Perhaps the greatest mystery to a commercial real estate agent or broker is the SEO of their website. Honestly, it’s the greatest mystery to most people, so let’s not blame our industry.
Here is a list of most-likely reasons your website has no traffic and how to fix it.
Reasons why your commercial real estate website has no traffic.
#1 New domain. Not so fun fact, it’s normal to get crappy traffic in the first year of owning your domain (JohnCRE.com etc.). Google and other search engines don’t give you better than page #2 in rankings until your website is at least a year old. This is an easy way to keep the “probably will give up soon” businesses at the bottom. Don’t shrug your shoulders in defeat. You can still set your website up for future success when your .com ascends from new-domain-purgatory!
#2 You’re not showing up on local searches. Have you noticed that when you search for a business, Google will show the 3–5 businesses closest to you? They pull this information from Google My Business. Sign up for this so you don’t miss out on search traffic happening near your location. While you’re at it, put your business on Yelp and Bing Places.
#3 No social connections. Having a .com is the first step. Gain some recognition by creating social media pages and linking them together. This can be done by creating Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc. accounts and placing links to your social pages on your website. Right now, social media participation is not a big factor in your rankings, but I guarantee it will be significant in the future. With social media gaining as “reasons why people buy what they do”, it’s going to become a major factor sooner and later. Also make sure you add your social media links to your local search profile. The more pages you have, the higher your credibility.
#4 Limited original content. Sorry, folks, an automated news feed won’t solve this problem. To bring in new traffic you’ll need original content fed to your website on a regular basis. Even monthly posts are better than nothing! Write blog posts that your target market is searching. Some examples may include: “# Tips to Buying a Distribution Center” “# Reasons to Buy an Office Condo instead of Lease” “# Ways to Diversify your Real Estate Portfolio”. This will not only bring in traffic from “long-string-key-words” it will also increase your rankings. Newsletter Hero will help you come up with ideas.
#5 No connection to other websites (backlinks). This means other websites have links to your website – either in reference to one of your blog posts or just as a link to your home page. Search engines also count Social Media shares under this category. (Someone sharing your link on Twitter, for instance.) I won’t lie to you; backlink creation is grueling work. It consists of writing guest blogs for other websites, sending in articles for press release, and getting people to post about you on social media. All of this is time intensive and, if I’m being honest, doesn’t have the highest ROI in the world. HOWEVER, if you’re interested in building backlinks, LinkFool has some affordable packages and 100% white-hat strategies. I can’t recommend them enough for implementing a backlinking program.
#6 No SSL on your website. If you don’t see a little lock next to your domain name, you likely don’t have an SSL installed. This can be as easy as contacting your website provider and requesting one (in most cases, these are free). However, sometimes your images will disappear after an SSL installation, so be sure you have the time and expertise to fix that if the issue arises.
#7 Not maximizing your original content. It’s best if you use your content over multiple platforms. For instance, if you have a newsletter, put it on your website as a blog article, cut up the content and post it on social media. Do a video talking about the subject, and use the audio for a podcast. The more you use original content and point to your website, the better your rankings will be.
For those of you SEO gurus, I want to note – NO, I didn’t go over every SEO strategy. Instead, I focused on the easiest ways to gain rankings without getting technical. If you follow these 7 tips without doing anything else, you’ll see your rankings increase. If you want to learn more about SEO, SEMrush is a great resource.
Teaching you how to get better search engine rankings is yet another way I’m taking the “broke” out of commercial real estate brokerage.
If you’re looking for a website with a “kick-ass” SEO setup included, check out my website design package!
~ Brandy
