Your real estate marketing efforts are usually shaped by 2 questions: “How do I find new prospective customers?” and “How do I turn my prospects into sales?” Obviously, a modern marketing landscape requires a completely different approach to answering these questions. In a nutshell, there are two critical techniques that you need to master en route to marketing excellency – SEO and a real estate CRM system. In this post, we’ll take a look at how to connect the dots between your SEO and CRM strategies so they serve a single purpose – secure you more sales.
More often than not, agents use these CRM and SEO strategies separately. In the meantime, mutual feedback can make your marketing more targeted and your sales practices much more efficient. Let’s take a quick look at when exactly each system goes to work to provide you with these effects.
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a good first step to take to start earning digital impressions. The ultimate purpose of all of your SEO efforts is to drive more targeted traffic to your site, with site visitors beginning in your sales pipeline and progressing towards the deal (more on mechanics of the SEO practices in #1).
Once the visitor navigates to your site thanks to your successful SEO activities and performs some action (e.g., signs up to your newsletter), it’s time to capitalize on your CRM functionality as the visitor turns into a contact. A real estate CRM system helps in a variety of ways – from capturing people’s contact details to helping you see how qualified each contact is so you can follow up with the right messages.
In other words, your SEO efforts result in creating pages that satisfy people’s quest for information. Once they’re ready to exchange their contact details and feedback for more info from you, your real estate CRM system captures these details and then stores them in one central repository so you can track all customer interaction throughout the buying cycle.
Let’s take a look at some great ways to power your SEO activities with your real estate CRM system and vice versa.
4 ways to refine your local SEO strategy with a real estate CRM system
1) On-page website optimization from inside your CRM
A successful SEO strategy hinges on both on-page and off-page optimization. Briefly speaking, on-page SEO is done on your site, and off-page means building an online presence via other websites. Both of these SEO activities are enough for dozens of posts to describe so we won’t be stopping on this in detail right now. Here are, however, a few quick tips to check out in case you’re not sure how to get started:
- on-page optimization checklist:
- off-page SEO and link building strategies: SEO for Real Estate: a Definitive Guide to Local Link Building.
A key difference to keep in mind when optimizing a real estate website is it has to be optimized for local. Here’s the post with the best local SEO techniques to try: Get on the Map: 21 Brilliant Ways to Ultimately Master Local Real Estate SEO.
Next, how do you connect on-page SEO with your real estate CRM system? You can then use a built-in content management system (CMS) to optimize every page of your site (as well as any particular property) to make it perfectly visible to people and search engines.
2) Keep track of long-tail keywords and conversations
What would you say if you had a solution that lets you:
- shorten the sales cycle;
- narrow down your SEO efforts to your most relevant and effective keywords;
- highlight the exact type of content your target audience is searching for and convert them to leads faster.
You can do all of this in one shot just by starting on collecting some feedback on how your leads found you online. One great way to improve measurement and prioritization is to set up a lead-tracking process for once they hit your CRM.
Ideally, you need to know the lead source for every lead in your contact database so as to know which marketing channels are worth using. But you can do even more: by talking to your leads you can uncover some amazing long-tail keywords that Google Keyword Planner doesn’t track and your competition overlooks.
Here’s how this works. Your leads probably won’t ask you general questions. In the broader sense, they do, for example by saying they look for a condo for sale. But their next questions are very specific. People don’t just look for the area and property type. Typically, they have a whole list of criteria upon which they evaluate their next home.
This is the whole idea behind ‘long-tail’ keywords. These are very specific, 4+ word queries that people use to find products and services. They’re not easy to identify which makes them even more valuable. Add to this that people who type these queries are more sales-ready than those using more generic terms, so you’ll never want to miss them out again. Compare: ‘buy land in Australia’ or ‘how to own property in Australia by US green card’. The latter query is clearly written by someone who has very specific questions.
Here’s how you can put the process of identifying long-tail keywords on fast track:
- keep all of your client conversations in your real estate CRM system, so the record for each contact has a full conversation history;
- monitor these conversations for important sales keywords and pay special attention to how they’re used and in which context. Using the language your audience uses does help;
- keep a list of the new long-tail keywords and remember to update it. Use these queries when writing real estate listings, neighborhood pages and SEO content for your blog;
- mix the new long-tail keywords with the short, high-volume keywords and you’ll secure yourself a good deal of traffic and qualified leads (while driving sales-ready leads, long-tail keywords do not provide much traffic, but short ones do, so you’d want to use both);
- monitor search queries people type into the search field directly on your site. These can give you some great clues about which queries people use to find services like yours (and whether your SEO strategy reflects on that).
Start monitoring your conversations, keep accurate records of lead sources and relevant search queries for each record and you’ll get a better grip on your online visibility.
3) Discover how your target audiences talk about their problems
Digital marketing is all about information. People browse the Web searching for the info that’ll answer their questions in a meaningful, friendly manner. So this is the prime opportunity to prove that your expertise doesn’t exist in a bubble, but before actually doing this, you need to know what kinds of problems people are facing, right?
You probably know a few dozen already which makes things much easier. Online queries are very dynamic, however, so you’d want to watch them closely all the time.
Again, what you need to do is monitor all of your conversations (which should be done via a real estate CRM system so you can access past records easily) for specific problems keeping people awake at night. Put them on a list, spot recurring questions and provide a valuable explanation on your blog. Chances are huge that these questions already contain common SEO queries but you can always cross-check with your keywords list to make your content even more targeted.
With easy, centralized access to customer conversations, your SEO professional can do a better job increasing your online visibility. You’re making it easy to focus on the relevant problems that your real customers have. Far too often, you can be tempted to produce content not backed up by a real problem your audience has which rarely works.
So keep conversations in your real estate agent CRM, allow for easy access, identify customer problems, do quick SEO research and produce and promote your SEO content – all of this will generate more quality leads.
4) Analyze your data to see trends
One huge benefit of having one central place for customer interactions is you can now understand your marketing and sales with simple metrics that a real estate CRM system calculates for you automatically.
Just with a few easy steps, you can plan your next move better. For example, you’re now able to:
- see which marketing channels brought you how many leads;
- see which queries help your organic growth and which shouldn’t be incorporated into your site;
- measure campaign ROI for your paid advertising;
- discover seasonal fluctuations to adjust your SEO strategy better and win the biggest online exposure at the right time.
Additionally, using tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Google Keyword Planner along with the sales insights from a real estate agent CRM, makes your SEO and sales strategy even more aligned.
What’s next?
As an agent, you’re probably already familiar with both SEO and CRM, and you probably use both. Indeed, together they provide you with an unmatched advantage of having a continuous flow of qualified visitors to your site (SEO part) who you then convert into customers (CRM part).
So make sure to use valuable feedback from your real estate CRM system to power your SEO strategy and fuel online marketing. The rewards are more leads, sales and referrals that you wouldn’t otherwise get.
