Real Estate SEO
A Real Estate Website Can’t Compete without SEO
Real estate SEO (search engine optimization), though not exactly a household term, is essential to a successful real estate website in today’s climate.
In the Wild West days of the internet, real estate agents only needed to build a website to stake their claim to internet real estate sales, and SEO wasn’t a factor. Now, however, every real estate agent has a website. At the same time, more and more real estate buyers are using the web to find, research and buy properties than ever before. To stand out from the pack, a good real estate website needs SEO. SEO for a real estate website is like advertising for a real estate open house - a real estate agent can’t reach his or her buyers without it.
Buying Internet Ads Isn’t Real Estate SEO
Astute real estate agents know that real estate SEO is different from - and more important than - paid internet advertising. If you were to draw an analogy, paid internet advertising is like placing ads in the lifestyle section of the newspaper. People sometimes look at the ads, but they know you’re trying to sell something, so they often ignore the ads entirely. In a Google search, paid internet ads appear on the right side of the screen, jumbled in with other ads and separated from the information that the reader is searching through.
On the other hand, real estate SEO puts your website in the search results for Google, Yahoo, MSN and other search engines. Real estate SEO is more like an ad in the Yellow Pages than a generic lifestyle ad. Good real estate SEO doesn’t give you a peripheral ad; it puts you right in the heart of the information your readers are seeking - and it matches you up with the people who are looking specifically for your services.
Best of all, good real estate SEO doesn’t just get you listed under “Austin real estate” or “Vail real estate” - it also gets your site to show up every time someone searches for the address or MLS number of an active listing in your region.
Think that might bring in some good real estate sales leads?
Our Real Estate SEO Solution
Our website uses Realzi - which we believe is the best and most reasonably-priced real estate SEO solution on the market. Realzi updates our site constantly with MLS information so our listings are just as current as the master real estate database for Austin. At the same time, Realzi is designed specifically for real estate SEO, and that means that HomeToAustin consistently ranks highly when you do a real estate SEO comparison. Try it! Just pick a real estate property’s address or MLS number and Google it, and see how our real estate SEO stands up.
The Essential Real Estate SEO Question
One of the guys at Realzi explained it to me perfectly yesterday. I complained that I was having trouble getting my broker friend to understand the value in real estate SEO. He said, “Do they want their website to be an expense or a moneymaker?”
That’s the essential real estate SEO question. If you don’t care about your web presence, then real estate SEO isn’t for you.
But if you’re an agent, broker or realtor who knows how to close deals and is interested in getting a steady stream of fresh leads from your own website, you should give real estate SEO a hard look.
