Are You Caught Up in the Real Estate SEO Buzz?
I think it’s time to stop focusing so intensley on search engine optimization and real estate websites.
How many ways are there to market your real estate website? There are hundreds and thousands of ways.
SEO is only one of them. It is only a small part of any good marketing plan. Search Engine Optimization is not a marketing plan.
What’s worse is that SEO is extremely transparent and duplicatable, meaning your competition can pickup on exactly what you are up to, copy it and eventually dilute the effectiveness of your work.
They can analyze your keywords, trace your backlinks and a whole host of other things that turn your hard work into their easy gain. Eventually, they’ll catch up…
So if your real estate business depends largely on internet leads generated primarily because of your search engine ranking, you are building a business that is at the mercy of Google. And no one even knows if Google will exist in 3 years.
Of course investing in SEO can be profitable, but SEO does not an internet marketing plan make.
Now I understand that most SEO companies will balk at what I am saying.
They would probably pull out the NAR study on how 74% or 75% of folks use the internet to search for real estate and how that proves that SEO should be priority 1 on any real estate professionals internet marketing plan.
It doesn’t prove that at all.
All studies like this show are that 74% or 75% of people use the internet to search for a property. It shows that you need to be accessible online. That’s it. The rest is opinion. You can make those numbers say anything else that you want.
Does a high search engine ranking equal a good real estate business? No way. For every example where that is true, you can find 10 or more where it doesn’t hold water.
So making high rankings your number one website priority isn’t really your goal… More business is your goal. The two are not synonymous.
So why are all of the real estate mailing lists and forums constantly buzzing with talk about SEO – how to do it, the good companies, the right tactics… etc.?
It’s because most people view SEO as the answer to their lead generation problems on the internet. Optimizing your real estate website provides you the with a tremendous hope for gain, for not too large of an investment.
Plus, search engine optimization isn’t rocket science. You can get the basic grasp of things in a weekend or two of reading. After you get some basics under your belt… it seems easy.
After a while though, you realize that it quickly turns into glorified grunt work.
I should know, I used to do a lot of it.
But SEO is not the work of a business owner. It is the work of a contractor.
That’s not to say it is not valuable. But it is a commodity. It can be outsourced. And anything that can be done better or more cheaply by someone else means that it is not the best use of your time, effort or focus.
Think about this…
Just how many real estate websites can be in the top 10 for a certain keyword phrase anyway? Exactly 10, that’s it.
And it is getting more and more expensive (in both time and money) to get there.
In fact, the wild west mentality of the internet isn’t going to last forever. The big guerillas (and many more of the small guerillas) have finally caught on and are starting to pump a lot of money into marketing online.
So that means you have to get smarter...
And wouldn’t it be smarter to look at what the masses of real estate professionals are doing online and then do something different? It’s one of the more profitable business strategies there is.
If everyone is chasing the SEO train, look for other ways to drive prospects to your website.
Direct mail, joint ventures, referral programs, pay-per-click ads, ezine marketing, teleseminars, email courses – the list is endless.
So get your head up out of the SEO sand and take a look around. You’ve got tons of options to drive traffic to your real estate website.
Get creative, be different and use proven marketing tactics to ensure your business success with or without SEO.
