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Why Your Real Estate Business May Fail without SEO. Part 1

By RealtyTech Inc.

Real Estate Technology with Real Estate Technology and Marketing

January 10, 2011 03:54 AM

That's a scary title: your RE business may fail without SEO...

Unfortunately, it's becoming more and more true: unless you've been in the real estate profession for many years and have a ton of word-of-mouth referrals at your beck and call, your real estate business may very well sink today unless you go online and use search engine optimization (which, for the purposes of this post, includes social media marketing).

Why? Because real estate is extremely competitive (but you knew that) and that competition is going online (which you also know).

In addition, if you're not optimizing your website and using all that social media marketing can bring you, your competitors are!

Don't get left behind. If you're a Realtor in a large market such as Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Dallas, Atlanta, etc., understand that hundreds, perhaps thousands of other real estate professionals are all vying for the people who go online and search for "homes for sale Los Angeles" or "Dallas homes for sale" or any other keyword relevant to your selling area.

You need a website, one that appears near the top of the first pages of results for the keywords with which your potential clients are searching. Homebuyers tend to click on real estate sites they find on the first page of Google (or Yahoo!, etc.) and rarely make it to the second or third pages of results. You need to be first: good optimization of your site will get you there.

Let's talk about that website for a moment. When you optimize your site, you do so within the confines of its content -- the text, videos and audio clips that give your visitors the information they seek. In addition, relevant and well-written content (optimized for the search engines) helps tell the search engine crawlers what your site is "about" and whether it's worthy of being indexed (ranked).

Yet while your content may help your site rank high, unless it's well-written, offering your visitors information of value, you probably won't get people to "convert" -- SEO-speak that means your visitors do something: they fill out a form to get more information about a property; they e-mail you to ask about a property they see on your site; and so on. Even just filling out a form for a free area market report is a positive sign: this visitor is one step closer to becoming a client.

Well-written, typo-free content that provides value to your visitors is crucial. Good SEO will fail without it and your site will fail without good SEO -- they are that entwined.

Next post: We'll discuss some other reasons why your real estate business might fail without good SEO. Interested in learning more about how a well-optimized site for your RE business can help you succeed? Contact RealtyTech.com today!