As a real estate agent, most of the prospects walking through your door will be considering buying or selling properties within a few square kilometres of your office. If only there were a way to hyper-target your marketing efforts towards those customers who are looking to buy or sell within your sphere of influence.
Fortunately, there is a marketing strategy you can use, and it’s called local SEO. Improving your site’s optimisation for local search results will attract more highly qualified prospects to your agency, guaranteed.
What is Local SEO?
In a nutshell, local SEO (Search Engine Optimization), refers to a website process which optimises a site, so it appears high in the search engine results pages (SERPs) for a search query which has a local element to it.
For example, if you have a real estate office in Bella Vista, New South Wales, a person searching to buy or sell in that area may type “real estate bella vista” into the search field. A website which is highly optimised for local search should get the top link in the Google search results.
Local search also displays information the Google bots have collected from your business website which could be useful to the visitor including maps location, contact information, a snippet describing your business, and possibly a collection of reviews.
How Local Search Ranks Websites
There are many variables which go into the algorithm to determine the most relevant results from a query. Geo-proximity lends a lot of weight to the user’s location relative to your agency; the closer your real estate agency is to the user’s physical location, the more likely your site will feature highly in the search results.
Other ranking factors a site can use to increase its potential in the search results is to include lots of content on the site that will be helpful to the searcher. In the case of a real estate agent, relevant articles would consist of buying and selling tips and home renovation ideas to increase kerbside appeal.
Benefits of Local SEO
More Traffic
Traffic via the search engines is referred to as organic traffic, and the higher your results in the local search, the more organic traffic you will receive. Local SEO provides enormous potential for a real estate agent to attract more business through search engine traffic.
Lower Cost Per Lead
Paid advertisements are an excellent addition to a marketing campaign, but they have a significant downside; once you stop paying for the ads, your traffic drops to zero almost immediately.
With local SEO, as long as your site provides relevant information which satisfies a user’s query, it will continue to show for those questions without any further intervention – other than to keep the site up-to-date with fresh and relevant information.
Information published 2 or 3 years ago which you have suitably optimised will continue to bring in prospects. As more people visit your content, your site will grow in authority. Each subsequent post also increases the potential for your site’s traffic to grow by a considerable amount.
Higher Visibility
The pages of local content on the web numbers in the millions. The first position of the SERPs generally attracts 33% of click-throughs, and the majority of users will not visit the second page.
In short, if you don’t achieve first page rankings, your site will only attract tiny amounts of organic click-through traffic.
The modern home-owner, property investor, or real estate seller will turn to the internet to search out a new business. Make sure your real estate business maintains a competitive edge through local SEO by talking to your trusted SEO experts for Real Estate businesses here at Digital Presence today.
