SEO and the enlightened Commercial Agent

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SEO and the enlightened Commercial Agent

SEO…you may have heard the term being bandied about, you may even know what it stands for, but do you really know what it means for your Commercial practice and how it could play a major part in attracting new business?

Successful Chartered Surveyors and Commercial Agents know that making an impact on the web plays an important role in the development of new business and the retention of existing clients. Yet having the greatest website in the world is pointless if no one ever gets to see it.

SEO or Search Engine Optimisation will get you seen.

Get Seen By Prospective Clients
When a prospective vendor, property developer, corporate tenant or institutional investor uses Google to search for the leading commercial agent in your area, your company needs to be somewhere at the top of page 1.

It goes without saying the higher your commercial agency is ranked on a local search the greater the chance you have of being noticed. And it’s important to consider that over 70% will never go beyond page one of Google’s search results. That’s only the first 10 results.

High Rank = Positive Image
But high rankings are not just about getting noticed. Your relative position will contribute to the perception the commercial property market has of your company. Look at your own behaviour when searching on the Internet; you would rarely go beyond the first ten results. We all associate a high ranking with market leaders and established players.

Of course you would expect all the large corporate players; Savills, Knight Frank, Jones Lang LaSalle et al, to enjoy high rankings, thanks in no small way to their sizable marketing budgets. But you would be wrong to think that you couldn’t compete.

SEO covers a number of processes that influence how search engines like Google rank and rate your company. These processes affect everything from the initial design and structure of your site to the amount of relevant and constantly changing content the site features.

Effective websites are about the marriage of engaging design and great SEO.

The best way to achieve this is through a partnership with an experienced digital agency.

But beware, not all agencies provide on-going SEO with your new website. At worst, they may have no comprehension of it, at best they claim to ‘optimise’ the site at the build stage. They may not even have the skills in-house, but farm out SEO to a 3rd Party.

The most important thing to remember is that SEO is an on-going process. Your market, your audience, your competitors are constantly changing. It is your web strategy and therefore your SEO that will keep you ahead of these changes and your competition.

By Philip Burrows, Marketing Consultant