As a real estate agent and a marketer that has put considerable time into their website and overall digital strategy, you want your website to get traffic.
After all, if you put a lot of effort into building it, and no one ends up visiting it, is there much point to having one at all?
A lot of the reason that real estate websites don’t get traffic is simply because people can’t find it; it doesn’t have enough visibility or opportunity to be found online, especially by the right target audience, at the right time, and for the right reasons.
So how do you get more traffic to your website?
A lot of real estate agents will focus on paid search (ie: Google PPC ads) right from the beginning. And why not? Paid search instantly brings traffic to your website, which will bring up your visitor metrics.
But does that traffic really matter? Is that traffic really effective?
If the traffic that’s coming to your website isn’t made up of people within your target audience, that actually want to work with you now or may want to work with you in the future, why do you want them to care if they come to your website?
In general, PPC does work of course (a lot of agents use it successfully as a primary part of their lead generation strategy).
However, PPC just doesn’t work as well as an SEO-driven content for 1 main reason: PPC doesn’t build trust (you can learn more about that right here).
That’s where a solid SEO strategy comes in. SEO is one of the best ways to build trust with your target audience; and the best part is that once it’s up and running, it can run in the background, 24 hours a day, without you needing to do much (other than continue to build it).
★ Want to learn more about SEO and paid search? Have a look at these posts and resources:
- Using Paid Search for Real Estate Agents to Get More Conversions and Transactions
- Building a Well-Rounded SEO Search Strategy for Your Real Estate Website
- Understanding SEO Titles and Meta-Descriptions on Your Real Estate Website
- Download Our SEO Strategy Building Guide for Real Estate Agents
So What’s Involved?
Overall, SEO is a complicated topic, and this is definitely an oversimplification, but as a real estate agent trying to write content for SEO, there are 3 main components you should know about: keywords, backlinks, and quality content.
However, the one you should focus the MOST on is the quality content component.
Content is king, and when it comes to SEO, content is truly and certainly an established and proven king.
Do keywords and backlinks matter? Of course they do. In fact, they matter a lot as part of building a successful SEO strategy.
However, the average real estate agent isn’t going to know how to properly research keywords or create a backlink strategy (and that’s ok!). Instead, you should focus on producing the most high-quality content you can, and the other 2 components have the potential to work themselves out on their own.
★ Want to know more about writing high-quality content and content strategy in general? Have a look at these posts:
- Writing Successful Real Estate Content that Converts
- Optimizing Your Content for Humans (And Not Just for Search Engines)
- How to Plan Content that Attracts and Engages
Here’s how to approach it:
Before you begin writing content, you should have a deep understanding of your target audience. I’ve gone through target audience fairly extensively in the past (as it’s a core focus of what we do at Artifakt), but if you want to learn more about it, you can have a look at this post right here.
As a refresher, your target audience is always:
- Who you work with now,
- Who you want to work with in the future,
- And who you don’t want to work with.
Once you have your target audience established, your content topics should be built around the questions those people ask you about the market or real estate in general. As an agent, this is the exact type of content you should be consistently writing.
By building your content strategy this way, it will ensure that you’re not only writing topics that your audience is interested in but also, that you potentially show up in search results when they’re looking for answers to their questions (and so, build your SEO strategy).
Essentially, the theory is this: if you write high-quality content, around the questions and concerns that people within your target audience are asking, you’re likely to show up in search results when they’re looking for answers to those questions (which addresses the keyword component by changing it, instead, to broader keyword topics); and then, if you’re providing solid content that’s informative and provides solutions for people, other people will likely link to it because it’s so useful (which addresses the backlink component).
While there’s a lot more to building a solid SEO strategy, this is the simplest, most effective approach for a real estate agent to take if they don’t have the time or expertise to build a complicated link-building strategy or research keywords.
Want to improve your content strategy? Download our Content Strategy Guide for Real Estate Agents. It has practical methods on how to plan, implement, market, and audit a successful real estate content strategy that will deliver results as part of your overall inbound marketing strategy.
Want to learn more about SEO and get more traffic to your website? Our SEO Strategy Building Guide is a mix of curated content and self-guided workbook that will help provide insight on how you can build and implement a modern SEO and overall search strategy.
