Good SEO for CRE = good web exposure. Web exposure = warm leads. And warm leads = easier sales. Who doesn’t want that?!
However… SEO projects, like car repairs or dentistry, can be dangerous. You know that feeling you get with a car mechanic? You’re out of your depth, both parties know this, and you have a sneaking suspicion that you may be getting fleeced.
As with all things tech and CRE, it’s easy to get BS’d. Trust me, we are tech people, and we’ve paid our school fees. This article aims to help you in two ways:
If you’re going to take one thing away, here it is:
SEO spending generally happens once off, or in projects. While SEM, like fuel, is a recurring expenditure item. The spending depends on whether you need, or want, your SEO “engine” to work harder.
Getting good results on Google is influenced mainly by TWO things, in order:
Just like some car engines are built to go far on little fuel, while other engines need the same fuel to travel the same distance… It’s the same with SEO: spending money on Google, without first making your site Google-friendly, is “throwing good money after bad”.
In other words, if you are competing against businesses who have built their site to be Google-friendly, for every Dollar they spend, you may need to spend five Dollars.
So… How can I assess how my site’s engine is built? How do I win in the world’s most competitive race (i.e. Google Search)? And specifically, how do I win in commercial real estate (CRE) marketing, where the stakes are high, and the space is hyper-competitive – every website is in a race against every other website.
Some context: Google is a search engine. To come up in search results, you want to optimise your website for this search engine. I.e. make it easy for the search engine to do its job. Thus “Google-friendly” = search engine optimised.
Google begs for websites to be built Google-friendly: (and even hands out the “how to” guide)
But for some reason (we don’t know why, we are not experts in building websites) Google’s guidance is ignored.
If you can help Google crawl and read your site in the “language Google understands”, then Google can help you with a great ranking. If you don’t, then you will be out-punched by those websites who are Google friendly. It’s as simple as that.
So, like Tom Cruise said in Jerry Macguire:
“help Google, to help you”
Here are two (free) online tools that you can use to test your own website. Simply copy paste your website’s address (URL) in. (Wait right up until the analysis finishes running – it goes up and then down)
Another option for you… On a website in Google Chrome, click F12. On the screen that pops up on the RHS, look at the top menu bar (clue: it starts with Elements, Console etc.). On the right hand side of the menu bar select “Lighthouse”. Click “Generate report”
While the above tools are most accurate, the below is a quick, visual way to see if a website is Google-friendly:
(Note: a website can look good like below, but still not be search engine optimised for your business, so please don’t rely only on this “look test”)
What if you don’t score well compared to your competition? If you are not technical, you will need someone technical to make your website Google-friendly. If your website is built correctly (i.e. good SEO / engine), it may not require a website rebuild or changes to how your website looks. However, it will, at minimum, require someone skilled to “get under the hood” of your website and reconfigure your website.
Not so. Here is the next SEO for CRE lever…
Just as we search for info on the web by typing specific words Google, so do your customers. Therefore the next step is to make sure your website’s key words talk to the words your customers search on.
For example: you can have the most Google-friendly website selling safaris. However, if you have configured your website’s key words around tomatoes, you will only connect with customers searching for tomatoes.
Please see the example below: customers are searching for safaris, guess what key words comes up:
(On above we count 4 websites with 24 key words among them hitting on the searched-for word safari)
Tip: organic search is when users search on a term, and click through to a website appearing in search results (where the website is not appearing as an ad). More on this below…
So what happens if 1) your site is now built Google-friendly, and 2) your keywords (on your Google-friendly site) are talking to what your specific customers are searching for. Do you now sit and wait?
Next up…
In simple terms, if other good websites link to you, then it means you score higher in Google’s eyes.
So reach out to your friends (friends with high-ranking websites are even better), and see if you can help each other.
Thirdly, you want people actually clicking through to your site. Clicks are the oil that Google works on. This can feel a bit unfair, because the higher up on search results you are, the more people will click on your site. In turn, the more people who click on your site, the higher up you get on search results.
In summary, the websites who are already ahead, get further ahead (…an SEO version of the saying: “the rich get richer”).
With SEO for CRE you can drive these precious clicks using one, or a combination, of:
The good news: these solutions are free, don’t feel salesy, and they work.
But what is the most “quick fix” solution to break the top-sites-stay-at-the-top self-reinforcing cycle? See below…
SEM stands for search engine marketing. One part of SEM is SEO. But another part is paying for clicks. This is where Google makes most of their money (a staggering $90B-odd annually in fact).
Paying for clicks means you pay to “own” (for a defined period of time) certain searched-for terms on the web, so when certain people search, your site comes up first. (This is called Google Adwords or Pay-per-click (PPC))
Paying for clicks is explained in the graphic below: (here someone is searching for cars)
So hopefully now you feel a lot more confident about SEO, and all the jargon seems less daunting and intimidating.
You are now empowered with:
Forgive us if we have made this all overly simple and it’s not technical. To be honest, I have been patiently explained this a couple times, and failed to understand it. Hopefully by making this less technical it “lands” for you. If you want more technical info, the web has a treasure trove of many more articles on this fascinating topic.
Image credit: Business photo created by rawpixel.com – www.freepik.com
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