Real Estate SEO Adviser

Writing Your Way to Search Engine Visibility

If you’re a real estate agent with decent writing skills, you have a powerful search engine optimization (SEO) tool right at your fingertips … literally. That tool is the ability to generate quality content on a regular basis, and when applied to your real estate SEO program it can dramatically increase your website’s search engine ranking and overall visibility.

Real estate search engine optimization / SEO and writing skills are a match made in Internet heaven. Obviously, this is good news for real estate agents who enjoy writing. But where should you begin? How can you get the best return on your writing investment?

Here’s a list of web-writing tasks you can focus on right away. The items on this list have two things in common: (1) they all require writing skills, and (2) they can all lead to considerable gains in the real estate SEO department.

So without further commentary, here are five ways you can write your way to better search engine rankings and — ultimately — increased web traffic.

1. Revisit Your Titles Elements

The title element is simply a line of HTML / web code on a web page that describes the content of that page. At least, that’s what title elements are supposed to be. But a lot of the time, I see real estate agents use non-descriptive titles, copy and paste the same title element across the whole website, or forget to use title elements altogether.

These are harmful mistakes both from a real estate SEO standpoint and a website usability standpoint.

So before you spend time or energy with any other search engine optimization task, make sure that your title elements are optimized for people and search engines alike — on every page of your real estate website. Put your key phrases in your title elements (”stacking” the title with the key phrase right up front). Use a different title on every page, and make sure it reflects the content of that page.

The benefits of doing this are two-fold. For one thing, you’re making your real estate website more helpful for people. For another thing, you’re making each page of your website more relevant to the topics discussed on those pages, and thus more likely to appear in search engine results.

2. Submit a Real Estate Press Release Online

You can also put your writing talent to good use (for SEO purposes) by writing, optimizing and distributing press releases online. This can help bring in direct traffic, but it’s also a useful technique for real estate search engine optimization … as we will see.

Using a service like PRWeb.com, you can publish a real estate press release online with keyword-rich hyperlinks back to your website. Inbound links can help your real estate SEO program because they are one of the ways that search engines rank websites.

You can also optimize your press release for certain key phrases related to your business. This gives you yet another benefit. Now you are creating a new source for direct traffic, in addition to helping your own website’s SEO program. People can find your press release by searching those relevant phrases, and they follow the links to your website.

This SEO strategy is outlined for you in the SEO book available on this website.

3. Publish Real Estate Articles Online

Here’s another technique for real estate search engine optimization that will really help you get the most from your writing talents. If you create a high-quality article on some aspect of real estate, and that article gets republished on reputable websites, it can help build your credibility.

That’s one benefit to publishing real estate articles online. But we’re talking about real estate SEO here, so let’s look at how those same articles can help with your search engine visibility campaign.

It’s common practice to include a brief author’s note or bio when publishing articles online. And it’s also common to include a link to your website within the author’s bio. You can probably see where I’m going with this, because it’s similar to the press release strategy mentioned above.

The more places your article gets published, the more links you will earn to your website (from those other sites that publish the article). Depending on the popularity of the website who publishes your piece, this can bring direct traffic in addition to real estate SEO benefits.

This strategy is spelled out in much greater detail in the Top Ten Agent book.

4. Add Content to Your Real Estate Website

Are you getting writer’s cramp yet? I hope not, because I have more ways to use your writing talents for real estate SEO purposes! And one of them is the simple (but often overlooked) strategy of expanding your website’s content.

Writing new content for your website can help you improve your search engine ranking steadily over time. Thus, content development is a crucial part of your real estate search engine optimization program.

Think of all the different phrases — and variations of phrases — that somebody might enter into a search engine when looking for real estate services in your area. You can eventually get your website to come up in search engines for all of those phrases, but you have to start by building content around the key phrases. So the more content you have … the more ways people can find you online.

Just avoid falling into the trap of writing solely for search engines. You should write for people first, while realizing your efforts will also help with search engine visibility.

Here’s the key to developing great content for your real estate website. Try to create authority documents that others in your field would link to and recommend to others. Here’s an example of such a document I created on the subject of real estate blog marketing.

In addition to being good for your readers, this kind of useful content will make other webmasters more inclined to link to your article. This adds to your link “popularity” and can further improve your search engine rankings.

You see how it all ties together? If you have good writing skills, and you’re willing to put in the time and effort, there’s nothing stopping you from achieving such success.

5. Blog Regularly

We’re almost done, so hang in there. I just have one more tip for using your writing skills for real estate search engine optimization purposes … and it’s the blog.
A real estate blog is an ideal tool for a writer, because it gives you an easy way to publish content onto your website. The more you blog, the more content you have. The more website content you have, the more likely you’ll be to come up in search results for a wide range of search phrases.

But the SEO values of blogging are just one of the many benefits a real estate blog can bring. A blog can also help you acquire inbound links, build your reputation, inform your readers, reinforce your brand … the list goes on.

Get Started Today

Now that you have some direction, you’re ready to launch your “writing for SEO” program. Take what I’ve given you and build on it. Create a content plan for yourself, incorporating the items listed above. Make it part of your daily schedule and stick to it. You’ll increase your website’s visibility and traffic in no time — I promise you that.

Dozens More Real Estate SEO Tips

If you found this article helpful, you really should download a copy of my “Top Ten Agent” e-book. In the book, I outline in step-by-step fashion the process I go through to drive real estate websites up the search engine rankings (for more traffic, more leads and more success). Download your copy today.

Good luck with your real estate search engine optimization program, and with your business in general. I hope you’ve found this article helpful.

-Brandon