Our Listings Reach Over 3 Million Monthly Viewers
They say first impressions are everything. Many real estate agents, myself included, continually stress the importance of quality listing photos and cleaning before showings. These are first impressions of real estate. However, unlike meeting someone by chance and making your first impression on the fly, real estate first impressions are calculated and they start far before a prospective buyer is looking at photos of a property.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is critically important to have your listings seen. SEO is the practice of incorporating keywords, backlinks, and metadata onto your website and web pages to boost them higher up in the search results as people search those specific keywords. A real estate agent can spend hours editing beautiful photos, creating an exceptional video walkthrough, and writing a listing description that tells a captivating story, but, if they fail to optimize the listing copy with keywords, all their hard work will go unnoticed.
Buyers Aren’t Searching For Your Address
Many real estate agents alike make the mistake of over-using a property’s address in the title and listing copy. When sellers search for their address online, their property listing is the first to show up, and they consider it a job well done. That is not the case. No buyer is searching for your property by typing in the address.
Let’s say you’re a buyer from Minnesota, and you’re trying to find a cabin property for sale in Western Colorado for personal use during hunting season. You’re not going to know specific addresses, towns, and referential locations. Instead, you’re going to search in a general region for phrases like, “hunting properties for sale in Western Colorado,” “Colorado cabins for sale bordering national forest,” and “Western Colorado hunting land for sale.”
Any post optimized for a specific address will never show up. A listing post optimized for those specific, regional keywords, will.
Importance of Keywords in Real Estate SEO
Great listing copy tells a story and strategically incorporates keywords and phrases. The ideal keyword has an average to high search volume and is tied to a larger region rather than a specific place. For example, even though my brokerage is located in Cedaredge, Colorado and many of my listings are in Cedaredge, Eckert, and on the Grand Mesa, I first optimize all of my posts for Western Colorado, because prospective buyers won’t know where Cedaredge, Eckert, Delta, and other small towns are.
Building Credibility
SEO isn’t a simple science. Beyond injecting your listing copy with keywords, you also need to build credibility for your website.
Creating single-page listings with their URL for every property is the fastest way to destroy your search engine ranking. It takes months of repetitive use across your website for pages to start ranking for certain keywords. Using “hunting cabin for sale in Western Colorado” 10 times in one listing post won’t suddenly have that post showing up on Page 1 when people search that phrase.
Furthermore, incorporating internal and external backlinks within your listing copy shows search engines that your website is credible. In turn, the search engine assigns more value to it than a website that has never been linked to.
A smart real estate agent will have a website that showcases their listings and has a blog. That allows them to internally link to listings within the blog copy and blog posts within the listing copy.
Finding external credible websites to use your keywords and link to your original post is more challenging, but another essential element to proper SEO. For me, that meant establishing my brand and website, Colorado Country Broker, as a tool to help promote my brokerage and website, United Country Real Estate Western Land & Lifestyle Properties. Colorado Country Broker has built a name, ranking, and audience for showing the Western Colorado lifestyle, while Western Land & Lifestyle Properties ranks highly for all things real estate. The two websites seamlessly work together to promote and sell my listings, and each is filled with external backlinks to the other website.
Finally, United Country Real Estate Western Land & Lifestyle Properties leverages a network of specialty property websites to promote niche listings like hunting properties, lots and land, farms and ranches, and country homes. In total, our United Country network consists of thousands of websites and receives over 3 million monthly views, and every site ranks highly for specific keywords that give our niche listings an advantage.
Why This Matters To You
When you’re interviewing real estate brokers to list your property, ask them about their SEO strategy. If they’re not already ranking on Page 1 for multiple keywords that would describe your property to an unknown buyer and can’t name a network of websites too, your listing is not going to be exposed to the most buyers possible. It’s important to remember that not every buyer reads your local paper or uses Zillow to shop for properties. If they can’t tell you about their strategy beyond local advertising, the MLS or Trulia or Zillow, then bring your listing to United Country Real Estate Western Land & Lifestyle Properties instead.
