What is SEO?
SEO is short for “Search Engine Optimization.” It’s a vast and profoundly technical domain that makes millions of people want to pull their hair out on the daily.
And it's essential to growing your business online.
Don't fret, though.
You don't need to know how your car's engine works to drive cross-country.
You also don't need to understand how the plumbing works in your house to wash your dishes.
Same for SEO.
You don't need to be a software engineer or marketing expert to use SEO to grow your real estate business through search engine marketing.
The easiest way to think about SEO for your real estate internet marketing is that it’s a checklist of things you must do both on your website and external to it that helps Google rank your website for specific keywords.
It may sound simple when described that way, but an entire industry and set of career fields are built on it.
In fact, most companies spend almost 10% of their revenues solely on SEO.
Why?
It’s simple: business. Big business.
And it's also because of ROI, or "Return on Investment."
For an e-commerce business, SEO returns between $3-$10 for every $1 spent.
Not having basic SEO in real estate means $0 in return for your website.
What's the return on getting your site to show up for a few key client searches by doing basic SEO yourself?
Well, if only one extra person sees your site each month, contacts you, and you sell them a home priced at $500K, that's $15K to you.
A month.
For nothing but a little bit of your time. Maybe on a Sunday. A rainy, cold Sunday. Yeah.
Since Google is the top way consumers find things they need or want, getting seen for the proper search terms before your competitors do translates directly into clients, sales, and profits.
Big companies spend $100s of millions each year hiring teams of experts and buying the latest tools to improve and maintain their SEO.
In this introductory guide, I won’t delve into the “very technical” or get into advanced, daily SEO.
I’ll show you how to “pull the levers and push the buttons” to get your SEO on solid ground so that Google can place your site into its searchable index (i.e., people can see your site when they search).
It may sound basic, but 99.9.% of all real estate professionals skip over the core, fundamental SEO setup needed to even appear in Google. As a result, they’re left wondering why they never get leads from their website.
Google rewards SEO actions on what I call a “time served” model.
This means getting a solid SEO setup and maintaining it will be rewarded with incrementally increasing visibility in Google search for your desired keywords.
If you don’t ever get a solid, basic SEO setup, you can never rank in Google.
It’s just that simple.
The “Nitty Gritty” on SEO
You can divide SEO into two areas, Technical SEO and Content SEO.
They somewhat overlap, but it’s easier to understand if we break them down into two distinct categories of things you must address to become visible in Google Search.
Technical SEO is a set of configurations for your website and the technologies that enable it (i.e., “host the site”), such as:
- Your website’s server
- Networks and site security (i.e., HTTPS/SSL certificates)
- Your website’s URL structure and format
- Your domain name
- Crawling and indexing settings
- Important files such as Robots.txt and Sitemaps
- Your site and page loading speeds
- Mobile responsiveness (i.e., your site adapts to different screen sizes)
Content SEO is what your website actually says, or, as it’s called in the field, your website's “copy” and content. These are things like:
- Keywords
- Blog posts
- Page Headings and paragraphs
- Site/page titles and “meta descriptions”
- Images and videos
- Internal and external links
SEO is dynamic and constantly changing. Google updates the criteria that cause good or bad search visibility and how it performs search indexing, crawling, and ranking over 700 times per year.
While it’s not likely for someone who isn’t a full-time specialist in the SEO field to do optimization at a professional level, it is possible to quickly get your site set up with a solid core SEO configuration that brings in more search engine traffic.
Guide to Setting Up Basic SEO
Individual Realtors®, teams, and brokerages can benefit directly from practicing good SEO fundamentals.
In fact, if you don’t do the minimum required to get seen by Google’s search engine, your website will be invisible for all intents and purposes. And that means no new clients from internet marketing in a world where the web, social media, and mobile mean everything.
It may seem a bit daunting initially, but configuring your website to get indexed by Google isn’t that difficult, plus it only takes a few minutes of your time.
If digital marketing is something you value, there’s no better way to get a payoff from your efforts than a basic, free SEO setup.
Getting Started
To get a basic SEO setup, you’ll do the following:
- Identify keywords you want to rank for and translate them into website content.
- Make sure your site’s technical configuration is correct.
- Submit your website to Google for indexing and crawling.
- Monitor your website’s performance and SEO issues as they arise.
Again, this article shows you the minimal things you need to get indexed by Google.
For an in-depth, step-by-step guide that walks you through a detailed “DIY” setup of SEO to help you outpace your competitors, contact me here, and I’ll email it.
Identify keywords you want to rank for and translate them into website content
Keyword research can be challenging and frustrating, even for SEO experts. It’s part art, part data science, and part magic. To say it’s inexact is an understatement.
For starters, only Google knows how its search algorithms work. Plus, only Google has 100% of the data on who’s searching for what via its search engine.
The data about websites and who’s visiting them is called “clickstream” data.
Google makes some of this data available, but the majority of what is known about searches is provided by thousands of “downstream” companies that track network traffic around the internet.
These companies sell this data to other software companies who make it available via analytic tools that help people make a “best guess” at what keywords are trending.
One of the tools I recommend is “Ubersuggest,” at https://neilpatel.com/ubersuggest/.
Ubersuggest is one of the thousands of SEO and keyword research tools that let you perform keyword research. It helps you pick the right keywords for your website so that more people find you in Google Search when they type these words.
How to evaluate keywords
Before researching the keywords you want for your website and web pages, it’s good to know a bit about assessing and choosing the right keywords.
A keyword isn’t just singular; it’s any one or more words typed into Google search (e.g., “Homes for sale in Detroit,” “real estate,” or “homes for sale in Charlotte under $200K with good school districts).
There are also different categories of keywords. Most notably, there are general keywords and what is known as “longtail” keywords.
An example of general keywords is “real estate” or “home market.” These words are very high-level, so their usage tends to represent searchers who don’t know where to start in their quest for answers.
You might think optimizing your site for these keywords is an excellent strategy to get many visits, but it isn’t. With general keywords like this, you face considerable obstacles to getting seen, such as:
- It’s hard to know what someone wants when they type in only “real estate.”
- Google tries to match a query with its best sites, so a board query for “real estate” will return all sorts of national-level sites about real estate as a domain, a career, the real estate market, or mortgage rates.
- Competition to get seen (i.e., other sites optimized for these words) is high since the more generic a category, the more sites “fit” into possible answers for this query.
Conversely, longtail keywords are phrases typed into Google Search of three or more words, such as “homes for sale in Charlotte under $200K with good school districts.”
In contrast to general keywords, longtail phrases represent over 80% of all keywords typed into Google daily. In other words, people tend to type more than two words when they search the internet.
These longtail keywords also represent a more “educated” search since the searchers using these words tend to know something about the area they’re inquiring about and are looking for something more specific than general information.
It’s a good idea to always focus on longtail keywords because they represent smaller yet more “convertible” audiences (i.e., those likely to engage with your business) interested in your specific services, location, and brand.
Keyword scoring
Visit Ubersuggest and type in a longtail keyword related to your business and location.
For example, if you’re a Realtor® in Nashville, Tennessee, you might start with “homes for sale in nashville tn.”
You’ll get back a page full of data that seems daunting to evaluate at first glance, but it’s pretty easy once you get the hang of it.
Plus, you don’t need to use all the data on the page to quickly choose the right focus keywords for your website and individual pages.
The most important information about any keyword is:
- Do many people search for it on Google each month?
- Do I have a chance at getting seen in Google when people search using it?
- Are there related keywords that give me a better chance of getting seen in search results?
It’s easy to analyze any keyword and find the answers to these questions, but you must know how to read the Ubersuggest clickstream data.
The “Search Volume” data point tells you how many people search using this keyword on average each month.
A high volume means lots of month-to-month interest, but be aware that a high volume of searches doesn’t mean you’ll get a lot of clicks that convert.
If volumes are very high for a given keyword, it might indicate that you should choose a more “longtail” keyword.
In other words, by qualifying the query more with additional modifiers, you may get to a related keyword that still has good search volume but represents a more educated searcher looking for just what you offer.
For example, the keyword “real estate in nashville tn” has a very high search volume and a high level of competition, but adding the word “37211” for a specific zip code to get “homes for sale nashville tn 37211” still yields a healthy monthly average search volume with a much lower level of competition.
Targeting keywords this way will result in more consistent conversions from people who click and visit your website because you’re aiming at a smaller but more specific group of people with more specific needs or wants.
The “SEO Difficulty” section of the report indicates your chances of showing up in Google search results for people searching using the keyword in question.
The higher the number, the less likely you are to rank for this keyword because so many other sites already do.
Ideally, it's best to target keywords that are highly relevant to your business or offerings and have healthy volumes of monthly searches with the lowest levels of competition.
“Quick and dirty” keyword research and selection
Keyword research can get significantly involved, but quickly setting up a basic SEO configuration for your real estate website can help you build search visibility without knowing all the ins and outs of keyword analysis.
Once you pick a starting point, it’s good practice to look for other related keywords that may better represent your target audience and have lower competition from other sites.
The Ubersuggest tool makes this easy. Just scroll down the report page for any keyword until you see the “Keyword Ideas” section.
Using the sorting filters of each column in this section makes it easy to sort by the highest search volume and lowest SEO difficulty (i.e., competition from other sites).
Here’s how to use Ubersuggest to pick focus keywords for your website and each web page quickly and easily:
- Start by entering a keyword you would use to search for a home or a real estate agent.
- Evaluate the “Search Volume” and “SEO Difficulty” of the keywords for a “healthy volume” (i.e., a good number of people searching means a healthy month-to-month interest level) and the lowest possible level of competition.
- Look for other keywords that might better represent the exact groups of searchers you want to get in front of and that have good search volume with low competition.
- Pick the longest of the best longtail keywords as the focus keyword for use in your overall website title and meta description.
- Pick other relevant keywords for your individual website pages as appropriate for the content of that page (i.e., for an “About” page that speaks to you as an agent, you might choose words like “top realtor in brentwood tn” as an example).
That’s all there is to it. That said, spend an hour or so digging into the keywords you want to use to ensure you pick the best options for ranking.
I suggest you also create a spreadsheet of the keywords you choose for each page and their data points. As with anything else people do, search trends and patterns change over time.
It’s a good idea to evaluate the performance of your keywords at least quarterly to ensure you don’t waste time on keywords that are not working (I’ll touch on performance monitoring further in this article).
It’s also good to know that SEO doesn’t work like turning on a faucet.
As mentioned previously, Google works on a “time served” model, rewarding sites whose owners set up fundamentally good SEO, do excellent keyword research, and measure the performance of their sites over time to adapt as trends change.
Make sure your site’s technical configuration is correct
Google is a stickler for things being “just so” on the websites it ranks well.
Their mission is to provide searchers with the most accurate answer or resource for any query, so only sites that score well against their checklists are linked to questions asked by Google searchers.
To do this, Google maintains a set of “best practices” for websites that, when adhered to, gets your site found in search results.
The essential items to check (or fix) are
- Your site title and meta description
- Your page titles and descriptions
- Your page headings
- Your site’s page load time
- Your site’s mobile responsiveness
- Your website’s security
Site titles and meta descriptions
All websites need a site title and a site description called a “meta description.”
These should be well-planned to include well-chosen keywords so Google knows how to “link” your website to appropriate search queries.
Each individual page on your site also needs a title and a meta description.
Titles and descriptions are critical to Google - and your prospective clients. They tell Google what your site is about and a bit about what keywords you want to target.
They’re also shown to searchers on Google’s search engine results pages (called “SERP”) to help them decide where to click next after searching. That’s why what you write is vital for both Google and the humans who will see it.
As such, you must have Google-compliant and well-written examples of these items for your site.
You can check your site and page titles using easy-to-use, free tools like this:
https://mangools.com/free-seo-tools/serp-simulator
Visit the link above, enter your website’s domain into the URL box, and click “Fetch Data.”
The tool will then scan your site and let you know what your site title and description look like to Google - and to those who see your site’s entry in Google’s search engine results pages.
The most important things to pay attention to are:
- Is your site title or meta description missing?
- Is either of them too long?
- Are your most important keywords in the site title?
- Are you clearly explaining what your site is about in the meta description?
- How does your meta description help the audience you want to see it?
Google will reliably display up to about 70 characters for website titles but may trim your site title on specific devices.
Because of this, it’s best to limit your site title to 55-60 characters if you want to be sure the full wording is shown.
For meta descriptions, it’s best to stay under 155 characters, but be sure to explain, as briefly as possible, precisely what you or your site offers, emphasizing how your service meets a Google searcher's needs.
Page titles and descriptions
Once you’ve checked your overall website title and meta description, do the same for each page.
For example, if you have an “About” page at “www.yoursite.com/about,” copy and paste that URL into the tool. Repeat this for every page on your site to test your page titles and meta descriptions.
Some key things to note as you go thru each page:
- Be direct and clear, using as few words as possible.
- Make sure not to repeat any page titles or meta descriptions; each page must be unique.
- Each page should have distinct “focus” keywords relevant to that page’s content and purpose (i.e., on a property search page at “/home-search,” you might have “Search Homes for Sale in ______” as the page title).
- Put your most important keywords as far to the front of any page title as possible, as Google will highlight page titles that match a searcher’s query..
- Your overall site title will be appended to each page title, so there’s no need to repeat it.
Spending a little time checking that your site and page titles and descriptions are as solid as possible will ensure your site displays well in Google - and give you the best chance at getting a Google searcher to click your listing in the search results pages.
After all, you can’t get new clients from the web if no one clicks on your listing in search results.
Page headings
Many real estate professionals (and their web developers, too!) build sites from a “looks first” approach.
In other words, the prettier it looks, the better it is.
While having an appealing and interesting-looking site is desirable, it’s not the most crucial part of a website built to bring in new clients.
As a result of this “form-over-function” approach, people tend to layout pages with headings that “look” right to the eye instead of headings and subheadings that best fit Google’s SEO guidelines.
These guidelines control how well your site ranks for important keywords (i.e., Google searches), so be sure to get the wording and format right in addition to how they look.
For Google, these are the most important things to keep in mind when creating your page headings:
- Each individual website page needs an H1 heading.
- Use only one (1) H1 heading per page (as high up on the page as possible).
- Use your most important keywords in your H1 heading.
- Use different heading sizes to make your page content easy to read.
Regarding the use of different-sized headings, here’s a quick overview:
- H1: Use these for page titles to set your focus keywords and grab the visitor's attention.
- H2: These subheadings are used to call attention to important sections of your page and amplify/expand on the keywords used in your H1.
- H3: These subheadings are best used to organize your page's subsections and call attention to features or other lists.
- H4: These are typically used for short content outside any paragraphs you might have on your page.
Spend time reviewing each page on your website to ensure they comply with the above recommendations.
Page load times
With the predominance of mobile devices nowadays, Google is stressing the importance of how fast your website loads as a part of SEO scoring. They’ve created a new subset of SEO metrics called “Core Web Vitals.”
You don’t have to understand the technical details of it all, but you need to know how your site stacks up and what to fix if it’s a slow-loading website.
To check your website speed, point your browser a Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool here:
Enter your website’s URL and click “Analyze,” then wait a bit to see how quickly your site loads.
You can see your site’s speed on mobile and desktop, but pay the most attention to how it performs on mobile since Google’s search index is now “mobile-first.” Most visits to your website will come from mobile devices, too.
The test results shown by the tool are the metrics produced by the Core Web Vitals framework.
It’s a bit technical, but check how well your site ranks for “Performance” on the 0-100 scale.
If your site scores below 90, you’ll want to spend some time diagnosing and fixing what’s causing the slow performance.
If you scroll down the page a bit, you’ll see a report titled “Opportunities” section that outlines the most significant issues affecting your page load times.
Again, this is technical stuff, so it might not make much sense to you at first glance, but you can send this report to your web developers and ask them to address the items.
If you handle your own website, don’t worry. Just three things cause most slow-loading websites:
- Size of images used on your website and web pages.
- The file types of images placed on your website.
- Code or links in your website that make calls to other websites.
The easiest way to improve your website’s loading speed is to use images with small file sizes.
You can compress images using free tools like “Optimizilla,” at https://imagecompressor.com/.
Simply drag and drop your existing JPG or PNG images onto Optimizilla’s web page, then download the compressed files for your website.
In addition to file size, image file types matter regarding page load speeds. The following list is in priority order of the fastest file types:
- WebP
- JPG
- PNG
Generally, use WebP and JPG for images and PNG for logos. You can convert PNGs and JPGs to WebP using CloudConvert here:
https://cloudconvert.com/png-to-webp
Once you compress, convert, and re-upload the images on your website, re-test your site’s speed using Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool.
Mobile Responsiveness
A few years ago, Google changed its search index from desktop-focused to mobile.
They call it “mobile-first indexing." Google did it because more people search the web and view websites today from phones and tablets than desktop computers.
They also changed some SEO guidelines to reflect this move to mobile. The term “mobile responsiveness” embodies these changes.
Simply put, mobile responsiveness means that your website should look good and behave well on mobile, offering the same features to mobile visitors as desktop browser visitors.
When applied to a website’s design, the “responsiveness” part of the phrase means the site will shift the way it looks to show the same things seen in a desktop browser on a mobile device.
In the industry, it’s said that a mobile responsive website “breaks down” (i.e., shifts its look and feel) to work on any “viewport” (i.e., screen size).
You can test your website’s responsiveness by using Google’s “Mobile-Friendly Test Tool” located at:
https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly
If your site isn’t determined to be responsive and “mobile-friendly,” you will likely need some web development support to remedy the changes, as this is very technical work.
If your website has been up for a long time, chances are that it’s not mobile-friendly.
Another option for those who prefer the DIY route is to get a new website built from the ground up to be mobile-friendly.
Some of the best options for a new, easy-to-use DIY real estate website are:
- https://carrd.co/ (Free)
- https://www.squarespace.com/ (Paid subscription)
- https://wordpress.com/ (Paid subscription)
- https://www.duda.co/new (Paid subscription)
Mobile-friendliness is of critical importance for today’s SEO.
Simply put, if you want to rank well in Google and convert more visitors from your website into clients, you must emphasize a mobile-responsive website.
Website Security
A few years back, Google added web security to its set of SEO indeed and ranking criteria.
Specifically, Google added scores to its search algorithms for sites without the HTTPS protocol vs. HTTP. The “S” added to “HTTP” stands for “Secure.”
Google sought to reduce the incidence of data theft and other cyber attacks by encouraging site owners to protect the network traffic between visitors and websites with better search rankings for using HTTPS instead of HTTP.
Type your web URL into a browser on your phone or desktop.
If your website starts with “http://” and not “https://” then you need to update your configurations for better security - and, thus, better SEO.
Network security and website configuration for HTTPS utilize a “digital certificate” to prove that the website someone is visiting is actual and “official” and uses secure, encrypted data transfer between the visitor and the website.
As with most things SEO, website security with HTTPS is very technical, but it’s become standard for all DIY (and most other) web platforms to include HTTPS and a valid, matching SSL certificate for free with any website plan.
If you don’t have a secure website, contact your web developer and have them create and install an SSL certificate for your site.
If you prefer a DIY route, you can create your own SSL certificate and install it on your web server to protect your website. Just be warned, though, as this is a very technical - and often frustrating - task.
The organization Let’s Encrypt is the best place to obtain your own free certificate:
If your site isn't using HTTPS, you may consider moving to one of the DIY website platforms mentioned in the previous section of this article.
These platforms will include an SSL cert and HTTPS with your website subscription, so you won’t have to do anything on your end.
Submit your website to Google for indexing and crawling
First off, you can’t make Google index your website.
You also can’t control how quickly Google crawls your website or when they “link” your site to keywords and keyword groups.
Regarding the workings of Google Search, only Google knows everything - and they don’t often share firm information on what they do and how they do it.
However, you can encourage Google to crawl your site and add it to its mobile and desktop indexes.
Setting up Google Analytics
You first need to create an account for your website to be monitored by Google’s analytics service, Google Analytics.
This lets you see who’s hitting your site, where they’re coming from, how long they visit, and what they click.
Google Analytics is a prerequisite for the next step, so set it up first.
You’ll need a Gmail address or a business address using Google Workspaces as the email hosting provider.
Go to https://marketingplatform.google.com/about/analytics/ and click “Get Started” in the top right corner.
Google Analytics 4 can be involved, but you can get set up in as little as 3-5 minutes.
The best instructions I’ve found on the web for absolute beginners are produced by SEMRush, one of the most respected SEO data analytics companies.
Rather than “re-invent the wheel” here, I won’t reproduce the instructions. You can find them here:
https://www.semrush.com/blog/google-my-business/
Once you have registered and activated your Google Analytics account, proceed to the next step.
Setting up Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a toolkit of web tools that help you find problems with your website and see how well it’s doing in Google Search.
It will also help you determine your site’s speed and how it looks on mobile devices.
You can follow these simple steps from SEMRush to register for your Google Search Console account:
https://www.semrush.com/blog/definitive-guide-google-search-console/
One of the most important things Google Search Console lets you do is submit what’s called a “sitemap” to Google.
Your sitemap is a textual file formatted in a programming language called “XML” (you don’t need to know much about this). It tells Google and other search engines how your site is structured, the URLs our pages use, and how pages are linked.
Most importantly, after registering your website with Google Webmaster Tools, you can submit your sitemap to Google so they know to crawl and index your site.
While there’s no way to force Google to index your site, submitting a sitemap is like tapping them on the shoulder, figuratively speaking, and saying, “Hey, Google, look over here! New site for you to show in search results!”
If you have a DIY website on one of the popular platforms listed in this article, they will automatically generate a sitemap.xml file for all your pages.
The file is hosted at a web-accessible link, much like a standard web page, but it displays its contents in the XML language mentioned above.
Typically, sitemaps can be accessed at a URL like:
https://www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml.
An example of a real one can be found on the website for our Artificial Intelligence (AI) application for generating real estate blogs:
https://reallyblogit.com/sitemap.xml
If you visit your website, add the “/sitemap.xml” extension to the URL, and don’t see XML like the URL shown above, then chances are you don’t have a valid sitemap file.
The best way to get one is by asking your web developer to build one for you and deploy it to your site's web server.
If you handle your own website and need a sitemap, you can use one of many free online tools to build one, such as:
Creating a sitemap takes only a few seconds using this site. Click the link above, enter your website URL, and wait for the service to generate your sitemap.xml file.
Download the file, then either send it to your web developer.
If you handle your own website and it isn’t one of the services mentioned in this article, chances are you know how to upload files to your web server.
Just upload the sitemap.xml file to your website's root directory on your web server, and you’re all set. You can check it’s there by adding the “/sitemap.xml” extension to your website’s URL.
Once your sitemap.xml file is visible, you can submit it to Google so they’ll crawl your website and add it to their search engine index.
Go to the Google Search Console account you set up (located at https://search.google.com/) and select “Sitemaps” on the left sidebar.
Type in your URL with the “/sitemap.xml” extension and submit.
Google will eventually see your submission and crawl your site. Most site’s get crawled within a few days, but it can sometimes take 2-4 weeks or more.
Again, Google is as Google does, but this will get your site “seen” by Google. If you never previously submitted a sitemap for your site, chances are you were never in the Google index.
Using “ping” services
One way to (sometimes) speed up Google’s indexing of your site is to use third-party services called “ping” services that also figuratively tap Google on the shoulder and say, “Look over here! New site over here!”
There’s more to it, but the central idea is to move up in the crawling and indexing line by having more sites that let Google know your site exists.
I recommend using two ping services after you’ve submitted your sitemap to Google:
Each of these is simple to use. Just head to the site and enter your URL.
Monitor your website’s performance and SEO issues as they arise
For SEO professionals, data gathering and performance analysis are everyday activities.
Since Google is constantly changing its search engine algorithms and Google Search user habits change over time, tweaking SEO is always ongoing.
For small businesses and service providers such as Realtors®, this kind of SEO expertise and practice will not be achievable for most.
But that doesn’t mean setting up your SEO isn’t necessary - and it doesn’t mean you won’t get results from doing it.
The bottom line is, tracking SEO for a small or local business site that offers service in a specific locale not only doesn’t require an intensive professional level of effort and expertise, it likely wouldn't matter much even if you did.
Not to mention, you’d probably bankrupt your budget and business trying to optimize to this level, never seeing any return on your investment.
That said, monitoring your search traffic and SEO setup regularly is essential once you have it all configured at a basic level.
If you have the time and desire, monthly checks are recommended. If not, try to check your performance at least once a quarter.
If you’re technically minded, the best way to monitor your site's performance is to use the tools the professionals use, Google Analytics and Google Search Console.
Google Analytics is very technical and challenging, even for experts.
I recommend you sign up for StatCounter, https://statcounter.com/. It’s free and easy to use, plus the reports are presented in simple and straightforward ways (as opposed to Google Analytics).
You should, however, try to get minimally familiar with Google Search Console. It’s beneficial for finding technical and SEO problems with your website, and it’s a great way to see how well your site is performing for the keywords you’ve chosen.
Rather than give you a bunch of text to read about how to use it, this video is one of the best I’ve ever seen at teaching novices how to use Search Console with minimal effort.
Once you have the tools set up, it’s best to start familiarizing yourself with how your site’s performing, especially regarding keywords you want to rank for and the performance of individual pages on your site.
Remember that it may take 30-90 days for your site to start showing the effects of putting basic SEO in place. Data collection on these monitoring tools is often a bit behind since most work on a rolling monthly cycle.
Conclusions
Most real estate professionals have little or no Google Search visibility because they have not successfully set up their websites for SEO.
Without a basic setup, you can never, ever rank in Google.
Since Google operates on a “time served” model and won’t do anything automatically for your website, the search visibility “clock” only starts winding once your site is crawled and indexed.
Even if (and often, especially if) you have someone building and maintaining your website, you should follow the steps in this guide to check your setup.
Why?
Web developers, software engineers, and SEO specialists cost money. Lots of it, per every hour they work.
Most web hosting companies strive to maximize profits by spending as little time per website they build as possible.
This includes setting your site up for SEO.
In fact, despite marketing that they “set you up for SEO” or similar language, most web hosting companies do nothing more than build a site that looks good, host it live, and leave it alone as much as they can unless or until you complain.
Meanwhile, your site sits and sits and sits, leaving you wondering why you’re not seeing the results of people searching Google to find what you offer.
Sad, but it’s true. These companies work on the assumption that most real estate agents are not technical and, therefore, won’t know if they do anything about your SEO or not.
Lastly, this guide is meant to be introductory. It’s intended to help you do the minimum amount of work required in the least amount of time possible to get your site indexed actively by Google.
There is a veritable world of SEO techniques and digital marketing approaches you can dive into to get more business from internet marketing (and take business away from your competition!).
To learn more, subscribe to ReallyMarket today and follow the SEO-related tags on this blog.
It’s free and written solely to help real estate professionals market themselves to avoid the digital marketing industry's scams, high costs, and low returns.
If you want to talk SEO, just hit me up on LinkedIn or Twitter anytime. Happy to help!
