Many studies have shown that the number of customers researching online before buying or renting a house has increased dramatically. The information on the internet is made available to the customers through search engines and the users seldom go past the first page of the search results. So it is very important to make your websites optimized for search engines. For your real estate online marketing strategies to work efficiently, you need to get your SEO techniques right.
Keywords
Content is king and will always remain so. But the content is effective only when people find your website through searches on the internet. So for the content to be effective in that sense, you need to ensure that it is developed, targeting the proper keywords. Keyword research is one of the most over looked aspects of SEO and targeting the right combination of terms is one of the most crucial aspects to an effective real estate online marketing strategy.
Developing an efficient long-tail keyword policy for your website after a comprehensive keyword research, will definitely bring in more leads. If you are a small brokerage firm or a real estate website, you cannot compete against the top five or ten firms in your field. So if you concentrate on the long tail keywords that are well known locally but with a lower competition, you are bound to generate more traffic. If you are a real estate agent with focus on both the seller and the buyer, you should have separate pages for both, with proper keywords for each of them.
Content
You should blog often and keep the content correct, current, local and fresh. If you are a property developer, your website should not only showcase your property and its relevant information, but should also have quality content about the industry in general, in the form of frequent blogs. Such steady content creation will help the search engines to crawl and index your site more. Also the content of your website should be unique and should make the customer reading it think that it is creating value for him. Only then you stand a better chance of converting that website visit to your office/site visit. Small things like a well formed website URL and proper titles for your pages go a long way in making your website visible.
You should also ensure that you adhere to the rules and ethics of your local real estate regulators or bodies when you adopt these real estate online marketing strategies.
Sub-domains and directories
You should know how the search engines treat sub-domains and directories. While directories are considered to be part of the main site, sub-domains are treated as separate sites. So any SEO activity that you do on a sub-domain will not automatically cascade to the main site thus splitting all your SEO efforts. Some common sub-domains are “blog.newprojectname.com” or “search.realtorname.com”.
There are other SEO techniques like IDX integration, link building and creating other distribution mediums that should contribute to your overall SEO efforts.
As part of the real estate industry, you should approach SEO and other real estate online marketing strategies as long-term multi-year programs. Only then can you leverage all its benefits to bring in quality leads to your doorsteps consistently even when you are not making an effort for it.
