Before I became a search engine marketer, I was a real estate agent and investor. And while I was in real estate, I discovered blogging and the power that it had as a way for professionals to create an audience, establish their brands, and showcase their expertise in their niche or their neighborhood.
Unfortunately, learning about blogging never led me to learn more about Search Engine Optimization (SEO), because if I had, I probably would’ve been a much more successful real estate agent! As this article from Search Engine Land points out, many real estate agents are shifting their advertising efforts from traditional media to online media.
As more and more real estate agents and brokers begin to compete for paid search terms using pay-per-click (PPC) engines like Google AdWords and Yahoo’s Overture, popular keywords will be bid way up–especially in the most competitive markets.
So what’s an agent to do?
One option is to join a larger brokerage that can afford the big advertising dollars and hope that the traffic to your broker’s website trickles down into clients for yourself. I emphasize the word trickle–you’re not going to make a lot this way if you’re competing with 150 other agents in your brokerage.
Another possibility is to create your own website and drive traffic through AdWords. Like I said before, this is going to be increasingly expensive.
The third online strategy is to build your own website and get it ranked organically. I definitely wouldn’t say that it’s going to be easy to get on the first page of the Google results for keyword phrases like “my city real estate agent,” but the potential payoff is tremendous.
If I were still a real estate agent, my first priority in marketing would be organic search engine optimization. Why? My gut tells me that most agents and brokers will begin their online marketing efforts with PPC and online classified advertising. Most will not be looking at organic SEO as an option until their other online efforts fail or the idea of SEO becomes more mainstream.
The agents who move now and get established early in the search engine results will have a huge advantage. Google loves websites that have had good, trusted links for a long time.
The agents that start building quality incoming links and creating quality content related to their markets will have a big head start on agents who are entering three, six, or twelve months from now. Age is a big part of search engine authority, so the older your site and the older your backlinks, the better foundation you will have when every other real estate agent learns about SEO.
A strong SEO/link-building strategy combined with blogging to create fresh content and establish expertise will pay big dividends for real estate agents who are in it for the long haul.
Hey, that strategy will pay big dividends for just about any freelancer or small business owner!
