The real estate business has changed quite a bit over the years. The days of cold calling, cold emailing, lead scoring, WOM, and prospect profiling are not as powerful as they once were. But these are not the most efficient or far-reaching methods of marketing any longer. Social media and online digital marketing have taken the lead in most markets.

Online marketing specifically has become the mainstream method for marketing real estate. People realized the convenience of remote marketing and property hunting even before the pandemic. It is cheaper, reaches the target clients easily, and often times when done right is engaging. But to take full advantage of it, you have to go full throttle with the SEO process.

Local SEO VS Local Service Ads (LSA)

As a realtor, you’re always looking for ways to generate new leads and ways to get your name out there for potential clients to see. You may be wondering if you should invest in local service ads or local SEO. Here’s a breakdown of the two methods and what they can do for your business.

Local Services ads (LSA) are a paid form of marketing that allows you to advertise your business on Google. Your ad will appear when someone searches for a relevant keyword or phrase in your area. For example, if someone searches for “real estate agent in XYZ town,” your ad could appear at the top of the results.

Local SEO is a bit different. It’s an organic form of marketing that focuses on optimizing your website and online presence for local search results without paying Google. This means making sure your website appears high organically in the results when someone searches for relevant keywords in your area. We’ll learn more about the local SEO portion throughout the article.

What Is SEO? How Does It Work?

SEO, short for Search Engine Optimization, isn’t completely rocket science once you understand the fundamentals. It is to simply prepare targeted content, typically articles or blogs, in a way that they have the opportunity to come up when people search for certain topics. The goal is to make your content the first answer that a search engine will display for users. Please keep in mind that this doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time. But once your content starts to rank it can anchor in the search results for years bringing residual traffic to your website.

To do so, you have to make good use of keywords. These are common phrases that people will search for when they want to look something up. By including the most searched phrases and words directly into your content, you ensure that a search engine will ping it whenever someone searches for anything relevant.

You can also include LSI keywords, short for Latent Semantic Index keywords. LSI keywords are semantically connected words that Google, in particular, finds when it looks for content. These are essentially paraphrased terms for the same keyword or topic that you can focus on.

Keywords also apply to your website. Your website must be properly optimized for your target keywords so Google can index them properly. Things like metadata, copy H tags, and image alt tags are all important to have optimized. 

The content will contain backlinks, which will refer to your website and draw in traffic for you. Backlinks are naturally placed within phrases to not come off as marketing. This can help create a good impression and anticipation in a visitor before they visit your site.

General Benefits Of SEO

SEO can provide any business with powerful advantages when done properly. Instead of just searching in the dark for potential clients, you’ll have access to these features.

• You Get A Greater Outreach: The primary goal of SEO is to create content that comes up on the first page or, ideally, the first search answer that will be pulled up. This drastically increases the odds of clients visiting your site.
• You Get A Curated Customer Base: Instead of mass marketing to all demographics, SEO allows you to present your content to only those who have expressed interest. It increases their likelihood of staying and the chances of purchasing your product or service.
• You Have Access To Inbound Marketing: It is consumer-focused marketing that attracts your customers to you. You don’t have to reach out to every customer and market yourself first.
• You Can Get More Clicks Than PPC: Pay-per-click ads are more visible than organic SEO. However, 71.33% of the SEO content that users find to get a click has a much higher rate than PPC. Users trust organic content more than ads.
• You Can Create a Brand Image: SEO can help create content for your product or services that is more personable, relatable, and expressive. This helps build a brand image for your customers and earns brand loyalty.
• You Get Ahead Of The Competition: 61% of marketers make SEO content a priority in their marketing strategy. 59% of marketers stated that SEO-based content provided the best leads out of all their marketing schemes.

Every single one of these advantages applies to you as well. However, you have some unique additional advantages when it comes to real estate marketing, and these can put you in the lead.

Advantages Of Implementing SEO In Real Estate

Real estate or property marketing and sales work on building a relationship with the client. You have to come across as accurate, trustworthy, knowledgeable, and prompt. Here’s how SEO can achieve all of that for you without any effort.

• You’ll Always Catch Market Trends: No matter what trend is running the market, you can always optimize for it. If customers are looking for specific styles, sizes, price margins, or anything else, you can arrange your content accordingly and expect an inflow of customers.
• You Can Anticipate Upcoming Demands: You can track what your content is being searched for and understand the upcoming market changes. Understanding popular keywords is a great way to read the state of the market.
• Your Media Presence Creates Trust: EO content isn’t simple marketing. Your business is inserted with claims, reviews, and recommendations, giving your brand better exposure than simple advertising can’t do. Being seen organically can create a level of trust in your business that is hard to achieve otherwise.
• You Can Enhance Your Link Profile: SEO tools can aid you in finding where your website is being backlinked from. You can get strong, credible online sources that are considered authorities to refer to your website.
• You Can Filter General Mass: You need a specific demographic as your traffic to your website, not a general audience that will never buy from you. SEO strategies can isolate the crowd you need and lead them to you.

SEO is a very powerful tool for real estate businesses, but you haven’t gone the whole nine yards yet. For that, you’ll need to look into the benefits of local SEO for real estate businesses.

Local SEO, And Benefits Of Local SEO For Real Estate Businesses

Local SEO is optimizing your content for local searches. This promotes your content and website aggressively within a specific geographical location. This drives up your online ranking by eliminating competition and coming up with specific searches.

To understand how local SEO works, you have to understand local search. A local search is when the user uses terms such as “Real estate agents near me.” Google then uses the geographic location of the user to track businesses nearby and cite them. You want your website and business profile to be referred to in these searches and come up as high in the rankings as possible.

The benefits of local SEO for real estate businesses are not very different from SEO strategies. But it is far more focused. You’ll have some enhanced advantages.

• You’ll be highly visible to the local real estate customer base. You’ll note a near 200% increase thanks to searches like, “Open now,” “near me,” and “right now”.
• You’ll have a higher likelihood of successful leads coming in.
• Your marketing cost will become lower, thanks to Google’s business profile services.
• Building citations or backlinks will be cheaper and have a higher ROI.

This all may sound convenient, but setting up local SEO strategies can get pretty convoluted. Thankfully, it’s not that hard to untangle it and do some of it yourself.

How To Setup Your Google Business Profile?

You can take the first step of arranging local SEO for your real estate without assistance. To do so, you have to set up your business profile on Google.

To set up your business profile, follow these steps.

• Search for Google Business Profile manager, and click on the service link.
• You can either claim your business or list it for Google to find. Enter your business name and see if it pops up. Otherwise, click on “Add your business to Google.”
• Google will have already set up your information if it’s listed, and you’ll head straight to verification. Otherwise, provide your business name and type, then click “Next.” For business type, type in “real estate” and select the appropriate suggestion.
• Confirm that your business has a physical location that your clients can visit for consultation, and click “Next.”
• Provide your business address, and click “Next.”
• Deny that delivery to your customers and click “Next.”
• Add the locations where you’ll provide your services in. Be very specific about this, as it will determine whether Google will put you up on relevant searches or not. Do not leave this empty. Click “Next” when you’re done.
• Add your business number as the contact number, and click “Next.”
• Finally, Google will want to verify your business. Pick verification by phone, as it will be faster.

Once you’re verified, your profile is set up. Customers will find you in local searches on Google and also on Google Maps. You can go and edit your business profile further to state when you’re open and a few other features.

The rest, however, is best left to professionals. While SEO isn’t totally rocket science, it takes time and experience to properly set up a business for online visibility and brand image. It’s not different from how people see real estate, it’s only easy on the outside.

The benefits of local SEO for real estate businesses are not to be overlooked. Beyond the leads, ROI, and efficiency it brings you, it buys you time. A human cannot serve as many clients as a website can, and it can save you from pitching to every customer. It won’t just give you more business. It’ll give you more time to enjoy success.