SEO is not just a tactic or a side job — it is a real estate marketing strategy

In talking with a friend who was looking at a new website, he told me he would use one company for the web design and another for SEO. When I checked out the SEO shop, it turned out to be one of those cheap SEO shops promising the world — and with no experience in marketing. Zilch. Nothing.

Now that is a really bad idea! A formula for disaster, in fact.

A website without SEO won’t do a thing for you. You might as well set up shop in the desert.

A website with SEO as an afterthought will be marginally better — but not much. Especially not in this day and age when all your competitors have a digital presence as well.

A website must be built from the ground up with SEO at the core of the development — and SEO cannot be treated as a tactic, but as a real marketing strategy.

Sure, you need to find the right keywords or keyphrases, and optimize your content for that. You need browser caching and some other technical SEO features in order for your SEO to work.

But you need a lot more than that to convert website visitors into leads.

You may need a referral system, or an SMS based review system. Maybe you need a drip marketing campaign. There may be an opportunity to segment your audiences and write content specifically for some of the segments — think buyers of high end properties, or think of buyers of lake-view properties with boat docks if you live around lakes.

All of those actions COMBINED will result in SEO that delivers results. Most SEO experts and web designers, however, have no clue about these topics. They are, of course, traditional marketing topics, going by many different names — content marketing, inbound marketing, email marketing, digital marketing, reference marketing, lead gen, etc.

That is why at Real Digital Marketing we brought a team together that understands real estate web design, content development/management, SEO, and real estate marketing.