Nov
18
What SEO Can Learn From Real Estate Agents
Filed Under SEO
In 2007 i invested a considerable amount of time and money and I got my Real Estate license. I scored 97out of 100 on my final exam, and I thought I’d be awesome at real estate. I quickly learned that technical ability had very little to do with success in the world of real estate.
In the world of real estate, the top producers are generally those who know the most people. They have a good reputation and people refer them, because lets face it; you’d rather have an agent someone you know has already ‘test driven’ for you. When you don’t know people in your community and don’t have these pre-existing relationships, you’re screwed.
Not only are referrals the best kind of leads in Real Estate, they are the best kind of leads as clients in general. How does this apply to SEO? Currently, Google looks at links back to your website as ‘votes’ for you. However, it’s easy to ‘game’ the system by buying links or hiring an SEO agency to find them for you. In the future, Google will rely more on a relationship-based sort of way of ranking in order to ‘better qualify’ links back to your site.
Social media is definitely a part of that. The friends you have on Twitter, on Facebook, and whatever social platforms we see in the future will help Google determine your ‘community’. The ‘Important People’ in your networks / ‘community’ who ‘recommend’ you (via Re-tweets, posting your links, etc.) will play a bigger role in determining how important you are – or will become – online.