🏡 The Real Estate Marketing Update - Edition 09

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Welcome back.

We’re sticking with a heavy Google theme in this week’s edition to help you generate more leads from the top two search engines: Google and YouTube.

If you missed our previous editions, you can check them out here.

Or, if you’re caught up, let’s jump right in.

Scroll down for one actionable tip, one handy tool, and one essential news story that will impact your lead generation efforts.

Prioritize Search Intent Over Search Volume

Do you want to know what one of the biggest mistakes we see Realtors make when it comes to online marketing?

It’s this…

They, or the “experts” they’re paying, focus far too much on keywords that get a lot of search volume.

This might be helpful if they were strictly running a brand awareness campaign and had a hefty ad budget, but this is hardly ever the case.

Instead, they’re trying to do SEO centered around a list of keywords relevant to their services/location and prioritized by how many times those keywords are used.

This brings us to this edition’s tip…

Target and optimize your marketing efforts around phrases and questions with the desired intent.

Here are a few examples to further explain what we mean…

Example 1: Realtor Looking to Generate More Buyer Leads

In this example, you want people to come to your website and contact you to help them purchase their next home. You don’t want them just to hit your website, do some searches or look at some properties, and then leave.

Instead of using commonly recommended phrases like “los angeles real estate” or “los angeles homes for sale” you’d want to use phrases or questions like “what is the best neighborhood to buy a 5 bedroom home in near the top high schools in los angeles county?” or “what do I need to have ready before making an offer on a new construction home in los angeles?”

Example 2: Realtor Looking to Generate More Seller Leads

In this example, you want homeowners to hit your website solely intending to interview and hire an agent to help them sell their home. You don’t want them to look at your sold listings or see some arbitrary number of total sales volume that might mean nothing to them.

Instead of using commonly recommended phrases like “best los angeles realtor” or “top listing agent in los angeles” you’d want to use phrases or questions like “what are the top 5 questions i should be ask a listing agent before hiring them?” or “what should I sell my home for if I need to move within 30 days?”

Do you see the difference in these approaches?

Focusing on keywords with high search volumes might bring you traffic, but that traffic will convert at far lower rates.

So, before you create more content, invest in more SEO work, or even share something on social media, do this…

Think about who your ideal client is and what you want them to do once they hit your website.

This mindset will change your messaging and drastically impact your website’s conversion rate.

Reply to this email if you need help identifying your business's most opportune queries. We won’t do the work for you, but we can put you on the right path.

The best tools are usually the most simple ones. ViewStats falls into this category.

It’s a no-frills way to glean valuable insights from people who have invested time and money in growing their channels.

With YouTube being the second-largest search engine, ignoring the video platform is not an option for any realtor looking to create a consistent stream of business.

Are you growing your YouTube Channel?

Reply to this email with your YouTube Channel URL, as we’d love to check it out and show some support.

A Big Reason Why SEO Still Matters for Realtors

A recent study from SparkToro and Datos has answered a question that many marketers continue to have…

Who Sends Traffic on the Web and How Much?

This is an important question because the answers influence how and where online marketing budgets are spent.

To save you a click into the report, the answers are…

Google sends the most referral traffic (over 63%) to websites in the U.S.

What does this mean for you?

As consumers, this confirms that we still rely heavily on Google as our first and most frequently used site to get to where we want to go on the Web. As long as we all keep using Google as much as we do, they will invest more in ways to keep us in their eco-system.

As a real estate professional, this confirms that having an effective SEO strategy is still incredibly important. Most real estate transactions still originate from a Google search, and organic search results still send a significant amount of traffic to other websites. This is all despite the recent additions of AI-generated options, more prominent paid ads, and many top organic results getting pushed below the fold.

The bottom line is that if you want to generate website leads, it’s important to know this…

Organic search delivers the highest converting traffic

Knowing that, you need to have an ongoing SEO strategy, one that includes the following steps that you do regularly:

• Optimize existing content that already gets traffic

• Add new content that is relevant to the most opportune key phrases and questions that your target audience uses

• Tune up your website’s performance to ensure users have the best experience possible (i.e., site speed, ease of navigation, easy-to-find contact info, etc.)

• Get other relevant, authoritative websites to link back to your content (e.g., online PR, broken link building, cold outreach, guest blogging, etc.)

These can’t be one-off or one-time projects. We can’t stress this enough.

You need to do these things monthly (ideally weekly) to have a chance at the massive referral traffic that Google is still sending.

What has been your biggest SEO challenge?

Whether you need help knowing what to optimize or even getting started, we’re here to help. Reply to this email with what’s been holding your SEO back, and we’d be happy to share our expertise and point you in the right direction.

Thanks for reading.

See you next week.

The Real Estate Marketing Update Team @ imFORZA