Real Estate Internet Marketing: Website SEO

by Harper Thorpe | 0 comments | Posted Wed, 2011-11-09 08:41

If you look at your web statistics for your agent or broker website, you will find that the majority of search engine traffic you get comes from Google. Google is the most popular search engine in the world by a wide margin. According to Nielsen, Google is the only website on the planet that has more traffic than Facebook.

If you take a look at your analytics for your real estate website, you can understand the impact of search engine optimization. You need to go to the area called “referrers.” A referrer is an upstream website on the internet that sends consumers your way. Search Engines are typically top referrers to real estate agent websites. But to really understand SEO, you need to select a search engine, and look carefully at the “keywords” that are driving consumers to your real estate website.

When you look at the keywords, you will find that your name, like CoreLogic in our case, or AgentAchieve, or BrokerBuzz, or Harper Thorpe – will be the top keywords. This patter repeats itself on the tens of thousands of real estate websites that CoreLogic hosts for agents and brokers worldwide. And that makes sense. I will elaborate.

In the first three paragraphs, I intentionally wrote website copy that is search engine friendly. I intentionally highlighted the keywords that I wanted to optimize for SEO. AgentAchieve, our brand of agent and broker websites has excellent search engine optimization. With this writing style, I am associating the Corelogic, AgentAchieve, and my name to the keywords of agent website, broker website and real estate website. Notice I also put the keyword in the title of this post, and the title of this post is included in the URL for this post. I even made the keywords BOLD to highlight them.

As an agent or broker, you would want to use a similar writing style for pages that you put on your website. In your case, you would want to write about your name, your company, and cityname+real estate.

To be successful at search engine optimization for real estate websites, you must understand that the overall volume of pages of content related to the repetition of your name, your company and cityname+real estate gives your website more search engine keyword density. If you have the most content about a keyword, or keyword phrase, then Google will likely rank your website higher in search engines. Be careful – do not overdo it. An old way to trick search engines was called keyword stuffing – simply repeating the word over and over again. Search engines will ban you from appearing in search results or demote your ranking if their web crawlers think you are trying to deceive them.

Here is a little graph that illustrates the point.

Google and other search engines use algorithms to measure keyword density. They have some theoretical gauge as to how many times a keyword would naturally repeat itself. They look at all types of articles, and count words. When a keyword ratio to the other words on the page is unbalanced, you begin to reduce your search engine optimization – see the graph where it says “repeated a bit more than sensible”.

Many other factors play into search engine optimization success. There are entire websites and books dedicated to understanding the science of SEO. What I offer here is a basic guideline. I will end this article with one last thought. The most important measure of search engine optimization effectiveness for real estate websites is paying off the click. When a human comes to your website, the amount of time they spend on the page and the number of pages they visit is also recorded by Google and other search engines. If consumers arrive at your page and leave immediately, that is called a bounce. You can find your bounce rate in your analytics – if you have a bounce rate of 12%, you are a rock star! If you have a bounce rate of 50% or more, you need to work on your website to get consumers to stay longer.

I hope this helps demystify search engine optimization as part of your real estate internet marketing.

(This is where Dick Enberg says, Oh my!)

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