“Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” -- Mark Twain (and also a SEO, somewhere, most likely.)
When you got into real estate, you probably had visions of beautiful homes, beaming clients, and huge commission checks dancing in your head, right? You probably didn’t think that you would end up having to learn quite so much about websites, content marketing, and, most mysteriously, SEO.
SEO, or search engine optimization, is the magic key to getting all of the beautifully crafted content out into the world and in front of the eyes of potential customers. And by the time you found out about SEO, and maybe even hired someone who said he could help with SEO, you started reading articles about the death of SEO. Wow, that was quick, right?
But, of course, SEO isn’t dead. It can’t be. Because the fact is, as long as there are search engines and algorithms that determine what websites and what content gets placed before potential clients, SEO is something that you have to think about. The problem is the way that SEO used to be done isn’t the way that it is done now. SEO has changed, and you, and your IT experts, need to change with it.
Content Matters
There was a time in the dim and distant past when SEO was a fairly mechanical process. Lots of content with lots of the right keywords, tags and titles optimized for the search terms you wanted, and maybe a few of the right backlinks to hold it all together could ensure you a fairly good rank over time. Then, Google Panda arrived.
Google Panda was a product that used machine learning to apply human impressions and evaluations to the websites it scanned. Humans evaluate the quality of a website quickly and intuitively. By applying the opinions and ratings of humans to a number of websites, Google Panda then “learned” how to know what was high quality content and what was low quality content. It began to understand what made a page good and useful as opposed to a page that was spammy and stuffed with keywords.
Links Matter
Then, a couple of years later, Google Penguin arrived to clean up those backlinks that so-called SEO experts had been creating for years. Now, high authority sites and legitimate links became the gold standard. Gone were the days of “black-hat SEO” where link-bombing a site with no user function would get you anywhere. Google sought, with these and other adjustments, to ensure that only the best and most useful content would reach the higher ranks of its search engine.
Now, these elements of punishing poor practices are baked into the Google algorithm, along with a continuing process of review by human evaluators to ensure that the highest standards continue to be met.
So what now?
So what does this mean for you and for your online presence? Well, for starters, it means that those old-fashioned quick and dirty SEO “experts” can no longer help you. Stuffing your content with keywords or building a ton of spammy backlinks simply cannot do what you need. Let that go.
So what does work today? First of all, great, useful, user-friendly content. Your clients, and potential clients, need real solutions to their real estate problems. They need real information that helps them make informed decisions throughout their search. They need content that helps ensure that they recognize you as the market expert for their real estate needs.
Beyond that, you need to connect with others. Instead of artificial backlinks, you need to be communicating with other Realtors in your area. You need social signals from your social media marketing and from satisfied clients linking to your pages. You need to add value when you’re online in order to be rewarded with responsive colleagues and clients.
We offer the latest in truly modern SEO/SEM services, with quality links and best practices. Connect with us today, we would love to go over our various marketing programs with you to see what will best fit your needs.
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