What is SEO for Real Estate all about?
The Real Estate Industry has certainly evolved over the years.
You can no longer rely on a strategically positioned good looking shop to draw in potential buyers and sellers. Yellow pages advertising is certainly a “thing of the past”.
The 5 most common ways a business will be found.
- Referral from a friend
- Previous good buying / selling experience with a person or firm.
- Google it
- Advertising of your current listings
- Location / Location of the shop
Sellers look for more information about the people and firm prior to selecting an agency to list a property for sale. This researching process involves searching on Google for the agency that appears to be performing best in their local area. A typical search would be “real estate agents xxx” (where xxx in the town or suburb).
The large real estate directories and portals generally dominate the first pages of Google for these types of searches. This is largely a result of most agencies websites being poorly constructed (in terms of being found by the big robots).
What is SEO in simple English
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. That means setting your website to be robot friendly. It refers to optimizing the performance of a website specifically targeting visits from non-people. Robots crawl the millions of websites, searching for information to catalogue so that it can present the best and the most relevant info to the person conducting an internet search.
Just as a person will browse a series of books in a library, a robot also performs the task in a similar way and looks for these key ingredients to find the best book on the desired topic.
- Title
- Description
- Chapter headings / table of contents
- Pictures
- General ease of reading / navigation
The title of the book gives a person an idea of what the subject matter is about. A robot looks at the title of webpages.
The inside cover of a book quickly describes the author and generally some details of what to expect. Robots look for a special piece of code (planted behind the scenes) called Description.
The chapter headings / table of contents gives a book reader very easy info about the book. Robots look for keywords and site maps.
Pictures in a book and on a computer can be interpreted by humans. However robots can’t interpret most images, so they rely on a special ALT code which describes what the image is about.
When looking at a book, simply by flicking through the pages a person gets the idea whether this book is desirable or not. Robots flick through some pages of a website to get a glimpse. If there are broken links and/or undescribed internal pages etc, the robot will move to the next website without even seeing what else of relevance is on the site.
Popular books in a library or bookstore will be strategically positioned and signage pointing to them. Robots also look for popularity of a website by analyzing what other websites link to it and also what other websites are linked to from this website. Basically the popularity is judged by “backlinking” and also interaction with social media sites.
SEO can be classified as 2 separate types.
- On-Page SEO
The on-page seo refers to what is specifically on your website, including the page titles, description, keywords and other meta data (code)
2. Off-Page SEO
The off-page seo refers to the various linking of other websites to your website and the quality of each link.
While the search engines pay more attention to the quantity and quality of linking in the Off-Page phase, it is imperative to ensure that your website has been On-Page SEO’d. Otherwise, just like the book scenario in a library or bookstore, the search engines will just pass by websites which haven’t attended to the basics and made the general appearance attractive for a robot to visit.
Our research has revealed that a large majority of websites involved in real estate have very poor (to non-existent) on page SEO’ing. This includes most of the web developers in the real estate niches. Also most of the large corporate franchises perform very poorly.
This is actually good because there are really not that many websites competing for top Google rankings. Most of the websites aren’t even in the game because of their obvious neglect in house keeping.
Take the opportunity now to steal your competitors future clients by gaining a larger market share from due diligence to SEO practices.
We have put together a series of SEO packages to fit virtually any budget. You will definitely save a lot of money with attention to detail and covering all the basics prior to investing thousands of dollars. The rewards of attracting more clients in the Real Estate Game is so high and the cost of achieving those rewards can be so low.
Money not spent on SEO is actually like holding a flag up and telling the world that you just don’t care about this internet stuff.
See these SEO Starter Packages to get your business moving and make it harder for your competition to catch up. (If they ever wake up to what is actually going on.)
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