If you’re a real estate agent you will likely have heard the term SEO mentioned at least a few times in regards to your business but do you really understand what it means, how it can help you find new clients and where to start?
I imagine you already have a website, whether that be your own personal site or a sub section of a larger company site. Either way, that site is just sitting there, out on the internet waiting to be found. Initially, the only way people find your site is by you sending people directly to it – that could be via a link on your business card, an email signature or a link from a YouTube video you might have posted.
This is all well and good but what you really need to do is get your new site in front of all the new buyers and sellers who are searching Google for a realtor. Some examples of the search phrases these people are searching for are:
- Real Estate
- Find a realtor
- Homes for sale
- How much is my home worth?
These 4 are examples of generic search terms people might enter into Google. Next you have local focused search terms where there is some connection to the local market, examples are:
- Vancouver Real Estate
- Find Vancouver Realtor
- Vancouver Homes For Sale
- How much is my Vancouver home worth?
Searches can get even more targeted, examples being:
- Buying home in Maple Ridge
- Find Maple Ridge realtor to buy home
- Burnaby listings over $1,000,000
- How much is my Port Moody home worth?
One last example of even more specific search phrases potential clients may enter:
- Listings 4 km from Gilmore Skytrain
- Find best realtor for Gibsons Vacation Home
- New Burnaby Listings
- How to sell my Burnaby house for more
The point of all that was to show you how there are a multitude of search phrases potential clients are searching for daily. You could be on that list of results.
How do I get my site to show up in Google for a particular search term?
Well, for each of those search terms there are a list of websites that show up on Google, the list of sites shown is different for each term entered. The sites listed in the results are ordered based on their relevance to the search term entered. A search for “Port Moody realtor” isn’t going to show results for Chicago Illinois realtors as Google carefully sifts through the entire web, analyzing sites, to determine those most suited to the search terms entered. These results fluctuate from day to day.
The process of improving your site’s rankings in the search engine results (SERPS) is known as SEO which stands for Search Engine Optimization. As a busy real estate agent you don’t want to add the additional burden of doing all this work yourself, instead you should utilize the services of a good SEO agency.
Individual pages of a site can be crafted to suit a particular topic – you may have a page for Burnaby new condo listings, when found by Google this page could be a candidate site to show up for any search terms related to Burnaby listings. E.g. Burnaby condos, Burnaby realtor, Burnaby condo listings.
There are two key aspects to SEO – On-page SEO and Off-page SEO.
On Page SEO
Above I said your page ‘could be a candidate’ for a particular search term – Google has an “algorithm” which looks at the structure of the page to see how relevant it is to a particular topic, the process of improving a page’s content to help get pages listed in Google (and other search engines such as Bing) is called “On-page SEO”.
Some of the methods to improve pages include:
- Proper URL format (using keywords rather than category or page numbers)
- User Friendly page navigation
- Fast loading pages
- Mobile friendly pages
- Text formatting
- Fresh, top quality, relevant content
Off Page SEO
Google also looks at the relevance a site and its individual pages get from other sites on the web – a new page about Burnaby listings may fit perfectly for that topic but it needs other sites of influence to be mentioning that site – think of it as a reputation based weighting system. Heavy hitter sites like Youtube, Facebook, Houzz and local influence sites like The Globe and Mail, Vancouver Sun etc. all share some of their “strength” with sites they connect to – there is a whole art & science of building up the reputation of your site by interacting with these other sites and that is known as “Off-page SEO”. Some examples of off-page SEO techniques are:
- Link Building
- Social Media Marketing
- Social Bookmarking
As a busy real estate agent you don’t want to add the additional burden of doing all this work yourself, instead you should utilize the services of a good SEO agency.
What to expect from an SEO agency
When working with an SEO agency, they will initially analyze your site to see where it currently sits. This analysis will cover both the on-page and off-page aspects of your site.
They will analyze the site to see if there are any issues with the site structure and performance:
- How well does it perform and function on a mobile device (every day the number of searches coming from mobile devices is increasing so you need to have a site that runs well on mobile).
- How fast does the page load (large camera photos will slow down the load times of your site and Google favours fast loading sites over slow loading sites)
- Are there any errors
- Highlight any missing information which can guide the search engines toward the intended topic of any page
They will determine where the site currently sits in Google for typical search terms related to you and your locale. A typical report would list a handful of those typical search terms along with the position in Google results where your pages reside. The higher the position, the better.
The number of people searching past the 1st page of Google results is far lower than those that look at the 1st page. The number of visitors to Google search results drops off dramatically page after page. Your goal is to be on the first page of Google, and the higher up the page the better, to have the best chance of securing new leads.
Lastly, they will review where your competitors sit for those same keywords and give you an indication of how easy or hard it will be to bring your site up along side or ahead of them.
Remember, if you’re competitors are on page 1 of Google for your neighborhood and you are on page 2, or worse, they will get a significantly higher share of the traffic than you (which translates to potentially lost leads).
SEO isn’t an overnight magic pill
SEO services can not magically make your pages jump up in the results over night, this is an ongoing activity, in fact, making a lot of changes suddenly can be detrimental and even drop your site in the search results. Expect your involvement with an SEO agency to take 6-9 months to see real progress, beyond that you can ramp down the use of an SEO agency to more of a maintenance model.
What to expect from your SEO agency engagement
During the period of your SEO agency involvement you will expect to receive regular reports tracking the progress of your pages for particular search terms. This may become information overload as results fluctuate daily, much like a stock price. Ideally your SEO agency will provide a summary report biweekly or monthly which smooths out some of these fluctuations and gives you a clearer picture as to how your site is moving up or down the search engine results (SERPS).
They will also provide recommendations on fixes to make to your website to address any on-page issues. You can hand these over to your web designer or give access to your SEO agency for them to address the issues for you.
Conclusion
So to conclude, SEO is a very useful addition to your arsenal of client prospecting tools. With the increase in mobile phone usage, more people are searching for real estate agents and property information online. The question is do you want to find you or your competitor’s sites?
Nigel is a local Vancouver based SEO consultant – you can contact him at nigel@nigelrankin.com or info@vancouverseoexperts.org for more information on SEO services.
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