SEO – The New Age of Marketing

Technology rules the world. With the Internet and smart phones, information is available with the touch of a button. This has changed the way a company, including those in real estate, markets their services and products to the masses. Traditional marketing has transitioned to online marketing. Looking for someone to sell your home? Google it!

Companies now are fighting for their website to be the top spot on a Google search. How is that possible? It’s called Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. SEO is a methodology of strategies and techniques used to increase the amount of visitors to a website by obtaining high-ranking placement from search engines such as Google, Yahoo or Bing. These results are organic and earned, not bought.

Nora Sullivan, national trainer with United Country Real Estate, provides a few tips to help get your website to the top of the list.

• Social shares and social presence have a synergistic affect improving website SEO because it’s the easiest way google can view a business as having a following, consumer respect, brand and local presence.  United Country offices are encouraged to post on their business page, and link back to listings, office website, videos, etc.  Facebook pages for business are indexed, personal pages are not. Let’s not forget Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube. All social presence helps with SEO and branding.

• Local searches continues to gain strength, enhance SEO and improve local rankings.  Claim your Google Business, complete your profile and incorporate keywords where appropriate. Make sure your name, address and phone number are consistent across all channels. This includes your website, social media profiles, review sites and directory.

• On-page topic modeling is important.  If your title has the keyword “luxury”, write in the content why it’s luxurious and add the luxury features of the real estate.  Semantic search seeks information to support the title that is related to the topic or keyword. Similarly, if your title includes the keyword “farm,” write about the type of crops, livestock, soil, fenced acres, barns, etc.  As algorithms become more sophisticated, it’s increasingly important to include contextually related content into your copy instead of just typing the keyword over and over and over.

SEO is increasingly encompassing the technical components of online marketing. Content marketing is now the key driver of search engine rankings.  If you’re not focused on SEO results, mostly likely, you are falling behind in the game.

United Country Real Estate’s marketing program includes the highest ranked and largest portfolios of specialty program marketing websites, unequaled national print advertising and the largest internal real estate advertising agency.  For more information about United Country or any of their services, visit www.unitedcountry.com.