The internet has made a huge impact on the way people search find a home. What was once a process that started by finding a real estate agent in the yellow pages or taking a Sunday drive through new developments has turned into an online search for a realtor or MLS service, which usually starts on Google. While being on the first page when someone searches "real estate + your city" is great, we believe there is much more that can go into an online real estate marketing campaign.
The first step to getting exposure online for your real estate business is having a real estate web site. While there are literally thousands of companies that offer real estate sites for a low monthly fee, most of these are designed to be super cheap, and the majority of them are structured in a way that will never work well for SEO. An ideal real estate website will have the following qualities:
By providing all of the preceding, you make it so someone who's investigating a community won't have to leave your site to find related information to their search for a new home.
Once you have the perfect real estate web site you need to bring in the visitors. Organic search engine optimization is the most cost effective long term solution for bringing in a steady flow of qualified visitors. With real estate, there are five main groups of keywords that get the highest search volume along with a city name:
One other great focus for a proper real estate campaign is making sure you're MLS listings are optimized for Zip Code searches, and for exact address searches. While these won't bring in enough visitors to crash your server, they are typically not too competitive and are easy to target with the proper coding implemented into your MLS software.