Your real estate website is among your most important marketing assets, but even the best website can only do its job if your target audience knows where to find it. Most prospects start their search for homes and real estate agents online, using search engines like Google to seek out the best fit for their needs. Your ranking in search results plays a crucial role in driving website traffic, and that traffic is vital to your lead generation, which is why search engine optimization (SEO) should be a starring ingredient in your recipe for digital marketing success.

SEO is central to the visibility of your website, and the online reach of your real estate brand. However, it's also a topic that can feel a bit overwhelming, especially if you're not familiar with the details. So let's take a closer look at exactly what SEO is, how it works, and why picking the right SEO partner can make your life much easier.

What is SEO and Why Does it Matter For Real Estate Marketing?

When you search for something online, do you typically scroll through multiple pages of search results before clicking on a link? For most of us, the answer is a resounding no. People are most likely to click on one of the first results they see, without even scrolling to the bottom of the first page of search results. Therefore, from a marketing perspective, a higher search engine ranking means more clicks in search results, more website traffic, more leads generated by your website, and ultimately more new clients.

SEO is the key to rising up in the search rankings, and fully unlocking your real estate brand's online lead-gen potential. While it's often referred to as if it's one entity, SEO is really a holistic approach to website design and online marketing that directs a variety of tactics toward the achievement of specific marketing goals. The details of SEO can quickly get very technical, but the basic goal is simple: use proven, tested tactics to drive more traffic to your real estate website.

One of the biggest reasons that SEO matters so much to real estate marketing is that it can be very local in nature. If your real estate firm is located in the heart of Ohio, then you don't need to worry about competing with firms located halfway across the country. Your goal is to outrank local competitors and be the first website that people see when they search for homes or real estate services in the markets that you serve.

How SEO Helps You Drive Traffic and Generate Leads

In order to understand how SEO drives traffic, it helps to first understand how search engines operate. Google wants to send search users to informative, relevant, easy-to-use websites that match their search query. While the tactics used are many, you can look at the goal of SEO as making your website fit within that framework as comfortably as possible.

Since the SEO tactics that search operators like Google like to see tend to align so well with the concepts of good website design, embracing SEO is ultimately a win-win — as long as you're willing to invest the necessary effort. Here are a few ways that SEO helps you drive traffic and generate leads:

• Website Design and Ease of Use
  The fundamentals of how your website is designed play an important role in SEO on many levels. How fast your website loads, how easy it is to navigate, and how well it scales to mobile devices all factor into your SEO success. These are all standard priorities of modern web design because they're good for SEO and also help to deliver the best possible experience to your website visitors. So if your website has become a bit outdated over the years, a fresh redesign can be the perfect starting point for upping your SEO game.
• Informative and Regularly-Updated Content
  When search users have a question, search engine algorithms want to send them to a relevant website that provides the answer. Content is such an important part of any SEO strategy, both for the valuable information it contains and for how it helps you integrate other aspects of SEO. Researching and using the right keywords with the right frequency, for example, is much easier when you have a blog where you can post relevant content that speaks to the needs of your audience. Content marketing also dovetails perfectly with local SEO, allowing you to touch on the topics, attractions, events, and communities that matter most to your target audience.
• On-Page SEO
  Content is one of the many factors that fall into the category of on-page SEO, and on-page SEO has a huge impact on how your website is designed. It includes familiar topics like internal/external links, URLs, images, content, and page speed, as well as more technical topics. If you're not familiar with things like schema markup, meta descriptions, title tags, and headers, don't worry — that's where the experienced SEO pros can help. Just remember that on-page SEO includes things you can see, like content and links, along with things that happen "under the hood" of your real estate website.
• Local SEO
  Local SEO includes many of the topics that we've covered already, like keywords and content, which allow you to maximize visibility in the markets where you do business. It's what allows you to outrank competitors in your markets, and appeal to prospects who are ready to buy/sell in those markets. If you want to dominate your market online, then local SEO should be central to your marketing plan.

Why Choosing the Right Partner is Essential to SEO Success

Given its technical nature and how important it is to marketing success, it's no surprise that SEO has very much become its own thriving industry within the larger digital marketing sphere. Getting SEO right requires a detailed plan, a long-term commitment to executing that plan, and an understanding of the latest cutting-edge topics in a constantly evolving marketing area. SEO success also requires you to be quite nimble and adaptable, because at any time, search engine operators (looking at you, Google) can change the game's rules.

To navigate the complex world of SEO, adapt to the inevitable changes in SEO that will come in the future, and maximize the ROI of your SEO strategy, it's vital to have a partner that you can trust to deliver long-term results. The right partner can also help ensure that you're fully equipped to capitalize on the increased traffic that your SEO generates, by enhancing the lead capture capabilities of your website and providing the tools that you need to follow up with every lead.

From website design to custom content creation and everything in between, our team at Delta Media Group® integrates SEO into many aspects of your digital marketing plan. We've been helping real estate firms develop successful SEO strategies for many years, and we'd love to show you more about how we can help you dominate your market online with SEO.