Real estate professionals are often baffled by the number of advertising options available to them.  They wonder which ones are the most effective in reaching their target audience and yielding the best ROI.  Yet many real estate professionals still don’t understand what has become the most powerful advertising method of them all: internet search engines.  Best of all, you can actually get your website on page one of Google for search results in your farm area without spending a penny!  Here’s how.

Today, about 80% of home buyers start their home search on the internet.  Of those people, 80% use search engines to help them find whatever they’re looking for.  So getting on page one of search results gets your listings huge exposure.  You’ll also have bragging rights at listing presentations by quantifying the huge number of people seeing your listings every week.  This will go a long way to helping you close more listing presentations.

However, getting onto page one of Google will not happen overnight.  But if you follow a few simple guidelines regularly, in a few months you’ll find yourself getting very close to page one on Google.  You may even reach page one in a few months for your farm areas.

There are two basic ways search engines rank websites: the words used on your website and the number of other websites with your website’s links on them.  The more instances of particular words of phrases appearing on your website, the more relevant search engines think your website is on those areas, and so the higher it will rank your website in search results.  For instance, if your website has the words “Toronto” and “real estate” 50 times each on your website, it will be ranked higher than another website which has those words only 20 times on their website.

The more times your website’s links appear on other websites, the more search engines think your website is popular and influential, and so the higher ranking your website will get.   So it’s important to post your listings on as many internet classifieds sites as possible regularly and get your contact information added to as many online directories as you can find.
Doing both of these steps regularly (or hiring someone to do it for you) will pay for itself many, many times over.  Google is the new yellow pages!

Find out more about getting your website onto page 1 in search engines with my course Building Your Ecommerce Business.  This course has been approved.  This course has been approved by the Registrar, REBBA 2002 to qualify for 6 credits.