As part of a balanced online real estate marketing effort, getting to the top of the search engines for the most dominant keywords in your market will bring a consistent flood of leads and business. Your SEO efforts will help you get the top rankings, but marketing means you will get business from those top results. So, how do you combine your real estate marketing efforts with your SEO efforts?Let’s focus on how to make sure we get business from those hard earned rankings:
Page Titles – Your page titles are the biggest real estate that you can have some control over in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Only 65-67 characters are able to be displayed to the user and that has to give them the confidence to click on your website over the 9%2B others on the page. Making your page titles stand out takes a little bit of effort and when combined with your SEO work will have tremendous results. To get the clicks and leads page titles should:
Call to Action – Give the user a reason to click on your website over all of the others. Put a call to action in your page title (like “Free MLS Search”) and your click count will certainly go up.
Keywords – Your targeted keyword should be as close to the beginning of your page title as possible. To ensure a user stays on your site when they click, make sure this keyword is also the focus of the page as well.
Meta Description – Meta descriptions won’t help much in your rankings, but they can help quite a bit for your marketing efforts. If the search engine can’t get enough content from your page it will often read your meta description text and display that in the snippet below your page title. Getting results from your meta description means focusing again on providing a call to action and a sentence or two that gives the user a reason to visit your site. Avoid any text that speaks about you and focus on the benefits they user would have when they click on your link.
Website Address (Domain Name) – Your web address is displayed with each and every result. Having a marketing focused web address can improve the click rate on your results by more than 10%! There are many rules you can abide by when choosing a website address, but here are just a couple that will help you to start seeing some results:
a.Avoid your name – Your name won’t say much to the user because you are a stranger at that point. Try having a website address that focuses on the areas that you serve. When the visitor sees the area in your website address they will have the confidence to click because they are looking for home information, not about you.
b.Length of Website Address – Some cities have long names and it’s hard to have a short website address, but try! A maximum of 3-4 words will allow for easy reading in the SERPs and increase your click rate.
Marketing your real estate business in the search engines is much more than just SEO work. Concentrating on the small details will help you to get leads and generate closings from your search engine rankings each and every month.