Real Estate SEO terminology.
What’s the difference between Real Estate SEO and Direct Advertising? (The way most real estate marketing companies generate traffic to websites)
SEO = Search Engine Optimization also referred to as organic marketing or search engine marketing which confusingly can also refer to direct advertising which is NOT the same as SEO.
When I say SEO, I am referring optimizing pages on your website, so they come up on the first page of a Google Search. I am going to use the search “Beverly Hills Real Estate” and illustrate a paid search result compared to an organic search result.
Real Estate SEO is 700% more effective at driving traffic and conversions.
Simply put – people trust the organic search results far more than they trust paid advertising. Still using Beverly Hills Real Estate as our example with 1.9k total clicks direct advertising delivers 323 CLICKS spread between six possible advertisers. Organic or SEO delivers 1577 CLICKS spread among 10 potential companies. Not only that SEO will provide those results month after month without you having to spend new money. The math is unassailable.
Real Estate Direct Advertising is far more competitive than Real Estate SEO.
Most real estate marketing companies focus on driving traffic. Direct advertising pricing is ALL scaled based on demand. Put simply the more companies targeting paid advertising in ANY geography the more this advertising costs. Direct advertising continues to become more expensive with diminished returns in most real estate markets. To illustrate this correctly, I made a 130-second video.
Here is a partial list of companies that ALL target Google or Facebook to generate traffic to their lead generation websites or landing pages:
- Commission Inc.
- Real Estate Webmasters
- Boom Town
- Real Geeks
- Homes.com
- Realtor.com
- Trulia.com
- Kunversion
- Smart Zip
- Redfin
- House Hunt
Real Estate SEO, on the other hand, is offered with competence by two real estate marketing companies. Real Estate Webmasters and Inbound Real Estate Marketing. When most of the real estate marketing companies mention SEO, they are using a buzz word related to setting up a website correctly. Not proving an ongoing service. Offering regurgitated content is NOT SEO.
Real Estate SEO provides long-term value
SEO focuses on providing high-quality content. A comprehensive Real Estate SEO campaign will provide valuable information neighborhood to neighborhood. These neighborhoods are not targeted by Zillow and Trulia who tend focus on generalities like “Beverly hills real estate” as opposed to “Holmby hills” real estate which is a neighborhood in Beverly hills. It takes awhile to rank but once you do it takes just as long for another real estate company to “catch up.” The result is a website that both maintains traffic for years AND collects far more “clicks” than those applying direct advertising to drive traffic. If you own the website and you own a percentage of traffic for at least a few years that website now has a literal dollar value equal to the amount of traffic it generates.
To illustrate what I mean look at the traffic value of one of Los Angeles top luxury real estate brokerages. If you track organic web lead conversion matched with the direct advertising traffic value you now have a substantial dollar amount that you can ask for should you sell the website. This example would be 1-2 million dollars. The fact that you can recover the money you spent on marketing both during a company sales process and in establishing equity if you’re looking for business expansion financing makes SEO the ONLY actual investment you can make when considering your real estate marketing spend.
Real Estate SEO | What is it? | Why you need it and why I can teach it to you. (Video)
Real Estate SEO in THREE STEPS.
STEP ONE – KEYWORD RESEARCH
Real Estate Keywords – Definition. I have created an in DEPTH video that walks you through step by step how to target real estate keywords. Here are some of the categories and topics covered in this real estate keyword research tutorial.
- Identifying a parent topic or keyword
- Using keyword research tools (ahrefs)
- Keyword difficulty
- Understanding how competitive a keyword is
Real Estate SEO – STEP TWO – CONTENT CREATION
Now that you know what topic you need to be writing about your ready to create content. This tutorial is designed for WordPress Real Estate websites. Content is defined as a page or post that you create on Wordpress. Whether it’s a page or a post your content will do best if it contains the following:
- 900-1800 words
- 2-4 images
- One youtube video
- One outbound link to a reputable website for every 2-3oo words.
If you’re having trouble following along, I suggest you read the MOZ beginners guide to SEO. This guide is real estate specific so once you understand terminology come back to this post and follow along with the detailed video tutorials. My next video on content creation. It’s one hour long. I created this tutorial assuming that you have a WordPress real estate website or blog. You can then install a vital tool that makes learning how to create good SEO friendly content much easier. The Yoast SEO plug in.
Real Estate SEO – STEP THREE – Creating signals to get your content ranked.
The last element of real estate SEO is sending “signals” to content that you have created. I am defining signals as backlinks. This next video focuses on three types of backlinks that any real estate professional can build and in most cases will be enough by themselves to get your content ranked on the first page of Google. Once again I am teaching the segment via video tutorial. This one is about 27 minutes long.
Real Estate SEO | Summary
This is a basic tutorial. If you have additional questions, drop them in the comments below, and I will do my best to send you to a qualified resource. If any of you follow this tutorial and get onto the first page of Google, please leave a screenshot of the Google search result in the comments. I will happily provide 1-2 hours of my time for free to anyone enhancing the value of this blog post to other InboundREM visitors.
SEO is ALWAYS changing. I don’t always have the time to create an entire blog post dedicated to those changes. If you would like to be enrolled in my subscribers list I do keep my dedicated readers updated more frequently than my website.
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11 Comments
This is awesome information, Robert! I’ve started implementing these strategies with my new website. Thanks for sharing your wisdom! I hope to report back with some excellent results!
Jonathan,
My pleasure. Spread the good word if you know anyone else looking to learn real estate SEO.
Hi Robert,
The part of creating “signals” to content that you have created was especially great, as backlinks is part of the network that can connect everything to where information can be readily obtained.
Ryan, I am extremely gratified that you were able to follow along with the SEO tutorial. If there is some way I can improve message me!
I’m kinda doubtful that real estate SEO is any less competitive than advertising – it’s just harder. You can’t just throw money at Google and push your site to their front page the way you do with their advertising. I think it’s safe to say that every site that you see buying advertising is also attempting to do SEO for their sites as well, but most of them fail so it ends up looking “less competitive”.
I love it! Another voice heard from. I respect your thoughts(which is why I published the comment) but as a guy that does nothing but look at U.S. based real estate websites I promise you in this particular niche very few brokers or realtors are attempting SEO. They are sold packages that include “seo” for sure but that is rarely anything more than a hand full of poorly optimized website pages with no backlinks. So in essence “no seo”.
Robert,
I just wanted to thank you for publishing all of this invaluable content completely free of charge for us realtors to soak up and use to expand our business.
I’m a newly licensed realtor and my goal is to lead generate strictly by using the internet, more specifically by ranking organically for longtail keywords.
Unfortunately, I’ve just come across your series now after I’ve been creating content and building out my website for the last 4-months, however, I can say I’ve had success with real estate SEO as a whole –
My domain is just approaching 4-months old, and I’ve managed to rank for about 20 different longtail keywords on the first page of Google thus far, with another 200 or so lingering between ranks 11-100+ awaiting their time to shine 😛 I’ve done nothing in terms of link building yet, and my knowledge of SEO is intermediate at best. My best month now I’ve managed to achieve roughly 200 organic search clicks, and of which I gathered 3 “leads”.
SEO can be such a powerful tool for lead generation now and I believe all real estate professionals should be at least considering it.
Thanks again for the wonderful and thorough videos!
Stephan,
You are definitely on the road to Real Estate SEO success. The results you have gotten are super fast. As I mentioned on the call we did having a broker that is using SEO with such tremendous effectiveness is a rare thing. Learn as much as you can apply as much as you can. I have no doubt when next we speak you will be on the road to achieving the same or better results than your broker is getting and obviously those are pretty fantastic.
Stephan,
Man, it was excellent talking to you. The fact you have a broker who is successful using extremely basic SEO tactics is amazing. Very few people have that example. It was great speaking to you and I really appreciate the fact you took the time to write a review.
Seo is the best and organic way to get the traffic on your website and turn it into sales.
Agreed!