Do You Need A Real Estate SEO Expert?
If you are planning to use your website to generate leads and find motivated sellers, finding a real estate SEO expert can help you build a solid SEO strategy. You want to find an expert in real estate search engine optimization who understands your goals and exactly which keywords will be most profitable for your business.
SEO for Real Estate Investors
Does your business market to motivated sellers, cash buyers, rent to own tenants, or note buyers? Regardless of your niche, if your real estate investing involves an online presence your website will require SEO for real estate investors. Hiring a real estate SEO expert might be the best way to get it done.
Depending on your website, this might be as simple as updating your current content with well-researched keywords, or as complicated as revamping your entire website. It all depends on your goals and current site conditions.
In 1981, 22% of home buyers read newspaper ads to find a home, and 8% used friends as an information source. In 2016, 44% looked for properties online first.
– National Association of Realtors Research Department (2017)
Search engines account for most organic traffic to websites, according to Conductor Spotlight (see pie chart, below). As of 2014, it accounted for nearly half of all traffic leading to web pages.
If search engines cannot find your real estate investing website, you miss out on countless real estate investment opportunities. SEO makes your site visible to search engines.
9 Benefits of Working with a Real Estate SEO Expert
The cost of investing in SEO for real estate investors, including hiring an SEO expert, has many advantages can beat that of buying paid traffic. Take a look at the benefits that an SEO expert can bring to your investment business.
1. SEO: An Asset that Belongs to You and Your Business
You can get traffic to your website through paid advertising, like pay-per-click (PPC). It will get you results as long as you keep feeding it money. When you stop feeding it money, you will stop getting traffic.
On the other hand, when you invest in SEO, you invest permanently in an asset that belongs to you: your website. Would you rather sink $5,000 into your own asset? Or would you prefer to spend $5,000 on advertising that lasts for a short period and then vanishes?
If you skip a month of pay-per-click advertising, you get no traffic from it. If you skip a month of SEO management, you still get organic traffic. When you finish working with a real estate SEO expert, you still have a healthy, attractive website that brings in organic traffic.
2. SEO Gets You on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP)
Today’s largest audience for your real estate investment ventures browses the internet. Eighty-eight percent of people looking to buy a home, for example, listed websites as the most useful information source, according to the National Association of Realtors.
People use search engines, more than any other tool, to do this browsing. Search engines use search engine results pages (SERPs) to display their results. You have to get on the results of the first page of the SERP for internet users to find you (see the histogram, below). That’s how you rank number one on a SERP, and ranking number one on a SERP gets you organic traffic.
3. SEO for Real Estate Investors: Always Ready; Always Available
When you invest in SEO, it’s always ready and available on your website. You know how real estate investment opportunities suddenly pop up and need action immediately. SEO’s always ready.
Often willing property vendors appear when an unexpected circumstance requires them to liquidate an asset, and you need your marketing strategy ready to address their issues when that circumstance occurs. SEO works 24/7, all year, all the time (see image).
4. SEO Builds Your Brand While it Builds Your Traffic
Your long-term branding means as much as today’s transaction. SEO will get your brand in front of viewers constantly. Pay-per-click marketing campaigns only get you views while you’re paying, says 1stOnTheList.
5. SEO Research Teaches About Your Own Business
As your real estate SEO expert spends time on developing and implementing SEO for real estate investors on your website, you will learn about your market and your competition. Effective SEO strategies utilize analytics to continually improve SEO for individual web pages and websites.
That same information will provide you with invaluable insight not only about your website but about your business and your competition. That analytical information combines with A/B testing make a deadly tool for beating your competition.
6. SEO for Real Estate Investing: More Qualified Traffic and Conversions
With best practice SEO for real estate investing, you will find that your website attracts more qualified customers. Better SEO will attract visitors already interested in your niche, and those visitors will be more eager to do business.
Poor SEO might get you many visitors, but if they seek something that you don’t offer, you’ll end up with low conversion rates and high bounce rates. A page’s bounce rate, which measures how many visits resulted in people leaving without clicking on anything, can knock your page down on the SERP.
By using long-tailed keywords, you can focus on the traffic that’s best qualified for your real estate investing interests. Hubspot defines long-tailed keywords:
A long-tail keyword is a keyword phrase that contains at least three words (though some say two or more is considered long-tail)… Long-tail keywords are used to target niche demographics rather than mass audiences. In other words, they’re more specific and often less competitive than generic keyword terms. Because of that, they provide both short-term and long-term benefits.
For example, the entire U.S. population searches for the phrase, “vacant lot,” around 12,000 times a year. If you use it, though, you’ll be competing with every major licensed real estate agent and their budgets. However, if you use the long-tailed keyword, “vacant lot Bryn Mount Washington Pittsburgh,” you would expect much less volume and competition, but you would probably have the only website in the world ranking for that phrase on the search engines.
7. Keyword Research will Teach You About Your Market
Just as SEO analytics will teach you about your business’ online funnel, keyword research will tell you about your market. For example, if you have been using the keyword phrase, “vacant lot for sale” for your online real estate investment strategy within Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, you’ll see (bar chart, below) that it gets about 667 searches per month, on average.
Meanwhile, all of the following keyword phrases get more traffic from within Pittsburgh, varying from over 255 – 134,444 searches, on average, per month:
- land for sale
- acreage for sale
- lots for sale
- house and lot for sale
- cheap land for sale
- land for sale by owner
- vacant land for sale
- rural land for sale
- farmland for sale
- hunting land for sale
- property with land for sale
- government land for sale
- hunting property for sale
- vacant land
- mountain land for sale
- acreage for sale by owner
- lots for sale by owner
- empty lots for sale
This tells you that not many people in Pittsburgh are looking for a “vacant lot for sale,” but, rather, “acreage for sale,” “lots for sale,” a “house and lot for sale,” or “cheap land for sale.” Perhaps they really are interested in a “vacant lot for sale,” but that’s not what they express in their searches, and you need to know that to help you communicate with your market.
8. SEO for Real Estate Investing Can Target Specific Demographics
Does your investment strategy target specific property models? Locations? Neighborhoods? Or Property price ranges? If so, you can take advantage of your niche in your SEO strategy.
Just as using long-tailed keywords will effectively reduce your online competition, it can improve the qualification of your average visitors. A visitor searching for “buy an apartment building between Pittsburgh and Cleveland,” certainly has a buy vision that’s stronger than the average customer searching for “Pennsylvania apartments.
“Long-tail keywords are longer and more specific keyword phrases that visitors are more likely to use when they’re closer to a point-of-purchase,” says Wordstream.
9. A Real Estate SEO Expert Can Move Your Social Media Marketing
Creating and managing new social media accounts can also add an important dimension to your SEO strategy as a real estate investor. In 2016, according to Social Media Marketer, 81% of surveyed marketers integrated social media and traditional marketing to make websites more readily discovered. Using social media will also help your website get more backlinks (other sites linking to your website) from authoritative sources. This helps page rank.