IS THE TIME COMMITMENT WORTH IT?
SEO and SEM are no magic bullets, however – IDX provider Real Geeks conducted a study to find out where real agents actually fall within the pages of Google. Competition is stiff – not only from other agents, but big brokerages, as well.
As Real Geeks found, real estate Google searches are tales told by the big chiefs: generic real estate searches, such as “Chicago real estate,” will very rarely display individual agent websites on the first few pages of the search, mainly because the big time, national brokerages dominate those segments of the search with their large traffic and search volume.
To quantify that, Real Geeks performed Google searches for the nation’s top 50 metropolitan markets, searching for “[City name] real estate,” and noting the websites that showed up on the first three pages of the Google search, about how far a Web user will look when searching for something.
Of the 1,691 sites that Real Geeks recorded, just 30 percent of the results on the first page were for local, independent sites. To give you some perspective, 10 websites appear on a Google search page; so this means, among the thousands of agents you compete with in your market, only three will appear on that first page.
When you consider the number of independent agents in a given city, of the three local listings on page one, the odds are stacked against a single agent making the cut to be one of those three on page one.
This evidence begs the question: is SEO worth it?
It will be a time commitment no matter what – but time spent generating quality leads is something every agent needs to invest in; your website can help your lead generation even more by helping your site get in front of homebuyers’ eyes in their real estate searches.
“How many agents are going to go in and make sure they have the proper keyword density on the page and make sure their page title tag and descriptions and images are properly named?” Lucido says. “How many are going to go into the Google keyword tool and check to see what search terms are best to optimize for? Those are the agents who will have success with SEO.”
Gary Lucido
Lucid Realty, Inc.
312.738.0232
glucido@lucidrealty.com
Chris Haran
Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage
847.313.6753
chris.haran@cbexchange.com
Nobu Hata
National Association of Realtors
312.329.8279
nhata@realtors.org