The benefits of SEO and PPC for your online real estate visibility

Quality leads from potential homebuyers are every real estate agent’s dream. It takes a lot of grafting, networking and calls to generate these leads. Using third party websites to promote your business can become costly too. What if there is a better way of generating leads on autopilot? Want fewer cold calls, meetings with unqualified leads and more revenue?

Enter PPC and SEO for real estate. 

SEO and PPC make use of search engines to generate exposure and reach people that are already interested in buying what you’re selling – property. 

Any real estate agent will tell you that the industry is not for the faint of heart. It’s competitive. And online marketing is no different. 

Gaining exposure online

If you expect your real estate website to generate any exposure or to drive revenue for your business in such a competitive market, you would have to make use of search engine optimisation and paid media marketing techniques. This will help you go up against the big real estate players such as Harcourts, Seef and Pam Golding. 

By complying with search engines’ best practices, you enable search engine crawlers to understand your website. This can be quite a complicated process, but in short, search engines ultimately decide which content and information to show people. So, you have to play by their rules to benefit from their platforms and the audiences they draw.

The search marketing landscape for both SEO and PPC has become increasingly competitive over recent years. This means that merely complying with best practices is not enough to guarantee that your business will get enough exposure with search engine results. Nope. You have to earn it. 

You can earn more exposure in search engines such as Google by proving that you are the best. Easier said than done. Quality is subjective, and search engine AI have their set of rules to determine what quality looks like. 

This is where search marketers and SEO specialists come into play. They're the middlemen. They know your business, what your audience is looking for and, most importantly, what search engines deem as good quality. They can conduct real estate keyword research to identify valuable opportunities for search traffic.

As a real estate business owner, you want your website to be found and visited by potential buyers. You need to cater to various types of people with various types of needs. Your potential buyers are all different. They are all looking for different features, prices, suburbs and property types. 

Turning exposure to revenue

Here is why real estate businesses need SEO and PPC services to drive exposure and revenue:

In South Africa, there are more than 40,500 searches per month for “property for sale” and a whopping 60,500 monthly searches for “houses for sale”. According to a recent study by Ooba Homeloans, there is an increasing demand for larger homes in South Africa, despite troubled times. This is also reflected in keyword search volumes. Lower home loan interest rates and the desire for better work-from-home environments have also contributed to the growth in demand. 

That’s a lot of potential interest, but there’s a lot of competition too. Your business needs to stand out; you won’t be seen if you show up on the second page of Google. 

Even if you have a good understanding of basic SEO or PPC concepts, it’s ever-changing. It’s, therefore, a good idea to have a dedicated resource or service provider that can solely focus on your search engine marketing efforts. Just ensure they have an understanding of SEO for property websites.

Search engine optimisation is a constant process. It’s not something you can do once-off, and expect to achieve results and remain in first place rankings. Your business continually has to prove that it offers the best quality, services, products and expertise for your relevant niches. 

Driving brand awareness

Apart from coming up at the top of search results and reaching relevant audiences, SEO in real estate can help to indirectly create awareness for your brand. The more you come up in search engine results for non-branded search queries, the more people become aware of your brand. It helps your business to be more prominent. 

SEO can also help to lower your costs per click for your paid media ads; and who doesn’t want to save money? 

A well-thought-out SEO and PPC campaign can undeniably help your real estate business stand out and reach the right people online. 

Ensure your business shows up in the search engines when people are looking for someone to help them buy or sell a property. Do not spend your whole marketing budget on third party websites; invest in building and future-proofing your website and brand. After all, if the third party website you rely on messes up their own websites, SEO or ceases to exist, then you lose the only lead generating channel you had. 

If you want PPC and SEO services for your property website, contact Rogerwilco, an award-winning performance marketing agency that has proven time and time again that it delivers on its promises and is geared towards becoming a revenue-driving partner for your business.