Why SEO Is Crucial for Your Real Estate Business

Featured image by Sieuwert Otterloo on Unsplash

If you’re a real estate business owner who hasn’t worked on your search engine optimization (SEO), you need to. It can be a daunting prospect, but it is necessary for your business to succeed in the current digital age.

Now, if you’re a small business owner without much experience in digital marketing, you may be wondering why—or even if—you need SEO. It’s important to note that regardless of the size of your business, or even if you work as an independent contractor, real estate SEO is still crucial. Below are just some of the reasons why you should use SEO for your business as soon as possible:

1. Buyers Are Going Online

Although buying or selling real estate property requires both sides to meet personally, most transactions are done online.

Buyers contact you through email. You give buyers the information necessary through links. And most importantly, buyers look for properties online. In fact, a study conducted in 2019 shows that 50% of home buyers bought their house after looking online.

House hunting has become a largely digital process. People search for properties by going to platforms like:

Homefinder
Roofstock
Trulia
Realtor
Redfin

When buyers search for real estate properties online, chances are they will see these platforms and not your business. Unless you implement SEO strategies into your business site, you won’t be visible to buyers all over the world because you won’t be able to beat out the competition.

2. Your Real Estate Business Is One Click Away

Buyers receive housing alerts and other reports mainly through smartphones. Why not take a step further by implementing SEO strategies and making your website mobile-friendly?

Besides, as of 2021, the number of smartphone users reached 3.8 billion worldwide, which means you can reach a massive audience if you were to implement a good marketing plan.

Doing so not only helps you reach buyers who search online, but you can also cater to billions of smartphone users. Quite literally, you’ll make your business one click away, and you should know how buyers often contact the first real estate business they see.

3. You Can Expand Your Network

In the real estate industry, building a trustworthy network for your business is one of the keys to success. After all, if you have an expansive network of prospects, you’ll always know where to look for clients. Buyers may even come to you by themselves.

There are several ways to build a network or expand it, and that is by going to:

Community events
Volunteer groups and charity programs
Conferences and events
Schools

Unfortunately, with how the world is right now, building your network through these more traditional means can be difficult. Hence, your best bet is to join online groups, but that might not be the best idea either since you usually have to spend a lot of time being active.

For that reason, optimizing your website with SEO is a much better option. With this strategy, you can make sure your business is more visible. If you’re lucky, it may come to the point that potential clients will come to you for inquiries.

After convincing them to opt for your services, they may even refer your business to their friends by providing the links to your business page.

4. You Can Educate Buyers

Any real estate agent with considerable business experience and appropriate education knows that buyers can sometimes have unrealistic expectations or unreasonable conditions. For example, they may want a new home with a nice ocean view for a price much lower than its listed cost.

Most buyers have the mindset that they can get much more than what they bargained for because they’re not aware of the market conditions or even real estate practices, which often results in unreasonable conditions that you often face.

Although you can explain what each property entails and why it’s worth more than they think, it can get a bit demanding. However, if you can implement proper SEO strategies for your blogs, you can educate potential buyers to know what to expect when making negotiations because they will have read your educational posts.

5. You Can Have More Time

As always, you need to spend a lot of time on marketing if you want your real estate business to flourish. You may have a website right now where you get a lot of visitors regularly, but that doesn’t mean you can stop there.

Most of the time, beginners tend to accept more visitors because they think they’ll get more leads, but that’s not true. Instead of quantity, you should focus on quality.

Prioritize clients that are more likely to buy a real estate property. SEO strategies specialize in this aspect. Using keywords that best fit your business, you can filter out people who aren’t interested in buying real estate, saving you and your employees a lot of time.

6. Your Employees Will Become More Productive

Real estate businesses typically consist of teams. Some companies may have a broker in their group, but that doesn’t mean you have to. What won’t change is the fact that each team member should contribute something.

The good news is that implementing SEO strategies into your real estate business can benefit your employees. Below are some examples of these benefits:

Bookkeeper: Having a bookkeeper allows you to manage your investments properly. Expenses from implementing SEO strategies is relatively straightforward, which will help your bookkeeper monitor marketing expenses.
Marketing coordinator: If you decide to use SEO as the primary marketing tool for your business, your marketing staff can also become more productive and efficient.
Administrative assistant: This role often involves replying to emails and answering calls. While it doesn’t reduce the work done, your employees can deal with emails and calls more efficiently with a reliable, optimized website in place.

7. Your Real Estate Business Can Keep Running Despite Crises

After the crisis that the world has gone through, it’s clear that unexpected incidents may cause your business to dwindle and sometimes completely stop operating. Unfortunately, there are crises that you just can’t avoid. Your best bet is to simply prepare for it.

Unless the crisis is directly related to the online world, having a website with SEO can keep your business running despite the world’s challenges.

It’s Time to Embrace Today’s Marketing Strategies for Your Real Estate Business

Door-to-door advertising, brochures, and cold calling—traditional marketing strategies you used to take pride in—are now obsolete. You can’t get stuck in the past. You’re most likely going to get left behind if you do so.

Your only choice is to adapt and embrace different marketing strategies. While it might seem a bit overwhelming at first, SEO is a straightforward strategy. Therefore, taking advantage of this practice is entirely possible for your real estate business.