Real Estate Marketing & Beyond
PG Wodehouse once said, “to find a man’s true character, play golf with him.”
That’s great advice for people, but you can’t play golf with SEO services. So, what a real estate agent to do? How can you find the true worth of an SEO service? In a world flooded with SEO tools, how do you find ones that will really boost your real estate business? Where do you start?
As the old cliche goes, the best things in life are free. All of the tools mentioned below are free or have free trials. That way you can limit your risk and improve your website at the same time. After all, you’ll never really know until you try.
Google has more data about search traffic than any other company. Google Analytics potentially has more upside than any SEO tool on the market. However, it comes with one serious drawback. It’s rather difficult to navigate. Luckily, the Google Analytics Individual Qualification Test exists. This is a rigorous test, but people who pass the exam gain a cornucopia of knowledge about Google Analytics along the way. The certification is robust. It’s one of the most sought-after certifications for companies who hire marketers, and there’s a good reason for that; it’s useful. The test used to cost $50, but now it’s free.
What exactly does Google Analytics do for realtors? You can use it to analyze the content on your site. For example, you can see how many times a video is played on your website. Or you can view how many people downloaded your latest checklist. Google Analytics shows you which pages are performing and which ones aren’t. It lets you know how long people are staying on pages too (the longer they stay the better). It does all that and much more. It’s a treasure trove of information, but it’s difficult to master. That’s why the Google Analytics Individual Qualification test is so practical and handy.
Yoast is a marvelous WordPress plug-in. It helps you analyze your content, allowing you to check how SEO-friendly it is. For example, it does basic things such as letting you know if your pages have a meta description and a title tag. It also wades into more complex waters, such as analyzing your content for readability. Writing for the web is different than writing academically, and Yoast encourages you to break up your writing, making it as reader-friendly as possible. Yoast is a staple for WordPress users.
KW Finder’s slogan is “find long tail SEO keywords with low difficulty.” It’s a process that should be on every realtor’s radar. It’s exhausting, burdensome, and tedious to rank for ultra competitive keywords. Think about popular sites like Forbes, Business Insider, or Huffington Post. These sites are incredibly difficult to rank ahead when they put a piece of quality long-form content out. Since there are many searches for popular real estate keywords, words like “real estate” or “cheap houses”, the top sites aim to rank for those words. Nonetheless, top websites can’t rank for all the keywords, and there are many long tail SEO keywords out there that are a good value proposition. In other words, their search volume is healthy, but their competition is low. KW Finder is fantastic at finding these words. The user-friendly software offers a free trial too.
The best things in life are free. Try these free SEO tools before you experiment with something like Ahrefs, which doesn’t have a free trial- (you have to pay $7 to try Ahrefs for 7 days).
