Real Estate is the largest independent sales force in the United States. There are over 2 million agents and over 100K brokerages operating in all corners of our great country. As a real estate agent in your city, you compete with dozens of brokerages and hundreds (or even thousands) of agents in your local market.

What does that all mean? Well, it means you really have to stand out to get noticed - and get leads. 

With technology pushes ahead ever faster each day and social media intertwined with all our lives on a daily basis, that means the marketing noise factor for your services is very noisy and almost totally dependent now on technology. 

Plus, over 55 trillion dollars will change hand to the Millennial and newer generations over the coming years. 

If you're to get noticed, that means you must have a solid presence on the web, social media and, most importantly, web search via Google and Bing. There's just no denying it and those agents who rely solely on referrals, friends, and family or old-school techniques will either not grow their fortunes or, worse, fade almost completely away. 

So how do you get more home buyers and sellers to your door? A good web presence and one that scores well in search is the ticket.

Same as it ever was since "The Google" came about. 

Here are 5 keys to getting found in web search. 

1. Get Mobile-Ready: Google's algorithm changes over the last year or so have indicated a strong move to emphasize how mobile web searchers find things they want and need on the web. That includes real estate and real estate agents. Your site must be what's called "mobile responsive" so it adjusts in all the right look and feel (and functional) ways when viewed on mobile devices. Effectively, the desktop is dead (well, dying). If your site doesn't pass the responsiveness test Google runs against it when it's indexed, your site simply won't rank. Be sure your website developers build your site with built-in responsiveness and also something called AMP, or Accelerated Mobile Pages. This Google-created project ensures websites are fast when viewed on mobile; another huge ranking criteria for Google now. If you had your website built any time prior to now, the chances are you don't have either. Over 99% of agent for whom we build high-performing custom websites don't have responsive sites or AMP.
2. Emphasize Solid Technical SEO - A site's technical configuration is supremely important for getting good rankings in search results. Sadly, most real estate agents have bad or even non-existent technical SEO because most web development firms and hosting companies simply put together a good-looking site and don't ever configure the site itself with proper headings, meta tagging, titles, sitemaps and dozens more technical items. Agents are not web developers, nor should they be. That said, most web hosting companies take advantage of the agents not being able to know whether they're done a good job or not since most agents equate a good-looking site with one that performs well. Nope. Never the case. A good way to keep them honest? Once the site is up, head over to an SEO audit tool site like https://www.woorank.com/ and run it against your domain. Save the results or take a screenshot of the results screen, share it with your development company and make them fix the problems. You may not understand all the report items, but they will. Hold them to addressing all the errors and problems - or find yourself another web hosting company.
3. Get great web content - You can have a good looking site all day long, but if the menus, images, video and, most importantly, the copy (or words on the site) are not very well-designed to match a good search engine strategy for keywords and phrases, you simply won't rank. Most agents make the mistake of writing their own copy or forcing their developers to go with their words instead of time-tested, researched and purposefully-designed content aimed at hitting the mark on Google search trends for relevancy and volume. If your web company is giving you advice on wording, you're smart to accept it. They've likely researched the trends and are trying to get more people to your door for you. The words on your site matter. In fact, they matter a lot. Google's crawler and search indexing actually use artificial intelligence to try to "understand" what your site is about like a human would and thus rank it correctly. That "understanding" can be helped or harmed by picking words you like as opposed to words that are researched to be effective. Hire a good developer familiar with SEO and even think about hiring a copywriter from a service like www.upwork.com. A few hundred dollars can make the difference in copy that gets you ranked vs. years in Google's search doghouse.
4. Monitor your site every month - Launching your site isn't the end, it's only the beginning. Having good copy and content on your site when you launch isn't an end all, be all either. Google makes some change to their search indexing every single day. As well, they frequently make major changes to their ranking criteria too. That means what works on day one to attract visitors to your site may not be as effective the next month. If you don't have a web partner or hosting company who can monitor your site's performance and make changes to your technical SEO, your copy and other software components, you won't appear in Google's search results when buyers change their search habits. It's that simple. Stay on top of it or you won't rank.
5. Build Backlinks - Good sites always have other sites that reference them by linking to them on the web. Google thinks very highly of this as well, since it shows your site has authority in a subject matter. Remember the part above about Google trying to understand what your site is about? Part of how it does this is to take other sites' word for it. In other words, the more often other respected and authoritative sites link to your site, the more Google can be sure your site is about what it thinks it is about. Building backlinks is an activity you should set aside an hour or two per week to do. Over time, it will really boost your SEO. Some good ways to do it? Ask established real estate bloggers to let you write guest posts. Publish expert advice on forums like RealtyTimes, ActiveRain and Medium. Comment on other people's posts too and make sure to Tweet a lot, post to Facebook often. It helps other people find you who might also backlink to your site.

These 5 things can help you in your fight (and it is a fight!) to stay search-relevant. Times are quickly changing and real estate is too. The agents who get digitally-savvy quick won't be the dead. 

Perhaps the number one things you can do to help your SEO? Realize how important it is and that it's a long, long term activity you must commit to not just for how long it takes to get your site up and running, but over the entirety of your career. It's just the reality of the situation.

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More Resources for You

• How Google Search Works - https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/
• How to Build Backlinks - https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/247984
• 5 Reasons You Must Optimize for Mobile - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ian-mills/5-reasons-you-absolutely-_b_5122485.html
• Why Agents Spend Good Money on Bad Websites - https://news.homepocket.com/for-realtors/most-real-estate-agents-are-paying-good-money-for-bad-websites

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