audience is already familiar with.
Here’s one powerful copywriting principle you should take advantage of to help with that:
Make old, new. This means, talking about common topics that have (extensively) been addressed on previous occasions by others in the marketplace, but providing a fresh and unique perspective by connecting them to new subject matters, events or technologies.
Here’s another principle I love which ties in with the above:
Make boring, exciting.
Talking about real estate can sometimes be dull, unless you connect the dots for your readers, and make content ultra-exciting to devour and share.
This requires for you to take your content writing to the next level, and cover the same topics from different, and more stimulating perspectives.
Use active verbs, visual words, comparisons, and analogies. Your competitors are probably doing this less often or are not utilizing the full potential of these resources.
This is where you can step in, and propel your content marketing to a higher, more spectacular, and efficacious level!
You cannot afford not to leverage your readers full brain cortex and stir all their senses (auditory, visual and tactile).
If you’re looking to appeal to your audience’s auditory sense, then use power words such as:
Listen (closely). Hear (me out).
STOP! Wait! Hey! Boom! Attention!
Yell. Scream. Shout. Squeal. Crack. Voice. Noise. Buzz.
Silent. Whisper.
If you want to stir your audience’s imagination, then use these visual power words:
Think. Imagine. See. Picture. Visualize. Dream. Observe. Discover. Recognize. Watch. View. Perceive. Discern. Envision. Conceive.
If you want to ‘fully’ engage your audience and touch their heart, then you should also make use of tactile sensory language containing words such as:
Touch. Embrace. Hug. Feel. Breathe. Relax. Experience. Contact. Sense. Suffer. Endure.
Using sensory language can help you captivate your audience like never before.
However, these techniques only have the optimal effect if you engage with your prospects in person. Communicating on the Internet makes it infinitely more challenging to obtain maximum results from your interactions because it is easier for people to be distracted from your blog or message.
Unfortunately, technology and social media makes that possible. And if your prospects aren’t focusing on one thing at a time, your communication and message will be lost in cyberspace, and the distracting surroundings.
This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t take full advantage of the above approach. Quite the opposite. You want to do whatever it takes to enhance your message, and sharpen your communication skills, is it not so?
It’s not enough to just publish content in an organized manner and taking a highly methodical approach.
You need to be exceedingly consistent. Thus, you should have a strict publishing frequency, e.g. weekly or twice a week (Mondays and Fridays, or whatever works best with your audience)
In doing this, you immediately separate yourself from your competitors, and establish immediate expectations. This helps to build trust with your tribe, grow your audience, and convert even the most skeptical prospects into raving clients and referrals.
Examples of real estate bloggers and companies publishing content on a consistent basis:
https://retipster.com/101-real-estate-leaders/
https://blog.hubspot.com/sales/real-estate-blogs
Be aware: not all of these profiled bloggers and companies are (highly) active and dedicated online. Some of them may be out of business already.
Whenever you brainstorm for topics and keywords to focus on when creating content for your website, and your content publishing calendar, ensure that you make use of the SMART principle.
You should also reveal to your audience your favorite principles as well as the core values you believe in, in order to help take your relationship-building to the next level.
The last critical reason why your real estate SEO strategy fails, is that you rather focus on achieving:
Short-term gains by experimenting with risky black hat methods.
For e.g, buying links to manipulate Google rankings and increase your search engine positions, is against their policy, and more importantly, it’s a short-term tactic anyway.
Once you are over your budget, you won’t be able to purchase any new links, jeopardizing your traffic growth.
Continuing this short-term approach, will cause your eviction from the SEO game. Instead, you should adopt a THINK BIG attitude, and create a multi-decade VISION for your company.
You should invest your energy in creating a proven SEO strategy, set to consistently grow your organic traffic. You should also partner with a reliable SEO team who could fix any SEO misconfiguration when bad things happen, or if your website suffers ranking penalties.
Sun Tzu knows that in a time of peace, better prepare for war.
I’d say it’s better to invest in SEO done right, from day one. This prepares you to recognize and prevent disaster from happening in the future, rather than having to fix things later on. As the saying goes – prevention is better than cure…
Here’s what you need to do to fix your SEO strategy, with a quick recap and some extra quick tips:
- Make your website easy to navigate, AND mobile-friendly.
- Ensure that your web pages and blog posts load ultra-fast.
- Add multiple email funnels to your website, and capture your visitors’ email and other relevant data to build trust and increase client conversions via strategic follow-up sequences created by you, your team and/or a real estate copywriter you can trust.
- Partner with an SEO and link building company who understands the real estate industry.
Also, before you select a specific SEO agency, it is crucial that you determine whether they are in line with your vision and able to transform it into fruition, with a strategic game plan and proven execution team.
- Be laser focused on content frequency like a pro. Never look back.
Chaotic content publishing is NOT a great blogging strategy.
Focus on being systematic in your approach. Create a content calendar and stick to strict posting frequency to build trust and increase your client base. Most of your competitors are probably neglecting this aspect, allowing you to advance and dominate the industry.
Can you imagine the significant increase in leads, traffic, and clients 12 months from now?
The journey of a thousand miles, starts off with the first step, right?
That’s why strategic thinking and simple, constant execution is the only SEO strategy that you will ever need for your real estate business.
- Engage your readers and prospects. Activate their imaginations, emotions, and all their senses.
Moreover, inject stories into your content and website, as often as possible. Everyone loves stories, and people usually respond to them in a positive way.
Ifiok Nk wrote an interesting piece on the topic entitled…
Sex Sells, But There is Another ‘S’ That Sells Even More Than Sex
- Celebrate the small wins.
I am profoundly grateful to God even when somebody I’d love to work with denies my service quote or asks for a counter-offer. This provides me with the opportunity to enhance my proposal the next time around, and this helps me to improve my presentation and marketing approach.
The fact that you have read this far tells me that you are not like most real estate professionals and marketers who read articles, but never apply the information revealed inside.
We both know that postponing and multitasking is a real threat to all business owners.
I trust you’ll take your website to the next level, and help your audience to resolve their challenges by implementing the information I’ve shared in this post. Doing this will give you a distinct advantage over your competitors.
Even if you only take one bit of advice and systematically apply it to your real estate website, I am confident that you’ll see better results from your overall digital marketing and blogging efforts.
Ultimately, I’d like to share with you another formula that I often use in my sales letters to sell B2B services and products. It works in any niche and industry, including real estate.
You just have to adapt it a bit, to fit your target audience, and you’re good to go.
I’m referring to the… 4 P’s formula
(1) Problem (2) Promise (3) Proof (4) Price
Start by pinpointing the real problem (which frequently goes beyond what the target audience believes it to be).
Magnify or aggravate the primary pain points and challenges associated with the problem by exposing the source of the issue.
Allow your target audience to visualize and feel how you will be able help them transition from problem to solution by making a very specific promise.
Vividly demonstrate how your offer helps to solve or fix the various pain issues, and ultimately the primary problem.
Detail the value and the advantages of your offer, step by step, and in as much detail as possible. Talking about price before emphasizing the value is a critical mistake and a sale crusher.
Share legit proof. Back up your claims.
For e.g., client case studies and testimonials, as well your own success story, results, and achievements will build trust and authority with your target audience.
Note: share all this in screencast (video recordings) format since they are better than screenshots; they are more intimate, and cannot be photoshopped.
Reveal the real tangible cost (in estimated time, money, effort, etc.) related to not taking action, and compare this with the price of your offer.
Your asking price should be at least 10x times cheaper or more affordable than the cost of not taking advantage of your bargain.
Give your customers a fair choice – buy from you and solve the problem or continue to experience the same problem and associated pain points, which in some cases can escalate to even bigger problems.
I am super excited to hear from you! So, if you have any questions about our article [3 Critical Reasons Why Your Real Estate SEO Strategy Is Wrong, and How It Is Costing You More Time and More Money Than It Should], or can suggest any other topics you think we should explore, feel free to let us know.
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