The Secret to Making your Real Estate Website Rank above Zillow (and everything else) in Google

For the last couple years of my real estate career, I found myself in a two-way battle with Zillow for the #1 ranking when the phrase “Cincinnati real estate agent” was searched.  I drove a significant amount of traffic to my company and was well above the largest firms in the area.  I didn’t pay anyone to link to my page nor did I hire anyone to provide any SEO services.  My ranking was achieved totally organically and totally free.

My strategy was simple and anyone can achieve the same results if you follow these steps.

#1 -Ditch whatever site you are using and change to a Wordpress site. Wordpress sites are the easiest to customize, have a great blog and come with widgets that can help you maximize your SEO rankings in each article.  Google search bots that evaluate the content on your site love (in my opinion) Wordpress sites.  Once I switched my blog to a Wordpress site, I jumped from page 15 to page 3 in a very short period of time.

#2 - Blog as much as possible. Coming up with content is hard.  I am currently on a quest to write 100 blogs in 100 days.  Study the industry and write/video the blog posts yourself so that your content is fresh and reads well. The more you can stay within a category that your site is based in, the better. 

#3 - Pick a few keywords and include these keywords in every article.  You won’t rank #1 on everything so go with a few that generate a sufficient amount of traffic.  You can use Google’s Keyword Analyzer.  Don’t overdo the keywords and try to limit to  2 or 3 uses of the keywords in each article.  Anything more will be frowned upon and won’t help your ranking.  Include keywords in your title, body of the text and add the keywords into the description of any images you use within the blog post.

#4 - Don’t worry about the how many people read/watch the video. Obviously, having people link to your blog will help but it’s not super important that the posts have thousands of views each day.  I filmed videos from a Flip and then on my cell phone.  I did them in 1 take with no editing.  My concern was pushing out new, keyword-matching content on a regular basis and not a professional quality. If you worry too much about the content or spend too much time editing, you’ll burn yourself out and never get to the quantity of blog posts needed to hit #1 in Google.

#5 - Stay motivated.  As you generate content, don’t wait for future clients to find you.  Put together a newsletter and share your content.  The feedback and views will go a long way to keep the content coming.  You’ll also want to keep an eye on the progress you make in your Google rankings.  Using one of the free Keyword search tools, you can easily track the changes in your domain as it rises to #1.

If I can do it, anyone can do it.  But just like being a landlord, it’s a long term investment strategy.  Good luck and happy blogging!