real estate seo service benefitsMarketing is common in the business world and practically necessary for every company out there. Since the Internet exploded onto the scene, marketing has had to now include having some kind of online presence. If you have a real estate agency, then your website might have become the lifeblood of your business, given how much consumers use the Internet to find properties to buy. SEO is short for search engine optimization, and it’s the combination of art and science behind driving more traffic to your real estate agency’s website. Keep reading to learn how that works and how an SEO service can help you with that.

You understand at some level that if you want your real estate business to be successful, then people need to be visiting your website. No matter how many great properties you might have listed on it or how great the website looks, if no one is visiting it in the first place, the website’s not doing you any good. In order to get more traffic, you need someone to do SEO for you. A professional service is the best option, because that’s what they do. What you do is real estate.

SEO is about boosting the visibility of your real estate agency’s website, or any website for that matter, by using knowledge of how search engines actually work. Search engine users type in very specific phrases or sets of words when they want to find something online. Search engine optimization is about promoting a particular website by making it look like a related and even authoritative result for some of those keywords or search phrases. For instance, if your real estate agency is in a city named Springfield, you might be looking to find online visitors that were typing in things like ‘real estate Springfield’ or ‘homes for sale Springfield’.

SEO happens in a number of different ways. Usually, the website needs to have a lot of content that is highly relevant to the search phrases and keywords that search engine users are looking for. Your website might also need to have a number of relevant links; these can be either inbound or outbound, alternatively called backlinks. Links to and from other reputable websites can make one website increasingly relevant in the eyes of Google, Bing, or Yahoo, so backlinks are valuable in determining the royalty of the online kingdom.

Search engines have a business model driven by giving the best possible experience to their users in terms of easily and quickly finding results that are not only relevant, but useful. Given that SEO has been around nearly as long as the Internet itself, search engines are sometimes filled with artificial results that got optimized for visibility, but aren’t really relevant. Some websites might get a lot of traffic, but the users that visit don’t find what they need. This makes search engines look like they got gamed, so there’s a lot more emphasis on website quality and relevant content now.

SEO services are able to decode search engine algorithms over time and might even use what’s known as ‘black hat’ techniques that might score a lot of traffic quickly and boost your website’s position in the rankings, but you can get penalized by Google and others once they know what’s going on, demoting your site and maybe even blacklisting it. Avoid the ongoing tug of war between search engines and SEO practitioners by finding a ‘white hat’ service firm such as https://scottkeeverseo.com/real-estate-seo/, that uses Google-approved, organic techniques that build you up over time without penalty. In short, Google and other search engines need to be able to provide relevant, accurate, and usable content to their users. Help them do this, and they reward you with their traffic.

Search engines have things called crawlers, bots, and spiders that are constantly roaming the Internet to index all the content out there. Using a very complicated formula, they rank how relevant websites are to particular keywords or search phrases. Each search engine uses a proprietary algorithm, so your rankings in one engine will vary compared to the next. However, the right SEO service firm can figure out which search engines your target users are using more than others and focus on those.

The service firm can also figure out the keywords or search phrases that those users are typically typing in, so that they can rank you for them. What’s even better is that they’ll also find search terms that aren’t getting a lot of competition even if people are looking for them, possibly giving you content avenues your competitors haven’t figured out yet. If you cater to something before anyone else, your website can rocket right up those rankings. Your SEO service firm will at some point need to make changes to your website, including doing things like putting keywords or search phrases into paragraph headings and HTML title tags.

They might also look over the alt attributes of your image tags. Search engine crawlers can’t yet index content that isn’t text. Images, audio content, and video files can’t help your rankings unless there are descriptions in the alt attribute of each related image tag.

Of course, regardless of what kind of content you have, it needs to be high in quality. If you have no content, you’re going to need to start putting some up. An SEO service firm almost always has someone that can do content for you, be it in-house or a third-party they work with regularly.

It can take weeks to months for white hat SEO services to produce actual growth in your rankings or traffic, but the reputable providers will tell you this up front and even give you a good idea when you’ll start seeing growth. That tells you that they know what they’re doing.

SEO is a marketing skill, but it’s a complicated one to learn, so why not stick to what you’re good at, which is real estate, and let the professionals of an SEO service firm grow your agency website’s traffic for you? Contracting out the work is a far cheaper and more cost-effective way to get access to the knowledge and talent of the SEO industry than trying to learn it on your own or hire a full-time SEO staff.