When you’re striving to become a profitable real estate agent, it’s a good idea to take advantage of the benefits advanced technology has to offer to help you achieve your goals. Building and maintaining a website (with or without an attached blog) is the cornerstone of establishing the foundation of a strong, online presence.

 It’s also wise to maintain several social media accounts or to hire someone to do that for you if you don’t feel equipped to do it yourself. Strategic use of SEO will help your web pages gain visibility and a higher-ranking position on a search engine results page (SERP). If reading the last couple of sentences registers like a foreign language in your brain, don’t worry. By the end of this post, you’ll gain a basic understanding of these important topics that can help you boost your business success.

What does the acronym SEO stand for, and what is it?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It’s basically a process of various tasks and strategies that form the backbone of a successful online marketing campaign. These tasks are designed to help your website (or blog, or both) gain visibility and, therefore, attract new traffic. Within a skilled application of the SEO process, your web pages are also likely to appear closer to the top of the page in a search result.

You can use certain keywords, links, URLs and, most importantly, fresh, relevant content to get noticed by “web crawlers,” which are bots that search engines use to scan pages and produce results when someone enters a search online. For instance, using keywords such as “curb appeal” or “selling a house” might get your real estate site noticed (by the bots) when a person enters “Ways to boost curb appeal when selling a house” into a search bar.

Social media activity indirectly affects SEO

A spider bot isn’t going to be crawling your social media accounts. However, the metrics of human interaction on your accounts, such as likes, dislikes, comments, and shares indirectly has an effect when you have synced your social media pages to your website or blog. Consider Twitter, for instance. If someone views your timeline then retweets your post, it works sort of like a backlink.

If someone retweets your post, it then shows up on that person’s timeline and is visible to all of his or her followers who view the post. If one of those followers retweets (shares) the post, it becomes a lot like a prolific link. As a real estate agent, you might also find that prospective clients prefer to communicate on a digital forum rather than by phone or in person, at least to start.

To recap, the following list shows three actions you can take to increase leads, engage your target audience and establish a strong online presence to help boost your real estate business success:

• Develop and maintain a website and blog with fresh, updated and relevant content.
• Be active on the most popular social media sites, including Twitter and Instagram.
• Use SEO to your advantage to gain organic traffic to your website and improve your SERP ranking, which increases visibility for your web pages.

Becoming a profitable real estate salesperson involves much more than scheduling appointments to show homes to prospective buyers. Your online presence and interaction with others (networking) are also key factors to your business success.