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Category: Digital Marketing

SEO for Real Estate Branding: Boost Trust & Visibility

August 9, 2024
3 minute read
Blog / Digital Marketing, Performance Marketing

Whether you’re in home building, managing multi-family apartments, or operating senior living communities, SEO for real estate branding is often seen as a means to an end—driving traffic, improving search rankings, and generating leads. However, focusing solely on these metrics can overshadow the broader potential of search engine optimization to shape and sustain your brand’s presence in the market.

SEO as a Strategic Asset in Real Estate

These efforts serve a dual purpose in the context of SEO for real estate, particularly branding. They are not just about enhancing visibility but also about building a strategic asset for brand positioning. This is especially crucial in industries like home building, multi-family apartments, and senior living, where trust, credibility, and emotional connections significantly influence decision-making.

Content Creation: A Pillar of SEO and Brand Identity

SEO for real estate branding also involves crafting content that resonates with your target audience. For home builders, detailed guides on the building process that highlight the unique craftsmanship and customization options available can set them apart. Multi-family apartments might focus their SEO efforts on lifestyle content emphasizing community events or resident testimonials, building a narrative around the living experience.

For senior living communities, SEO in branding might involve developing content that addresses common concerns, such as transitioning to assisted living or the benefits of memory care. By consistently producing and optimizing this type of content, you improve search engine rankings and reinforce your brand’s commitment to meeting the unique needs of your audience.

Enhancing Trust and Credibility Through SEO

SEO for real estate branding goes beyond keyword optimization in all these sectors. It encompasses elements like site speed, mobile responsiveness, and ease of navigation, which contribute to how users perceive your brand. A seamless, user-friendly website reflects a brand that values its customers, fosters trust and encourages ongoing engagement.

Brand Differentiation in Competitive Real Estate Markets

Ultimately, SEO for real estate branding plays a strategic role in brand differentiation. Whether you’re a home builder specializing in sustainable designs, a multi-family apartment complex targeting luxury amenities, or a senior living community offering specialized care, SEO helps position your brand uniquely in the market.

Expanding Your View of SEO in Real Estate

Expanding your view of SEO, especially in real estate, allows you to leverage it not just as a tool for driving traffic but as a foundational element for building and sustaining your brand. The true value of SEO lies in its ability to connect your brand with the right audience, foster long-term relationships, and ultimately drive sustainable business growth.

Call to Action

Evaluate your current SEO strategy. Are you using it to build trust, differentiate your brand, and create meaningful connections? Reassess your approach to ensure you’re leveraging SEO as a powerful branding tool, not just a traffic driver, in the real estate market.

Power Up Your Digital Marketing

September 1, 2020
6 minute read
Blog / Digital Marketing, Performance

Imagine you were the owner of a small winery at the outset of the coronavirus outbreak. With a heavy reliance on visitors buying product from your tasting room and wine drinkers eating out at sit-down restaurants.

Ouch. It was probably a good time to uncork a bottle or two and drown your sorrows.

Or alternatively, to get creative and pivot into the digital world.

Sounds kind of crazy. A virtual wine tasting. But plenty of vineyards pulled it off.

In a recent Digital. Done Right. Podcast, we talked through this example and brainstormed how the basic principles of what made virtual wine tastings work translate to other industries. We talked about the power of pivoting in real-time and taking the leap into the digital world for businesses more traditionally associated with brick and mortar.

Leveraging Customer Relationships

Successfully creating an online alternative for an in-person experience starts with harnessing your database. The people most likely to give your virtual experience a chance are those who already love your brand.

From there, it’s all about finding a way to build on that relationship through a genuinely interactive event.

The thing is, online experiences don’t have to be complicated and hard. Users aren’t expecting Hollywood level production quality which means very little barrier to entry. Plenty of successful digital events are filmed with a smartphone and hosted on Facebook Live.

What is important is the connection – and ideally the ability to ask questions in real-time (or near real-time) with influential people or thought leaders in your industry, even if that thought leader is you!

Back to the Wine

Looking at how this worked for the wineries, it is simple. Get someone trustworthy to taste and talk about your wine, make recommendations, and answer questions. Voila! This sort of third-party testimonial can be an immensely powerful replacement for a personal tasting.

Set up a subscription service and lay out a full calendar of virtual events customers can participate in. And really, you can rethink and repackage the subscription model strategy here to be less gated. To allow people with smaller commitments access to the content. Try limited-time free offers or the option to sign up for individual events.

Get creative. Tons of small businesses are coming up with incredible stuff and with consumers hungry for normality and influencers potentially low on work, it’s a great time to get decent talent involved for less money than you might think.

What About the Video

We already know that consumers love video – but here are a few basic guidelines for sketching out the type of content that gets traction.

  • People prefer to hear from real people. Not actors. Take the new Ford Bronco videos, for example. They used the real designers and the real engineers and got them rolling with a thought-provoking Q & A.
  • Keep it conversational. Going back to production quality and scripting here, you don’t need to invest the same time into interactive video content that you would for a television commercial. Maintain a reasonable level of quality but focus more on engaging the audience.
  • Showcase your personality and humanize your brand. Don’t be afraid to let the people in your videos be themselves.
  • Stimulate a two-way dialogue. Even if this means users drop questions into the comments section and you answer them later.

Interactive Content

This leads us into the power of interactive content and the ability to expand the digital experience beyond scheduled virtual events.

As more brands jump into interactive content, more ways are becoming available for consumers to interact directly with advertisements. This could be quizzes, checklists, augmented reality ads, 360-degree videos or chatbots embedded within the ad.

Chatbots are a fun way for users to engage with ads and they create a more personal experience that ties into higher conversion rates after clicking through to the website.

Pivot Now, But Not Too Far

COVID-19 threw things into overdrive a bit here but realistically, most companies are going to want to flesh out a more robust digital strategy as consumers get more used to these types of interactions.

But for businesses sitting at square one, the thought of embracing all this new technology can be daunting. Particularly when some of what’s available looks cool but may not be viable in terms of generating sales or boosting revenue. Stuff like voice, augmented reality and virtual reality, for example.

Where do you start and how far do you go?

Well, you start at the beginning. And you go as far as your testing takes you.

Your digital strategy doesn’t need to dive straight to strapping your customers into VR headsets and firing your entire customer service team to replace them with online chat. Basic tech like surveys and polls can engage your customers. Video content takes it further. Interactive virtual events build on this. And so on.

It’s OK to take baby steps as long as you’re taking steps.

I recommend carving out 15% of your marketing budget to try new things. Not to dabble and give up straight away but to really give new ideas a go. It can take months or longer to figure out what’s working for you, so set a budget and let trials run their course.

Help is Available

A lack of understanding for how to lay out a digital roadmap might seem scary, but it doesn’t have to be. It might even be cheaper to invest in an expert right now. There are plenty of digital arts and digital agencies hungry for business and they can help you build out your digital asset library.

More importantly, you can work together with someone who has done this before to think through the entire digital experience you’re hoping to achieve from start to finish.

The most important thing is to just get started. Growing your business didn’t happen overnight and implementing a robust digital strategy won’t, either. But you are better to pivot now and get the ball rolling rather than waiting six months and still find yourself sitting at square one.