Internet Marketing and Search Engine Optimization for Real Estate Websites

The real estate industry is one of the most competitiveindustries around when it comes to online marketing techniques such as search engine optimization. One of the many things that makes real estate search engine optimization so difficult is the sheer number of real estate websites available in any givenmarket. Even at the local community level you may have 5-20 real estate officesand agents' websites competing for the limited number of top positions onGoogle for a given keyword, and as if that is not enough, you then have nationalsites like Trulia or Zillow or article directories and blogs clogging theresults as well with sometimes irrelevant information. By the time you arelooking at the city level for a reasonable sized city, there are thousands ofsites competing for a few results on the top page. This all adds up to asituation that makes it difficult to drive traffic and attain quality leads viasearch engine optimization unless you have a really good SEO team such as chrispowell.net.

When it comes down to it, if you want to drive trafficdirectly via search engine optimization you have a few options: The first is to rank on the first page for 'City  name' realestate and other important key phrases. That is tough, but doable if you havea very talented SEO team. This is a task that usually requires a reasonablebudget ranging from $500 per month for a smaller town to potentially $1000 to $3000 per month or more for a bigger city. If an individual, company or servicetells you they can do it for $25 or even $100 per month they are lying and youare basically throwing your money away. Another option is to build lots ofcontent focused on everything and everywhere that you are looking for leadsfrom. This actually requires a lot of work on the other end which is contentdevelopment and keyword targeting. The goal here is to get lots of traffic from hundreds or thousands of different keywords that are relevant to your business.You could also simply create a system that displays really good content thatappears unique to the search engines and is indexable by the search engines. Thisis something that can be done by intelligently pulling data from the MLS, butdoing that also requires a lot of work on the front end development and areally well thought out strategy. And in many cases, search engines may besmarter than you think when it comes to identifying unique content. This toocan be expensive and difficult to manage.

There are a lot of other tactics that can be used to drivetraffic for real estate website. It can be helpful to be listed on the larger national real estate sites. How many of these a site wishes to be on can vary dependingon what they are willing to spend. If search engine optimization is still agoal, it is essential that you make sure you buy ads on sites that link back toyour site. Another popular strategy is to post listings on craigslist. A goodand legitimate campaign on craigslist can potentially drive hundreds ofvisitors to your site per day. There are lots of other similar classifieds aswell. You may also choose to write a blog or newsletter and establish afollowing. This will only be effective if you provide valuable information andthen you still need to attract readership

Ultimately, search engine optimization for real estatewebsites can be an effective strategy, but like almost any other strategy that is going to make you money it generally requires a significant investment either in terms of dollars or labor.