What Is Real Estate SEO? Learn the Basics of Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
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 … Continued