How to Generate Free Real Estate Business from Google

Google is a powerful search engine tool that helps users locate information online based on keywords. In short, Google uses these keywords to locate sources online and display them for you according to their relevance and popularity to your keywords. With 90.46% of the search engine market share, Google is by far the most popular, and it's no surprise it has claimed the generic term for looking up information online. Instead of saying, "Look it up online," you say, "Google it."

There's plenty of opportunity on Google and real estate professionals must take advantage of its influential tools in order to grow their business and gain market share. If you want to find home buyers, you need to go where they are -- online.

There's a trade-off between spending time vs. money when deciding between options for solutions. You can either spend more time solving a problem and less money, or you can spend more money and less time. When it comes to generation leads to grow your real estate business, Google also entails this trade-off. Google has two tools to help you reach and engage consumers: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM). Since SEM entails financing, I will share SEO strategies that generate free real estate business from Google.

1. Generating Real Estate Business with Search Engine Optimization for Google

SEO is the "spend more time, save money" strategy and attracts consumers to your website, also known as organic traffic. You can increase the amount of organic to your website by tailoring its content to Google's algorithm. Your traffic will experience a snowball effect when implemented correctly – the more quality traffic you receive, the higher you'll rank on a relevant Search Engine Results List (SERL), and that means even more traffic. In a nutshell, that means including relevant keywords throughout content, consistently updating content, and keeping visitors on your website with valuable information.

Below are tactics to enhance your website's SEO and increase organic website traffic:

1. Real Estate Blogging – Each week, do some research and write a 500-word article about the real estate industry, your city, or helpful tips for buyers and sellers.

2. Automated SEO City Reports – These are like real estate blogs but with specific information such as snapshots of homes for sale, featured properties, market data, school reports, cities, counties, and neighborhoods. Since this type of information is highly sought after by prospects, it will attract relevant traffic to your website.

3. Update Pages with Keywords – Review each page and blog article on your website and see if its keyword is included in the title, each header, description, link, paragraph, and image file. Examine this article—can you figure out the keyword?

   • It's important to note, keywords or keyword phrases do not have to match a search exactly. So a keyword phrase like "California Home Sales" would still be included in a search for "Homes for Sale in California."

4. Include Outbound Links – Include a source to support the claim for each fact that you share to increase the credibility of your content. You can also use them to provide third-party tools that a buyer or seller might find useful. Examine this article, how are outbound links incorporated?

5. Remove Broken Links – Broken links cause a poor user experience, hurts your SEO, and lowers your SERL ranking. After you've located broken links, go to your website and either update, remove, or set up a redirect for the link.

6. Increase Backlinks – Backlinks are links on other websites that drive traffic to your website. For example, let's say you have a broker branded website and your own. If you include a link on your broker branded website that directs traffic to your website, that's a backlink. You can increase backlinks to your website by partnering with local community members, bloggers, newspapers, philanthropies, etc.

7. Increase Web Page Load Speed – Your website's speed affects its bounce rate – the rate at which visitors exit your website without any interactions within 30 seconds. A high bounce rate will lower your SERL ranking. To decrease your website's load speed, you can compress images, remove unnecessary HTML/CSS code, unused page elements, etc. The HubSpot Website Grader tool is extremely useful in identify speed detractors in addition to performance, mobile adaptability, and security.

8. Use Formatting with Headers and Bullet Points – Your writing should follow a basic structure that's scannable and easy to digest. Using headers at the beginning of sections, bullet points to separate ideas, and bold to emphasize words are just a few ways you can use formatting to make your writing scannable and reader friendly.

9. Spelling and Grammar – Poor spelling and grammar will hurt your credibility, so double check your work. Grammarly is a free and useful spelling and grammar tool that checks for errors and recommends corrections as you type. You can install into Google Chrome as an extension.

10. Pick a Catchy Title – Catchy titles include buzzwords like "The Top 5…" or "…in 2021" and get people to click on your article.

11. Set Up Google Business – When a consumer begins their search online for an agent or brokerage to work with, their Google search might say, "Real estate agents in San Diego." A map with brokerages will appear that makes it easier to find local business. Setting up your business with Google will add your business to this map – which displays at the top of a local search.

12. Mobile Adaptability – According to a Hitwise's Mobile Search Topics & Themes [US] Report, 60% of all online searches and 48% of real estate/properties industry searches were via mobile device. If your website isn't mobile compatible, Google will penalize your website and rank it lower on its SERL. If your website is mobile adaptive, you will rank higher and provide a good user experience for your website visitors.

Now that we've gone over several ways to drive organic traffic to your website to generate free business from Google, let's go over how to convert that traffic. In order to convert organic traffic into leads, you must include lead capture forms and contact forms through out your website.

2. Converting Organic Traffic into Leads

A home buyer looking for valuable, relevant content will find a buyer's resource page helpful. By setting up a lead capture form on valuable information like this, you can entice a website visitor to exchange their contact information for your buyer information – converting them into a lead. Additionally, a blog article, city reports, seller's resource page, listings page, and other tools like a home or comparative market analysis should be leveraged to capture and convert website traffic into a lead.

In order to increase traffic and conversion rates, you must learn how to analyze data and make decisions based on your understanding of the data. Optimization is usually implemented through A/B testing. To learn more about analyzing website traffic to optimize your website's SEO, check out Google Analytics.

When it comes to making important business decisions, you can either spend more time and less money or spend more money and less time. Attracting organic leads to generate free real estate business from Google is considered the former. Although SEO strategies take time to mature, they will generate passive leads that will consistently fill your funnel.

To view the original article, visit the TorchX blog.