What is real estate SEO? By definition, it is “creating relevant content with keyword focus to improve website visibility in the organic search results for real estate professionals. The process includes building landing pages, updating metadata, content modifications, and analyzing keywords.”
Whether you’re doing apartments, looking for motivated sellers, cash buyers, private lenders, or note sellers — even if you’re a real estate agent — the whole thing is you need to understand search engine optimization and how it can change your business for the better.
What is Real Estate SEO?
So, what is real estate SEO? To break it down simply, by giving Google and other search engines what they want, Google will reward you with higher rankings.
You see, each search engine — Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. — has an algorithm that crawls online web pages to determine which results to show people when they search for any given keyword phrase (i.e., the words they type into the search engine).
By “optimizing” your real estate web page(s) for a search engine’s algorithm (usually Google since it’s the biggest), you can rank for high-value phrases and drive passive traffic to your website.
Carrot members, for instance, often rank for market-specific phrases.
Here’s the best part: that algorithm determines where you and every other website ranks in Google — experts already know what factors that algorithm considers.
Partly, they know because of testing and experimentation. And partly, they know because Google consistently releases updates about how their algorithm interacts with websites and online content.
Note: I’ve transitioned from talking about search engines in general to talking about Google specifically. This is because Google accounts for about 93% of the search engine traffic online. It’s the heaviest-hitting player in the search engine world and the one whose algorithm you should most seriously consider when crafting your SEO strategy.
Which means you can too.
But it’s important to note the difference between working to please the search engines… and trying to trick them.
One will get you rankings. The other will get you banned.
Black Hat SEO VS. White Hat SEO
Black hat SEO and white hat SEO, are basically just search engine marketing jargon for a bad way to build rankings and a good way to build rankings.
Black hat is gaming the system. It’s trying to trick Google’s algorithm into giving you higher rankings. While this will sometimes work over the short run, it is likely to get your website into trouble when Google finds out what you’re doing.
You can learn more about black hat SEO no-nos over here.
White Hat SEO Strategy – Maintaining Your Integrity.
White hat SEO strategies, on the other hand, build rankings the way that Google wants you to.
That’s the way that we work at Carrot. That’s how we’re going to train you, is on white hat strategies.
With white hat SEO, there’s less risk and more opportunity.
As an example, if you go to Google and type up phrases like “Sell my house fast Pittsburgh,” “Sell my house fast Baltimore,” or “Sell my house fast Birmingham,” or “We buy houses Bakersfield,” or hundreds of other phrases.
Or, on the cash buyer side, “Investment properties in Baltimore, Baltimore wholesale properties.” Or maybe “real estate agent in Boston.”
You’ll see Carrot members popping up very high on the search rankings, leveraging their training and our search engine optimization tools, and getting more leads.
For SEO search engine optimization, we’re focusing on the section in the Google search results and Bing search results, and Yahoo search results. But mainly Google. We’re focusing on the area that’s above the orange box, you can see the parts where it says, “Ad.” Those are ads that people paid to be there.
The part in the orange box is called the organic search listings. That’s where, with search engine optimization, tweaking some things, and following Carrot training, you’re going to be able to get there in your market when you follow our training and our system.
Inbound Marketing for Real Estate – Draw Clients to You.
One of the reasons that we love search engine optimization is inbound real estate marketing. Inbound marketing is essentially when people go online, go to Google, type up questions, or they type up problems. They’re typing up something that they want to be solved, and then they land on your website.
They land on a website that is ranked high on Google. There was a study done by HubSpot that found that 28% of searches for something nearby (local SEO) resulted in a purchase. Also, 78% of local mobile searches result in offline purchases. So, local SEO is very powerful.
Direct traffic is people who already know about your website. They already knew your website name. Maybe they got it through your business card; maybe they got it off of a billboard, direct mail, or something like that. Direct traffic also performs very well because they’re already familiar with you. They already know about you. Then down the line you’ve got paid search, Google Ads, they go through PPC, and it’s all still insanely effective.
The reason we love search engine optimization so much is that with this higher lead to customer close-ratio, you have a higher quality lead. You tend to close more leads per the leads you’re getting than outbound marketing or things like that.
For example, here are the lead volume numbers accumulated by Carrot members (not counting phone calls.) 31.71% of the leads that came into our Carrot member websites were from Google organic search traffic. This drives home the importance of good SEO.
Why SEO for Real Estate is So Important for Lead Generation
Why Real Estate SEO Matters
If you’re closing one out of every 40 leads into a deal or a listing, from your radio ads, with SEO, you might close one out of every 10, one out of every 15. You don’t have to get as many leads to close the same amount of deals, which is why we love SEO.
Every day people are raising their hands for help by going to Google and other search engines, and they’re searching for solutions to their problems.
What search engine optimization and inbound online marketing do is the equivalent of a seller or a buyer or a private lender or a note seller going and knocking on your door and they’re asking you for help. Rather than the other way around, rather than you going to their door and knocking on it and saying, “Hey, do you need to sell your house,” or, “Hey, are you looking for properties?” interrupting their thought process.
Inbound marketing joins them in their thought process. They’re coming to you.
They’re reaching out and asking you for help, putting you in a position of power. Inbound marketing, specifically with search engine optimization, is the most remarkable form of marketing ever created because the people are coming to you, and it puts the prospect in a whole different mindset when they are the ones who reached out to you rather than the other way around.
Does Real Estate SEO Work?
A common question is, “Does SEO work, can it close deals, what’s the ROI of search engine optimization?”
Of course, it does! We have so many Carrot members generating SEO leads and closing SEO deals.
Here’s one of those stories…
Currently, Carrot members are pulling in a little over 60,000 leads per month. That doesn’t include phone call leads, people, landing on your websites, and calling on their phones.
The system’s effective and exciting, seeing you jumping into SEO and learning what you can do to increase your rankings in any city you’re in.
Baltimore, DC, Birmingham, Bakersfield, Houston, Oahu, Salt Lake, and even smaller cities. In smaller cities, it’s easier to rank well with SEO. But in bigger cities, we have members all across the country ranking very well, very high for SEO, with their Carrot websites, using our SEO training you’re going through right now.
For example, for the search phrase “we buy houses in Los Angeles” Carrot members rank #1 and #3 in organic results.
If you find another member in your market who is already ranking on page one, don’t panic. We have markets where there are four or five Carrot members on page one, all getting better results than they would be without Carrot, and they’re sitting there battling it out, but they would never have even gotten those results without SEO training and our system.
This works in any market, no matter how large or small.
As we mentioned, Carrot members currently hold more page one rankings and top five rankings on search phrases that matter more than any other website platform for real estate.
That’s an empowering thing for you reading the post or watching the SEO training video because it shows you that you have a powerful tool at your fingertips, and we’re here to help you get there and get the same results as other people in those markets if you implement the system and work it. Let’s get you there, too.
We break it down and make it simple and achievable in the rest of the beginner SEO training series, the 3 Lead Per Day training for our members, and our SEO 101 course
Whether you’re someone who’s diving into SEO for the first time or even whether you’re advanced, we have you covered.
We’ll also give you the strategies that are making it work well for us.
We’ll give you specific action steps, so you don’t need to be an SEO expert or a techie to get great results with search engine optimization.
You just need to follow the steps, stick with the plan, leverage our process and reach out to us when you need help.