Real Estate SEO Adviser

The Search Engine as Marketing Channel

I once got a phone call from a real estate who was new industry. He was calling to inquire about my real estate SEO /search engine optimization services. He had a certain urgency to his tone of voice, so I knew what was coming next.

He said he was ready to put a lot of marketing dollars toward SEO, in the hopes that it would help him establish his business. “I really believe in the search engine optimization thing,” I remember him saying. “I know it’s going to bring a lot of business.”

I agreed that, yes, a strong SEO program can certainly drive web traffic. And if you capitalize on that web traffic and have a good lead generation program, then you can certainly derive new clients from your efforts.

But here’s where the conversation went south. This agent had earmarked nearly his entire marketing budget for search engine optimization. It was to be his one-shot strategy for success in the real estate business.

Long story short, I regretfully declined offering my services to this nice, eager young man. I know a lot of SEO firms out there would have gobbled up his business (and his budget), but I couldn’t do it … and here’s why:

A real estate SEO program takes time to develop and produce results. It’s a marathon approach to website traffic … not a sprint. So I realized that if this individual spent all of his marketing dollars on SEO off the bat, his business might be a failure before his search engine visibility began producing any viable leads. Search engine optimization takes time, patience and persistence — it’s not a direct marketing strategy by any stretch of the imagination.

Real Estate Search Engine Marketing Wisdom

With that little story out of the way, here’s what I think you should know about real estate SEO in particular, and Internet marketing success in general.

• Relying on just one marketing channel is a recipe for frustration and failure.
• Search engine optimization takes time to “kick in.” The first few weeks / months of a real estate SEO campaign will be spent doing a lot of work with not much movement. It comes in time, though.
• The more marketing channels you can afford to pursue, the better. This gives you broader marketing reach, and it also allows you to test and compare various techniques.
• SEO can be highly effective in the long run, but it should be thought of as a “quick” or short-term approach to online marketing and lead generation.
• SEO should be used in conjunction with other online strategies, such as blogging, press releases, articles, networking, etc.
• I recommend putting money and effort toward search engine optimization after you have a steady trickle of leads from other sources. In other words, you should have leads coming from elsewhere before pursuing a long-term real estate search marketing program.