How to leverage SEO, drive organic traffic and outperform your competition | Private Equity Weekly

it is Marketing and Branding Month Here in Inman. As we enter the competitive spring selling season, let’s take a look at some of the proven strategies and cutting-edge innovations that are closing deals in today’s market.We will also recognize industry marketing and brand leaders through Inman Marketing All-Star Award.

In the highly competitive world of real estate, staying ahead of the curve is crucial. While some competitors may generate more organic traffic, it’s important to remember that quantity sometimes translates to quality.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the secret sauce that helps real estate businesses outshine their competitors and attract high-quality organic traffic. Strategic SEO efforts, including keyword research and implementation and utilizing Google Search Console, can play an important role in outperforming your competitors.

Keyword Research: The Basics of SEO

Keyword research is the cornerstone of any successful SEO strategy. It is crucial to understand what potential clients are looking for in the real estate industry. It involves identifying relevant keywords and phrases that potential buyers, sellers or tenants use when looking for a property.

As a newer website, it may be difficult to rank for the highest-volume real estate-related queries in your market because national portals like Zillow and Homes.com have such a high presence for these queries.

Instead, the first step should be to analyze the niche of successful real estate agents in your market to understand which keywords or search queries drive traffic to their websites.

Here’s what you should look for:

• competitor analysis: Analyze the keywords your competitors rank for. Tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs can provide insight into their strategies and help you identify gaps in your own keyword positioning.
• Local keywords: Real estate is local by nature, so focus on keywords specific to your location. Include community names, landmarks, and other relevant geographic terms.
• Long tail keywords: While highly competitive keywords may drive traffic, long-tail keywords generally convert better.For example, instead of targeting “Houses for Sale,” consider optimizing for “Victorian Houses for Sale in (your city)” and create some relevant victorian era residence. You will then start to see organic traffic from potential home buyers interested in purchasing a Victorian home.

Implement keywords to increase organic traffic

Once you have conducted thorough keyword research, you can put those keywords to work and optimize your real estate niche.

That’s it:

• On-page optimization: Integrate keywords naturally into your site’s content, including attribution descriptions, blog posts, and meta tags. Avoid keyword stuffing as it can hurt your rankings.
• Premium content: Create valuable, informative and engaging content. Regularly updating your blog with articles about local real estate trends, market insights, and community guides can help attract and retain organic traffic.
• Mobile optimization: Make sure your site is mobile-friendly as Google prefers mobile-responsive sites in search results.
• User experience (UX): A seamless user experience with fast-loading pages and intuitive navigation can lead to higher user satisfaction and better rankings.

The value of organic traffic

While paid advertising can bring quick results, organic traffic has its own unique advantages:

• Value for money: Unlike paid advertising, organic traffic requires no ongoing costs. Once you achieve a high ranking, you can continue to attract visitors without additional ad spend.
• Credibility and trust: Users view organic search results as more trustworthy. A high ranking means your website is a trusted source of information for the real estate industry.
• Sustainable growth: SEO efforts tend to build over time. As your domain authority and ranking increase, your ability to attract more organic traffic increases.

Google Search Console: A valuable SEO tool

Google Search Console is a powerful tool that provides insights into how your site performs in Google search results. It provides various features for optimizing website SEO:

• Performance report: Monitor how often your site appears in search results, click-through rates, and the keywords that drive traffic. Use this data to refine your SEO strategy.
• Index coverage: Identify and fix any indexing issues that may affect your site’s visibility on Google.
• Sitemap: Submit an XML sitemap to help Google crawl and index your site efficiently.
• Action Availability: Check for action usability issues, as action friendliness is critical to SEO success.

Keyword Research Example: Debra Dobbs (one of Chicago’s top agents for the past 15+ years)

Competitor traffic:

• How We Get Traffic from Competitors’ Websites: Debra Dobbs: Keyword research shows estimates of where organic clicks are coming from.
• Debra Dobbs has gotten a lot of keyword positions related to zip codes, so I created a Blog about postal codes Start getting some of her domain traffic.

Blog post on January 11, 2024: The share of impressions for search queries containing “zip area code” increased by more than 574% in less than four weeks, with the average keyword position for “zip area code” rising three spots, from 60 to 24, and achieving 7 natural clicks.

Note: During the previous 28-day period (at the time of this writing), the Openhausrealty domain had received over 1,000 organic clicks, none of which contained the keyword “zip code.”

In the highly competitive world of real estate, SEO is key to outperforming competitors who may generate more organic traffic. Keyword research, strategy implementation, and utilizing tools like Google Search Console can help you build a sustainable and successful online presence.

Remember, in the world of SEO, quality and relevancy often trump sheer quantity. By optimizing your real estate domain name for the right keywords, you can attract high-quality organic traffic, which will lead to greater success in the long run.

David Marden is a third generation real estate professional with over 20 years of experience and has mentored some of Chicago’s top real estate professionals.Contact Marden Instagram and LinkedIn.