5 Local Marketing Myths

 

It’s not uncommon to come across estate agents that know a little about SEO but haven’t had the time to fully understand online marketing. Due to lack of knowledge, many of estate agents have held onto some myths that are completely false.

However the myths do not necessarily come from misleading articles on the internet but in fact they are due to the search engines continually making changes to their search algorithms every single day!

Some of the changes may be relatively small and subtle, but the continuous tweaks and changes means that the once crucial SEO tactics are now inexistent after a period of time.

Here are 5 local marketing myths that you should forget about:

1) You don’t need to optimise for mobile

Mobile usage has increased a huge amount over the past 10 years. These days having a mobile friendly website is vital to estate agents as a huge amount of traffic to estate agency websites (on average 70%) comes from a mobile device. Not only is this percentage likely to grow over the next few years but Google has also stated that failure to optimise for mobile can actually impact on your rankings.

2) You must have keywords in the domain name

Once upon a time exact match keyword domain names were a sure fire way to rank for your chosen keywords, however these days it isn’t going to help all too much. You are better off using other practices in order to achieve high rankings.

Also you should know that for most established websites, around half of their search referral traffic is likely to be for their brand name. So if you are a business that is looking to be around for a while, the best approach is definitely to focus your domain towards your company name.

3) You need some quick SEO to help boost you up the local rankings

When it comes to SEO there aren’t any quick fixes. In competitive areas you are likely to be competing against older, more trusted websites which gives them a greater ranking power. Of course it is still possible for you to rank and compete against them as long as you are willing to work for it.

Not only do you need to be doing an excellent job at SEO but you also need to invest into multiple strategies of promoting, such as  through social media channels, email marketing, etc.  

Considering the competition in the area, you have to be realistic. There is only a certain amount of slots that you can rank in to appear on page one. You can be doing everything right and still not show up… SEO for a competitive keyword will never be a quick task; it will require consistent, ongoing work in order to achieve your goals.

4) Great ratings/reviews means great rankings

Your averaged ratings are not a ranking factor in Google. Your ratings can have an impact on your business but they do not affect your rankings.

You should also consider that having all positive reviews may actually have a negative effect as customers may not believe that all your reviews are real, having some negative reviews is definitely more realistic for a business.

5) Social media is worthless for estate agents

For some businesses social media is obviously easier than others to attract followers who want to interact. However, if you are struggling to make social media work for you then you probably need to be doing it in a different way.

Social media can allow you to manage your online reputation and to enhance brand recognition.

The best way for estate agents to be successful on social media is for them to position themselves as an industry, community and area expert by focusing on producing interesting and informative content.