Real Estate Marketing & Beyond
The world of search engine optimization, or SEO, can seem incredibly dense if you're on the outside looking in. Realtors and real estate investors often run into problems with conceptualizing SEO, what it does, and how to do it. Yet at the same time, real estate professionals know that a strong online presence is essential to market your business effectively.
The truth is that you don't need to lose sleep over SEO. As long as you understand a few basic concepts and how to apply them in an online environment, you too can reap the rewards of SEO. Here's how you can optimize your real estate business for SEO without a hassle.
The idea behind SEO is deceptively simple: it's a collection of strategies and tactics for getting your website noticed. More specifically, it's concerned with getting your site noticed by search engines like Google, Bing, and others. The better a job your website does at being noticed, the closer it shows up at the top of the list during web searches -- and that means it'll get visited more often than a site further down the list.
SEO is highly situational, however. Not only have standard practices changed over the years as search engine algorithms have changed, some strategies just work better for different goals. Tactics that work for one type of business could be less effective for another. This means that not only do you have to use modern SEO methods that have been proven to work today, you also need to select methods that will work specifically to attract the right types of visitors to your real estate site.
Understanding what SEO is and how it works is just the first step; now it's time to get it working for you. This is most reliably accomplished by first thinking about what types of web searches you want to be associated with. You'll need to research a list of the "keywords" you want to use, balancing authority (how high these keywords rank) and popularity (how many times they're searched).
Aiming for high-authority but less popular keywords means that you're less likely to get lost in the crowd whenever someone runs a search using that keyword. The internet is a massive place, so cutting down on your competition by cornering a few select keywords will drive visitors to your website more reliably than trying to compete against everyone else using a high-popularity keyword.
Next, it's important to craft content for your website that contains these keywords. Whether this content consists of pages on your site that describe your real estate practice, showcase specific properties for sale, or provide added value in the form of real estate or home improvement tips and tricks, you'll need to pepper those keywords throughout. Be warned, though: when it comes to keyword density, you can certainly have too much of a good thing.
Back in the day, so-called "keyword stuffing", which involved including multiple instances of every one of your keywords on a single webpage, might have worked well. Today, though, modern search engine algorithms can detect such activity and your site will end up getting penalized for it. Instead, use normal, natural language in your content, and keep your keyword use to no more than three times per 100 words.
There is, of course, much more to learn about SEO for real estate. This introductory guide should get you started in the right direction. Once you've got these basics, you're ready to move on to even more specialized strategies that will supercharge your digital marketing.
