Real Estate Marketing & Beyond
Marketing your real estate company involves so many different factors. Digital marketing alone, which is one of the primary methods for business marketing today, is complex and complicated. How one goes about doing this is a comprehensive task. As a result, many realtors choose to focus on just one or two specific goals when it comes to their digital marketing.
In many ways, such a strategy can be effective. Focusing on social media marketing, for example, has many benefits when it comes to being able to target specific demographics of prospective clients. However, one digital marketing goal that shouldn’t be overlooked is the impact that search engine page rank can have on a realtor’s business. Here’s why your agency should consider this specific aspect.
Plenty of people have established relationships with real estate agents already. These individuals have usually bought or sold a property in the past and found their realtor provided a good service, which prompted them to return in the future. In other instances, a friend or family member recommended a realtor to them, providing a positive referral. However, just as many prospective home buyers or sellers are also going through this process for the first time and unaided, which means they’re looking for a good real estate agent to help shepherd them through the process.
A great number of people looking to buy or sell property but that don’t have an established relationship with a realtor often begin their own selection process through a simple web search. In many cases, this will be through Google, as it is the most popular search engine of the day. This makes it crucial to ensure you employ as many good search engine optimization (SEO) strategies as you can so that agency features prominently in those search results.
The gold medal of SEO is to have a link to your professional realtor website appear first on the search engine results page. Realistically, however, this is often out of reach for several reasons, as the time, energy, and resources required to achieve this through consistent (and often expensive) SEO practices are sometimes out of reach for your average local real estate agency. Therefore, focusing not on overall search rank but on page rank can be advantageous.
Research has shown that the first page of returned results from a search engine is, in an overwhelming number of circumstances, just about as far as the average person will go looking through. Any results that show up past this first page are much less likely to be clicked. As a result, you can still reap the rewards of good SEO by focusing on the task of getting your real estate agency on the first page of Google’s search results and then working to keep it there.
Search engines like Google prioritize their results according to a fairly complex algorithm, and the particulars of this algorithm aren’t always clear. However, in this case, clear guidance exists on how Google, for example, decides to rank results. In this case, page rank is prioritized depending on site reputation. This may sound slightly amorphous – how do you quantify something like reputation? The answer, in this case, is that Google chooses to examine the number of quality external links that point to any given website.
In this context, a lot of high-quality links to a site tells Google that people consider this content to be of high quality and that it’s from a reputable source. “High quality” is again a hard thing to classify in a quantitative way, so Google has made it a requirement that links need to be organic – in other words, they can’t be spam, false, or paid links – to be considered high of enough quality to indicate a positive reputation. In other words, if your site has a lot of genuine links pointing to it, your overall page rank will improve.
Genuine link building in this manner between your site and third-party websites plays a major role in your website’s page rank. At the same time, there’s much more to SEO than just supporting a high page rank through organic links. Another important factor that goes into ranking a site positively includes the content that’s available on that site, how it’s presented, and how it’s written.
In the early days of the internet, SEO often consisted of what was called “keyword stuffing”. SEO experts would research the most popular keywords that show up in Google searches, and then use as many of those keywords as possible in the content of their websites to artificially inflate their rank. Today, however, search engine algorithms are so much more advanced; in fact, today, one of the best SEO methods is to use natural language in conjunction with judicial use of keywords. In other words, today’s SEO focuses on building content that’s designed for people to read, not computers.
Search engine optimization is an ever-evolving field, as it needs to change and adapt to search engine algorithm technology. This means that yesterday’s SEO strategies often no longer work as well as they used to (or at all). However, one of the most effective ways to build page rank for any website has been organic link building. That, alongside appropriate keyword use, is unlikely to change any time soon.This means that if you’re looking to supercharge your real estate agency’s digital marketing methods, focusing on SEO for page rank is a winning proposition. If you’re not familiar with modern SEO standards yourself, make sure you enlist the aid of an expert who can guide you in the right direction. With some hard work and a little luck, you could see your agency’s site trending on the first page of search results!
