How To Generate Real Estate Leads Organically

Real estate lead generation is the life force behind a successful real estate business. And a consistent inflow of leads without having to make cold calls is every real estate agent’s dream.

According to the National Association of Realtors, in 1981, 22 percent of home buyers read newspaper ads to find a home. In 2016, 44 percent looked for properties online first. Today, 90 percent of home buyers use the internet to help them purchase a new home.

The world we live in today is a digital one and searching for a home is no different. Buyers now have apps that let them search by location and neighborhoods. Online listings have virtual tours so viewers can look at a bunch of potential homes while narrowing down their search to a select few in an effort to save time.

Also in 1981, the top way to find a real estate agent was through friends, relatives or neighbors. In 2016, home buyers are entering the process more educated about the market before they speak to a home seller or an agent.

So, it’s important for the real estate agent to leverage the internet as a channel for leads.

So, what’s the best way to get real estate leads online?

You need to create a great website, have an impressive email database, and build a decent following for your brand, but above all, you need to create content that will keep you at the front of the pack.

Content Marketing And SEO For Real Estate 

Content marketing is a valuable tool for building up brand awareness and driving real estate leads. Blog posts optimized to show up in search engines can drive organic traffic to your website saving you from paying for ads and media buys month after month. Building up a presence on social media as a skilled real estate agent can help drive referrals and help potential clients to think of you the next time they are considering buying or selling a home.

Content marketing can include property listings, blog articles, website copy, YouTube videos, infographics, and podcast audio. Real estate agents can use these assets to educate and connect with potential clients. This can lead to generating more real estate leads and closing more deals.

How Can I Create A Content Marketing Strategy To Generate More Real Estate Leads

Follow these steps to create a marketing strategy that fits your business model.

1.   Identify Your Target Audience

If you’re a real estate sales agent, you are likely targeting a demographic above the age of 30. If you’re a rental agent, you may be looking to target a younger demographic. If you are a commercial real estate agent, you are targeting businesses (B2B) instead of individuals (B2C). This is an important step in building your content strategy, as it will guide not only what your message is, but where to get that message out.

2.   Create Your Messaging and Content

Crafting a proper message for your target audience is often the hardest part of the process, as it requires a bit of creativity.

First, you need to ask yourself:

What are my client’s problems and what type of content will address those?

If you are targeting buyers and sellers, you may want to produce content around the home-buying or home-selling process. For commercial real estate agents, you may want to create market reports and multi-family analyses within your target market.

Start by Googling your service and your location. Then you go through the section of ‘People also ask’. This is what most people are searching for, once they have searched for a particular location. Almost all of these questions are great ideas for your content strategy.

Digital marketing tools such as Keywords Everywhere can also help you research monthly search volume for keywords that your potential clients are searching. You can build up your SEO ranking by building your content strategy around these keywords. This will make you more likely to be visible when potential clients perform these searches.

The use of search engine optimized content in Backlinks, Social media pages, Online directories, Meta titles, and descriptions can turn into a strong strategy for SEO for real estate.

3.   Build a Local SEO Strategy

Since the location is a key factor for every real estate deal, consider investing in local SEO. The goal of such a strategy is to rank for local search terms like “best real estate agent in my area” or “homes for sale near me.”

Some ways to get started with local SEO for real estate:

• Create and optimize a Google Business Profile.
• Consistently publish content through that Google profile.
• Set up listings on real estate specific local directories
• Build a backlink profile by gaining links from professional and general directories.
• Generate positive reviews on Google, Facebook, Yelp, etc.

4.   Locate your Ideal Marketing Channels

You have to identify what platforms you can use to broadcast your real estate specific content. This will depend upon:

I.        Your strengths

If you dislike writing but you like shooting videos, you may want to start a video blog or YouTube channel to educate your clients rather than a website blog. If you’re great with numbers but not so great with video, you might want to focus your content strategy on creating in-depth market reports and trend analyses.

 II.        Your target audience

Where does your target audience spend their time on the internet? If your target audience is business owners over the age of 40, you’re likely not using TikTok and Instagram to reach that demographic. LinkedIn is great for B2B marketing, but YouTube may not be the best channel. Ultimately, you’ll have to figure out how and where your target audience spends their most time online and figure out how to get your content there.

5. Bait-and-Switch Content

You visit a website that has a bunch of links on it about cafeterias in San Francisco. You click on one about the best cafeterias in the city, and then find yourself on another page that’s also a list of links.

Isn’t it frustrating?

If your content is meant to educate and inform people, any links on your site should take them directly to that thoughtful, well-written and quality content. Don’t make people go on a wild goose chase to find information that’s important to them to earn SEO links. That is a killer for online real estate lead generation.

While content that overpromises might get a lot of clicks, your time on-site, pages-per-session, and bounce rate will be awful. Your analytics will show that users clicked, rolled their eyes, and then closed the tab.

Google measures your users’ engagement with your content and takes that kind of behavior to mean that your content is irrelevant, and not worth ranking.

6.   Duplicate Content

A strict no-no for your real estate SEO is publishing the same content on multiple pages of your site.

While short, commonly-used phrases are more than okay to leverage across your site but you need to be careful not to take large chunks of content and post them on separate pages.

You can get ranked only once for a piece of content – you can’t duplicate it, re-optimize it, and hope to get another round of value from that same piece.

Google identifies much faster than everyone which brands implement this lead generation “strategy.”

A few tips and tricks to help you succeed:

Many years ago, digital marketing for real estate was once a nice-to-have strategy for professionals, but today it’s a must. Otherwise, you risk falling behind the competition and your business not reaching its full potential. Whether a homebuyer views a virtual home or clicks a link to schedule a tour in person, they are utilizing technology to meet their end, so why not meet them halfway and reach them on the social media platforms they spend their time the most?

If you need help with real estate marketing and real estate lead generation, connect with us at Info@DigitalMedio.com