If you’re confused about real estate social media marketing strategies and if they work with SEO in today’s market… If you wonder whether it’s too late to capitalize on Google My Business, citations, and other social indicators, it’s not—but only if you know which platform to focus on.
And if you want to understand what social can and can’t do to impact SEO and traffic, but you need a comprehensive approach and a better understanding, this social media post is for someone just like you.
We talk about SEO. We also know SEO can be overwhelming and confusing.
(Learn all about optimizing your real estate website for search engines)
Watch the full version of this training below “Real Estate Social Media Marketing and SEO“
With just a little bit of work, the right real estate website builder, and a decent chunk of time (the biggest ranking factor is time), any investor can get their website to page 1 of high-value search phrases, drive consistent traffic, and generate consistent leads.
That’s something we help investors and agents with at Carrot.
In fact, our users hold more page one rankings than any other industry website builder.
Here’s just one example from page 1 of “sell my house fast Bakersfield”…
We have a lot of content that will help you get to page 1 of Google. Here are some of our top blog posts…
- SEO Bible: The Ultimate SEO Keywords Guide For Real Estate
- SEO for Real Estate 8 Strategies You Need to Know for 2021
- Evergreen Marketing: How To Finally Get Off Of The Marketing Hamster Wheel and Convert Seller Leads 2-4x Higher
Feel free to navigate toward one of those articles if you’re brand new to SEO.
Otherwise, the question we want to answer in this article is, what’s the connection between SEO and your real estate social media marketing?
On their own, both SEO and social media are effective real estate marketing strategies… but how does one influence the other? Most importantly, how does your social media marketing strategy impact your rankings?
Let’s talk about that.
Does Your Real Estate Social Media Marketing Impact SEO?
The details of Google’s algorithim is the company’s best kept secret.
While Google often provides information about what factors it uses to rank websites, it’s impossible to look at the algorithm ourselves or, for that matter, know what Google has or hasn’t decided to tactfully exclude from its divulsions.
Either way, Google has made it quite clear that social signals — shares, likes, links, etc — do not directly boosts a website’s rankings.
That is to say, posting a piece of content on social media doesn’t count as a backlink and getting engagement (likes, shares, comments) on social media does not boost your website’s rankings.
Still, we’d be mistaken to assume that social media has no impact on SEO.
In fact, here are 3 ways that social media can help your SEO as a real estate agent or investor.
1. Website Traffic
Although Google has outright said that website traffic is not a part of their algorithm, it’d be silly to assume that website traffic has no impact on your website’s SEO.
Obviously, the more popular your website is, the easier it’s going to rank in Google.
(Not to mention that website traffic is just a small hop away from turning into leads)
Additionally, Google does take into account direct traffic (which is when someone goes straight to your website by typing in your URL) and repeat traffic (ongoing traffic from the same visitors).
Since social media is a great tool for building brand awareness, it can certainly enhance the amount of direct traffic and repeat traffic to your website, which in turn can increase rankings.
Repeat traffic can show Google how “popular” you are and their goal is to put on page 1 the best of the best. As Google “sees” you more as a brand, the more trust you have with them. That is always been key with Google, they have to trust you.
2. More Visibility
Here’s something you might not realize: even just having social media profiles give you an opportunity to rank for branded keywords.
For example, if I type “Oahu home buyers” into Google (the name of a wholesaling company here in Hawaii), their Facebook profile is the second result on the page.
This adds an additional layer to your brand and gives people another mode for interacting with your business.
3. Social Media Search Engines
When we talk about SEO, the most common platform to think of is Google.
But SEO applies to many different places — Bing, YouTube, and even social media platforms.
Think about it.
Google isn’t the only place where people in your market might search for someone to help them buy or sell a home — they might search on Facebook or Instagram, maybe they’ll even look on YouTube.
But when your target market is searching on those platforms, they can’t find your business unless you’ve taken the time to create a profile.
4. Citations
A citation is a Google ranking factor for local SEO.
fortunately, since you’re a real estate agent or investor, you operate in specific markets — so you don’t need to rank for nation-wide search terms. You just need to rank for search terms specific to your market (“Sell my home fast in Dallas” for instance).
In that case, citations matter a lot.
A citation is any online mention of your business, its name, email, address, phone number, description, and hours of operation.
Real estate investor Yelp example. Ranking 2 for Oahu Home Buyers
Google seeks out that info from different sources to see if it aligns. If it does, it assumes that your business is legit.
Citations are so impactful for SEO that we recommend building about 40 citations on different websites — we’ll talk more about how to do that below.
How To Optimize Your Social Media Profiles for SEO
Although social media isn’t a direct ranking factor inside of Google algorithm, you now understand social signals can have an impact on your website’s performance none-the-less.
And next, we’re going to give you 5 steps for optimizing your real estate social media profiles for SEO.
Here they are.
Step 1. Use The Big 4 Platforms
You might be wondering which social media platforms your business should sign up for.
Here’s what we recommend.
- YouTube
From our experience, those are the four highest-impact social media platforms for real estate agents and investors.
So go sign up!
Step 2. Align All Business Information
This is a critical part of getting local SEO rankings: make sure that your business information is aligned across all platforms.
In other words, your phone number, name, address, images, descriptions, and hours of operation should be the same on every single site where it’s listed.
Remember when we talked about citations earlier?
That’s why this is so important.
Ensuring that your business info is consistent across all platforms tells Google that your business is legit and trustworthy… making it more likely to rank for local keywords.
We have a detailed citations guide that’ll show you how to build your citations (and exactly which sites you should use).
If you want us to do it for you, then check out our citation building service.
Carrot Tip: Review/update your Contact Us page of your site and the information you put there is what should be on all your citations.
Step 3. Use Google My Business
Google My Business is probably the most powerful tool at your disposal for ranking your website for local keywords.
As you can see in the screenshot below, Adrian Nez has used Google My Business (along with the other tactics mentioned in this article) to snag the eye-catching snippet on the right side of the results for “sell my house fast in Wilmington NC”…
That illustrates just how powerful Google My Business is.
And we highly recommend signing up for it — check out this article to learn more about how to do it.
Step 4. Collect Reviews
Obviously, reviews have a big impact when people stumble across your business online for the first time. Their only way of knowing whether you’re trustworthy or not is by looking at what other people have said.
Reviews are also a great way to build authority for rankings but most importantly to convert more traffic into leads. Reviews shows you live up to on your promise.
So collecting reviews is a critical part of building an online brand.
(Not to mention that positive reviews make you rank better for local keywords)
But how do you get reviews?
Well, the easiest way is to ask past clients to give you a review on Facebook or Google — make sure to send them a link so that it’s as easy as possible.
If they were happy with the service you provided, then they’ll probably be willing to provide a review.
Step 5. Promote Content
If you’re creating content on your blog or on YouTube or on some other platform… you should be sharing it all over social media.
Especially if you want the content to rank.
That’s because direct traffic and repeat traffic does have an impact on your SEO rankings… and sharing content on social media can help boost both of those metrics.
Of course, sharing content on social media isn’t going to be an overnight game-changer. But if you consistently share content on social media every week for 6 months? For a year?
That can have a significant impact.
As a bonus, when you have recent and active content on your social media, it shows you are a real business. For example, what if you looked up a business you were looking to do business with and you see the last post made was 4 months ago. That might throw off your search and wonder “is this business still open?”
Final Thoughts
According to Google, social media is not a direct ranking signal inside of its algorithm.
But as we’ve learned in this article, that’s no the whole story.
In fact, real estate social media marketing can help drive direct traffic and repeat traffic, provide additional opportunities to rank, and count as citations that boost local rankings.
So it’s definitely worth your time.
What do you think? How do you use social media and have you seen a difference organic rankings? Which strategies do you use? Share your thoughts, knowledge, and questions with us in the comments below!