04/8/25

Over the years, we’ve used this blog to provide our fellow real estate professionals with plenty of marketing tips to stand out in today’s digital world. However, there’s a big topic we haven’t addressed lately: Search Engine Optimization (SEO). What do those three letters mean? Come with us on a digital journey.

“SEO is what helps you stay competitive. You need to balance focusing on the user and making it easy for search engines to crawl your website,” according to a Hubspot SEO instructor. “You can have the best content on the web, but no one will know about it if your website isn’t optimized for search engines.”

That – and plenty of other reasons – is why SEO matters for all websites, including real estate-related ones. Consider these stats: 68% of online experiences start on a search engine, and more than half of website traffic comes from an organic search.  

Remember E-A-T: SEO is always evolving, so it’s key to stay on top of trends and changes. One good way to ensure you will continue to rank highly organically is to make sure your website is full of content that shows expertise, authority and trustworthiness. (Sometimes, you’ll see an extra “E” added to the acronym for “experience.”)What exactly does that mean? Your content should answer visitors’ questions, and your website should be updated regularly with new, useful, and local content. (This is part of the reason we maintain this blog and make sure it’s full of information our readers like you care about.)

Understand that ChatGPT is changing SEO, too. As more and more people use ChatGPT to get their information, SEO principles and best practices must evolve. How that happens exactly is still up in the air, but it’s something that should be on everyone’s radar if they want to truly excel in this area.

Know about Reddit and other community forums. You’ve probably noticed that you’re seeing answers from Reddit and Quora appear higher on your own Google searches. That’s not an accident. A 2024 update intentionally started elevating results from these forums and even made Reddit the third most visible website in results pages, quadrupling the traffic it got from Google. If you’ve never participated in a conversation on one of these sites, that’s OK. However, if you’re already active on one of these forums, think of these new developments as very good news.

Do these two things right now. SEO is a long-game strategy. Sadly, even if you implement some of these changes to improve SEO, it will take weeks or months to see a tangible result. However, here are two action items to do right away. They are claiming your Google Business Page and making sure your site is optimized for mobile devices. Doing the latter will help you cater to the modern client better anyway, but doing these two items will help your SEO sooner rather than later.

We all know having a strong online presence isn’t optional; it’s essential to win in today’s digital world. By investing in SEO, real estate professionals can attract more clients, build credibility, and stay ahead of the competition. Our teams know we work with some of the best local real estate professionals in this market. Everyone else should, too!