One of the reasons that an SEO expert should know more about real estate optimization and marketing is that almost every real estate agent has a website. In the same way that realtors have business cards with their picture on them, they have an online presence for people who may want to look at several home choices and schedule a walkthrough. Like many SEO customers, Real Estate agents need a quick education on what to expect in the optimization process. Some of the top realtors in any town will also pick up on the fact that one or two commissions can pay for a fair amount of website optimization, and a well optimized site can generate plenty of leads from buyers and sellers.
As a group, realtors can also use guidance on the need for certain SEO changes to their sites, since they may have already bought a pre-packaged site. There are only a few website design companies out there who specialize in MLS (Multiple Listing Search, a dynamic feature showing all available homes in an area) functionality, so as a rule, realtor websites can all look very similar. This similarity often extends to the content on the site itself, and in some cases the only original content on a real estate website will be the realtor’s name, address, phone number, and the neighborhoods served by the agent.
Anyone who’s read Dale Carnegie will know that the fastest way to gaining shared understanding with people is to explain things in terms that they can understand. People in SEO tend to drop a lot of jargon about keyword density, H tags, anchor strength, and site trust, all of which are concepts that could take several hours of training to truly grasp. This is would be similar to an agent talking about comps, escrow, and title searches before asking customers about what they’d like in a home. Relating the world of SEO to the world of real estate can make it easier to move ahead with vital site changes, and make your client, who is in this case a realtor, a partner in your success.
How do you relate SEO concepts to realtors? If you think about it, SEO isn’t all that different from real estate. Agents in commercial and residential real estate sell the location and the structure on top of it. In this case, the location is the domain name, and the structure is the website. The further you go toward the top of the search engine results, the more valuable the real estate. Likewise, a well built site at the top of the SERPs is akin to a luxury home in Beverly Hills. Naturally, real world locations are a bit more permanent, but SEO companies have an opportunity to show agents that the best spots are worth the money.
Using real estate concepts in SEO doesn’t stop with the website. Links to the site, and their quality, can be explained in these terms as well. In the SEO world, we talk about linking to “bad neigborhoods.” Likewise, an endorsement from a gated community (like a .gov site link) is worth more than 200 from the studio apartment complex downtown (like directories that give links to anyone, including casinos and adult sites.) The importance of page title writing can be likened to summarizing a home’s best features first. It isn’t that much of a stretch to say that your page title should be crafted in the same way that you’d place a classified ad for a home. If you really want to belabor the metaphor, you could even say that things like content, internal linking, and alt tags are analogous to zoning or HOA regulations. If you’re clear on how SEO elements relate to each other, the astute agent should get the impression that (just like the sales process) an incomplete SEO job isn’t going to end up generating commissions.
Uniqueness is another site aspect that can be related to realtors, but some caution should be advised. In the same way that many homebuyers are satisfied with “vanilla” homes in developments with only 3 choices of exterior paint color, real estate agents may want to have a site with the exact same features of any other website. From an SEO standpoint, however, there should be at least one unique feature that is going to keep people coming back to the site. This may be an MLS search that doesn’t ask for a signup, a mortgage/ payment calculator, or a virtual tour of the neighborhood. Most sites talk about schools and community centered-events, but a realtor who gets more in-depth and interactive may get multiple visits from shoppers who are seeking to eventually make a buy. An interesting feature like up-to-date pricing or recent sales figures may get realtors links from media outlets, blogs, and even other agents.
The value proposition of real estate SEO cannot be underestimated, and some of today’s most successful agents already know this. Even though there are more realty websites on the internet than almost any other small business model, the vast majority of these sites contain minimal SEO value, either because of unoriginal content, poor keyword selection, no link popularity, bad design elements (like frames), or Flash elements that can’t be crawled. For this reason, there playing field for many online real estate markets is surprisingly level, and a moderate amount of search engine friendly redesign plus link building can create a definite impact.
Relating SEO to client business models can be helpful for a variety of reasons. Working in a client’s own vernacular gives you an ability to relate to the client, and you will save time if you can turn SEO concepts into relevant ideas in the customer’s mind. Obviously, you don’t want to oversimplify things too much, but there is a clear advantage for bringing search engine concepts into the mindset of your clients. Even highly competitive salespeople have a network of colleagues and competitors with whom they share information, and one comfortable SEO client in real estate can literally create dozens of leads from people in the same geographical area. Since many agents prefer to stick to certain neighborhoods or homes within driving distance of their offices, a good SEO company can work with several local agents without excessive overlapping. Some real estate brokers may even want all of their agents to follow a solid SEO strategy, since this will mean that the agency itself will have more visibility in the search engines, even though it is spread among several different sites. In all of these cases, an agent who can relate to SEO concepts is going to be more comfortable with the type of changes necessary for success, and the cost of generating quality real estate client leads.
