While larger businesses have already created a name and established a dominant foothold in the online world, smaller real estate players will need to acknowledge how complex the market is. Coming up with ideas is one thing, but actually launching your real estate business is a more challenging matter.
The Role of Digital Marketing in Managing a Real Estate Business
One of the biggest priorities—and challenges—of starting a company would be funding. To keep a business going, it must have enough funds and create a significant ROI to keep itself going. In that regard, digital marketing is there to drive the overall goal of sales and ensure that the money spent on the business actually translates to profit.
Investing in digital marketing is something that is often taken for granted. The effectiveness of this facet of a business is unparalleled in terms of its ability to grow an enterprise. Aside from that, its dynamic nature can target multiple audiences through different platforms—all it takes is the right partner to push your goals forward.
Digital marketing does not work in a sense where you select one kind and use it thoroughly. For it to be effective, it needs to be tethered to multiple forms of marketing—such as graphic design, video media, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, and Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This can be easily done by a digital marketing agency but is also possible to do for one’s own business.
The Importance of Utilizing Proper SEO Strategies
Utilizing SEO for business may seem a straightforward process—but it can be much more complicated than you take it for. For real estate businesses breaching the online market, it isn’t simply about going through the motions. To truly succeed, one must approach this practice using the appropriate strategies; else, all your efforts can merely be wasted, or even possibly harm your business in the long run.
To help you properly craft an SEO strategy for your business, here are eight of the most common mistakes that businesses do in their SEO efforts:
Mistake #1. Your Audience is Too General
The internet is a vast landscape, and it’s easy to attempt to cast a wide net to capture as much of your audience as possible. While that’s one approach to digital marketing, this would be too much of an effort for a minimal increase in your leads—as ill-targetted content won’t produce the quality leads that your business needs to make a sale.
By thinking about what niche your business serves, you can craft SEO content that can target specific people and demographics. These people are the ones who are going to be most likely to do business with you.
As a real estate provider in St. Louis, Missouri, your target market are those from your area, not people all the way in New York! By thinking about a customer’s needs and wants, as well as problems they may be having, you can tailor-fit articles and posts to make their way into the local sphere of your audience.
Mistake #2. Utilizing the Wrong Keywords
SEO survives and thrives on the basis of keywords. Google’s algorithm provides its rankings based on specific keywords and their relations to a person’s searched words. As “common knowledge” as this might sound, unfortunately, many businesses still fail to perform proper keyword research.
Proper keywords need to be researched well to produce optimal results. This will create a better ranking on search engine results pages and is crucial to the success of your business. Google Keyword Planner in Google Ads can assist you with this on your site.
Mistake #3. On-Site SEO is Poor
There are two types of SEO, namely: on-site and off-site. Many businesses focus on the latter but fail to optimize the former type. Creating a page must have optimization already in mind, with the description tags properly crafted. Content headings must also be formulated well as a way to bump up on-site SEO effectiveness.
Google’s crawlers are able to sniff out poorly optimized websites, which will cancel out what could have been well-created content. By taking that extra step to optimizing on-site, you avoid losing the potential traffic you could have gained from all of your content.
Mistake #4. Poorly Optimized Mobile Websites
We live in what is called the mobile era, wherein a majority of the population has access to the internet via their smartphones. In fact, more often than not, users are likely to use a mobile device to surf the internet, which is why it’s crucial to create a mobile-optimized website.
With Google being the giant that it is, it is always working to make things better for all users. This means that Google will always rank websites that are well-optimized for mobile higher than those that are not, mainly because it won’t provide a good experience for those on mobile devices.
Digital marketing agencies can assist with web design and provide much-needed tweaking to optimize a website to provide a better user experience. After all, ranking on a search engine results page needs to encompass all kinds of optimizations when it comes to SEO.
Mistake #5. Producing Sub-Par Content
You can be churning out tons of content, but if it is not usable or digestible by your audience, then what’s the point? Content is definitely king—and it will help you position your brand in the marketplace.
In terms of SEO, however, quality always surpasses quantity. Plagiarizing sources just to get content out there is neither a good nor legal way to go about SEO content creation.
Finding the sweet spot for publishing content can assure that your website generates better statistics for your business. Additionally, don’t just stick to blog posts that are written. Try out video media, informational checklists, interactive quizzes, and other kinds of related media for your real-estate business.
Mistake #6. Social Media Presence Is Poor
Social media is a great and usually free way to promote your business—but only if utilized properly. This means that you must have a strategy when it comes to dealing with social media accounts. By pairing this with your SEO strategy, you can further spread the influence of your business on a more interactive platform.
Strategies should contain posting times, what content to put out and share, interactions with followers, and other methods of communicating your brand’s best practices. Your business’ social media accounts provide another avenue to boost your business, which is why it can be beneficial to add a social media manager to your marketing team.
Mistake #7. Site Errors are Persistent
Google is not very kind to webmasters who are not careful. This means that if you want your page to rank, you need everything to be working in top form. Broken, harmful, or misleading links can destroy your site’s reputation and therefore drop your rankings. Pay attention to your website’s health through its analytic tools, and do your due diligence in fixing the anomalies.
Mistake #8. Slow Loading Pages
People hate waiting for pages to load. Your webpages should be loading at a maximum of three seconds—otherwise, people may leave and abandon all intent to do business with you.
Aside from that, Google’s algorithms pay close attention to the loading speed of the pages on a website. Slow-moving websites would rank much lower on results pages, which would stem your online traffic even further. This means you have some optimization to do when it comes to web page loading times to rank higher.
Conclusion
This is a lot of information to take into account in terms of SEO development for business growth. It is true that SEO is a game that rewards patience and perseverance, as it is a long-term growth strategy and tool. The best way to go about all this is to consult the assistance of a digital marketing specialist who can help you with the complex nature of SEO.
Framework Pros is the best digital marketing agency in St. Louis, Missouri, offering the right mix of efforts in marketing for the digital sphere. Combining the best practices of SEO, PPC advertising, social media management, and other management tools, we can assist your business’ growth. Get in touch with us today and boost your business to the forefront of the internet!