Real Estate SEO

Posts Tagged ‘strategy’

I was speaking with a potential client about SEO just the other day. They’re in real estate and they offer residential real estate sales and rentals. They also offer investment sales and commercial leasing. Needless to say, there are a lot of stake holders to satisfy and lots of terms that could bring them leads.

The client also happens to own several real estate websites. They have a main website, an apartments website, one for commercial leasing, lofts, etc. This is a strategy that we’ve seen several real estate firms use. They opt to own several real estate sites rather than just one. It’s not a bad strategy, so long as you have the budget to build, maintain, and market each.

This particular real estate firm told us that they didn’t have the budget to spend on optimizing each of the firm’s sites. They want to invest a small real estate SEO budget into their main website. Now, the main site offers residential sales and commercial leasing searches, information, etc. The apartment leasing division has it’s own website.

When discussing a list of terms to focus on, the client was adamant that they needed to include “apartment” terms in their list. We advised against this. We told them that the SEO campaign would be hampered for several reasons:

1. The site doesn’t currently have any content related to apartments, apartment leasing, the apartment market, or anything else apartment related. So, we informed them that we’d be starting from a virtual SEO stand-still and that ranking for the apartment-related terms would take much longer than some of the other terms they were interested in.
2. The site doesn’t currently include an apartment search or even a tenant inquiry form. There’s no way to know when a rental lead is created or a rental goal (using the Google analytics notion of a goal) is reached. So, we’d probably want to ad a search form to the site. This is not an SEO task, so we told them that they should increase their budget to account for this expense.
3. Lastly, the if you’ve chosen a strategy where one of your sites includes LOTS of content for a set of users and the site has been designed to appeal to those users, then it makes much more sense to SEO that site for applicable terms. I’d liken this SEO strategy to the good old adage that talks about square pegs and round holes.

This all boils down to planning ahead. You can’t just pick a list of terms and start working. You need to think about your long term Real Estate SEO prospects. Choose terms that are achievable, who your site was built for, and those that the users who arrive will respond to. Make sure that your site has tools and content that are intended for that group of users who might search for those terms.

Not doing so will mean that you work harder or spend more money for less results. Real Estate brokers and agents can’t afford (really no one can these days) to be inefficient and wasteful. Listen to your SEO professionals. They probably do have your best interest at heart and they’re going to steer you towards best practices.

Thanks for reading.