Here at Discover Publications, we work with many agents who ask us all the time about how to dovetail their direct mail efforts into an effective online campaign. Here’s an article from Mack Dudayev a real estate agent (Chance Realty) who knows a lot about digital marketing, and we’d like to share his expertise.
Generating Real Estate Leads With SEO
The real estate industry faces a plethora of challenges that might arise due to environmental changes, shifting political climate, volatile market, rising mortgage rates and changing technological trends. Get into a conversation with a couple of realtors and you will get most of the above as the burden they have to endure in their career. The challenges listed may also affect an individual realtor in his own way. There is one that stands out the most though, is generating leads.
When first starting our agency, Chance Realty, we faced a similar issue with leads. One of our challenges was trying to scale the agency beyond the word of mouth that came from quality service. While it helped the agency grow early on, we knew we were going to have to find other ways to market themselves beyond the traditional referral model. Luckily, I learned a lot about the power of SEO when building my first business and was able to carry it over. After some trial and error, I found a few tricks in real estate that help brings in quality traffic.
Here my top tips for generating leads through SEO in real estate:
Strategies to Generate Organic Traffic Through Real Estate
There are definitely a large number of search algorithm factors that make a web page rank in a search result. In the end, though, it comes down to good quality content and good quality links that are targeting the right keywords.
Quality Content
The importance of quality content brings about the increase in the search ranking and therefore there is increased organic webpage traffic. Most real estate agents do not take this into consideration. Quality content means that the webpage completely covers the topic in-depth, is engaging, and well-written. This can include things like talking about communities, your local area, things to do, and other things home buyers would want to know.
Decide on what demographic you want to serve
Get to know who your targeted market is. In the start do not succumb to the desire of wanting to satisfy the needs of every individual out there. Set your priorities straight and direct them to a particular group. This means carving out a specific niche. This can be something like being an expert in a particular type of property, certain communities or a certain demographic. This will help you stand out in the eyes o the customer and the search engines.
Go the extra mile in providing information
Even though your clients desire to purchase a home. They want to enjoy the comfort of being an individual of a particular community. With this in mind, provide information that might be geared towards showing how a particular property is situated in a convenient location, close to all local amenities. You want to position yourself as THE expert in your city. The way to do that is to not hold back anything and put all your knowledge out there to be consumed.
Talk about things outside of homes and communities
Sometimes people looking to make the move are worried about more than just a nice home and a good neighborhood. Sometimes they want to know what the people are like, what there is to do nearby and the intangible benefits of living somewhere.
Make the multiple listing service your friend.
Take the opportunity that is provided by MLS listings. Try to ensure that your webpage is linked to the MLS, this way it will make the page appear in most searches that involves getting a home in different areas. This can help your website pop up for address specific searches.
Earn Links by Reaching Out
The best way to increase your organic rankings is to earn links. Once you create the content, it will be time to rank it. The way to do this is to reach out to local businesses and offer them some free content for their site in exchange for a link back to yours. This will allow you to not only show up in front of their visitors but also to help your existing content skyrocket in the search ranks. A good link is usually one that is located within relevant content and on a high authority website.
Convert Your Visitors – Conversion rate optimization (CRO)
Conversion rate optimization is a system for increasing the percentage of visitors to a website that converts into customers. Search engine optimization and Conversion rate optimization do make a beautiful combination and will create results together. Have this in your mind, your site should be easy to find, but it should also provide value to the user, offering useful content that addresses users’ needs. This can be exchanging more info for
Homepage
When it comes to homepage it is all about making a first impression on visitors. In addition to that, it is also an opportune moment to guide those visitors further into your website. You can do this by emphasizing links to product information and offering a free signup button. Make sure there is a search feature so that people can look at properties.
Landing Pages
These pages are mostly designed for people to take action. In the case of SEO, your landing pages will be your content pages. Make sure to include homes and listings on your landing page, this can be a video or even slide shows of homes that are in your area that are currently on the market. Make sure you leave them the ability to register when they are on the site or to search for listings related to the content. Adding preexisting filters is a huge plus.
A Little Sweat Equity Goes a Long Way
The good thing about SEO is you don’t always need a big budget if you’re willing to do the work yourself. We were able to have everyone get together in house and roll up their sleeves before we ever thought about outsourcing to an agency. SEO is a great marketing aspect that you can take advantage of and works even better in unison with traditional methods. Add this to your marketing sprint and watch your business grow over time.
If you are a real estate agent and you would like us to feature your article on our blog, contact us here.