Do I Need SEO? 5 Signs You Do (And When You Don’t)

do i need seo

Do I need SEO? If you need to get found online, the answer is yes. This article covers what’s involved in SEO and why it’s a good idea for your business.

If you want to grow your commercial real estate business, what’s the best way to do this? Do you post on social media? Should you pay for ads?

Consider that 60% of marketers see their highest quality leads from SEO. So you can use social media or paid ads, but you’ll get the best results from SEO.

That said, SEO isn’t for every business. CRE agents, syndicators, or developers who need to raise capital might get better results from social media strategies. But for property managers, real estate SaaS/proptech, or other real-estate-related businesses, it might be just the strategy you need.

We’ll cover the high-level details on whether you need SEO, how it works, what’s involved, and the tools you can use.

What is SEO?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a strategy to help your website get noticed when someone searches for what you do, have, or sell. Take a property management company. If someone searches “property managers in x location”, you want your company to show up in the top results.

SEO applies to any platform where people search for terms, like Google, Amazon, Etsy, or Bing. It’s a way to set up your content so search engines know what it’s about. From there, your site can rank higher in search results and be more visible to potential customers.

When you need SEO

If you expect to get clients through your website, you need SEO. You can create the most amazing web pages, but if no one knows you exist, all of your marketing efforts for your site are pointless.

Think about how you search. When you look for something, do you go past the first page? Or do you choose the top option? If you’re like 39% of people, you go with the first result that is not an ad.

So, the higher you appear on the search engine results page (SERP), the greater the chance that someone will click on your site instead of a competitor’s.

SEO is just one part of a digital marketing strategy, but it’s the foundational piece to get organic rankings and grow your business.

When you don’t need SEO

Not everyone needs SEO. You can ask these two simple questions to see if it fits for your marketing campaigns:

Does my business need online visibility to find customers?

If you are a real estate agent, you should have a website, but is that how clients really find you? Buyers usually look at sites like Zillow or Loopnet to find properties, so having listings there is more important. A better approach for agents might be social media.

For example, we do a lot of work creating content for the commercial real estate space. This includes agents, developers, and capital raisers who need to develop an audience on LinkedIn and X which is more important for the business than website traffic.

But for other companies, like property management, SEO makes sense. As an example, in Reddit’s r/Landlord forum, a property management company asks how they can find more clients. They’ve tried direct mail marketing to self-managed properties and are not having success.

User Sandwich-eater27 replies:

“Do you have a website and Google reviews? That’s the first point of contact for most people. If you’re a good manager and you don’t overcharge the landlord, you should be up to your neck in referrals”

User Shitp0st_Supreme replies:

“Craigslist and website building. I found mine by googling around and they’re fantastic.”

Are my competitors using SEO?

This is an easy test. See if your competitors are ranking in the top pages of Google for what you offer. If your competitors aren’t spending money on this, you shouldn’t either.

How search engine optimization works

The whole point of search engines is to help users find what they’re looking for. Each site or platform is slightly different in what you need to do to increase organic search results, but here are some general rules:

Match search intent

If someone is searching for “how to invest in real estate”, you don’t want them to reach sites talking about “luxury real estate listings”. Both talk about real estate, but the intent is off. If the user gets to the luxury real estate site, they’ll leave immediately because that’s not what they were searching for.

I made this mistake with my personal blog. I wrote an article about “digital landlord”. That’s an interesting topic because it could mean landlords who use technology to run their businesses. Or, it could mean running an online business where you “rent space” on your website. It’s also the name of a training course. The reality is that people were searching for the training course so my content didn’t match the intent.

For SEO efforts to work, you need to answer what the user is looking for and provide content specific to that search intent.

Build trust and authority

Search engines want to send users to trustworthy and credible sites. How do you become trustworthy? A lot of this comes from what you write about, your customer reviews, and any case studies you publish.

Take one of our clients who is in alternative investments. All of the blogs we create for them include references to:

  • How long they’ve been in business

  • Their customer reviews

  • Industry credentials

Over and over, we do this to send signals to Google that they are a legitimate business in this specific space. And, that users can trust them.

Site speed

Don’t have a slow site. It just frustrates visitors and hurts your ranking. Search engines notice when someone gets to your site and then leaves immediately. You’ll need to pay attention to technical SEO, which includes components like:

  • Optimizing your images

  • Getting rid of code you don’t need

  • Making sure that your site is easy to use

User friendly

Your site needs to be simple for visitors to use. Don’t make it hard for people to figure out where to find information. Some ways to do this include having easy-to-navigate menus and adding internal links to related content.

Local SEO

For businesses that provide a service or products for a specific location, you’ll need local SEO. This digital marketing strategy is slightly different than global SEO where location doesn’t matter.

For local SEO, you’ll need:

  • Optimize your Google Business Profile

  • Use local keywords like “product + city or state”

  • Include your name, address, and phone on your website

  • You’ll need positive reviews and ratings

  • Location-based content like “Arizona property management rules”

  • Local citations, which means listing your business on sites like the Better Business Bureau

Here’s an example portion of a Google Business Profile that helps a user call, get directions or see the business hours:

Google my business profile

SEO tactics

Quality SEO practices that can generate leads for your business include:

Keyword analysis

Keyword analysis is finding the words and phrases that people type into search engines. You might think this is easy, but sometimes you’d be surprised at the terms people use to search for something. For example, someone searching for “property management” might also type in:

  • “property management companies (location)”

  • “rental property management”

  • “property managers”

Here’s an example:

Google search examples

There are two main types of keywords to use in your content marketing efforts:

  • Shorter/general keywords: These are keywords like “what is a property manager”.

  • Long-tail keywords: Search queries with more specific phrases are called long-tail keywords. An example is “how do I choose a property manager”.

Content creation

You have to have interesting and helpful content for SEO to work well. Blog posts, videos, or infographics give people a reason to visit your site. The goal is to create content that directly addresses the needs or questions of your audience.

For many of our clients, we’re creating 3 blog posts per week and incorporating other content like YouTube videos whenever possible. We want searchers to see our clients as authoritative and a place where they can easily get answers.

Once you create content, you can’t “set it and forget it.” You’ll need to keep updating the existing content and connecting it to your new blog posts as well. For our clients, we often use economic data and other metrics that change each time new reports come out. In those articles, we go back and update to keep the information relevant and up to date.

Backlinks

Backlinks are links from other websites to yours. These give search engines a signal that your site is trustworthy and valuable. If you have quality backlinks from reputable sites, your website is more valuable in the eyes of search engines.

But not all backlinks are helpful. Links from low-quality or unrelated sites can harm your ranking. To get good backlinks, you need content that others will want to share and link to naturally. A way you can do this is to create statistics posts or survey results pages. Other sites will link to a data point in their own content, just like we did at the beginning of this post with the marketer metric of 60%.

You can also build relationships with other businesses or industry blogs to find opportunities for guest posts and collaborations, which can increase your backlinks.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO includes all the details that make your website work well. Basically, your site needs to be fast and work well for mobile devices. You can find details on performance in tools like Google Search Console with reports like this one:

Google Search Console performance

5 reasons you need SEO

Here are the reasons why your website needs a comprehensive seo strategy:

1. Build your brand

SEO helps shape how people see your brand. If you’re in the top rankings, people are going to trust your site more than paid ads or websites on further pages. Over time, you’ll build a reputation, and the more people see your content, the more they’ll associate your brand with quality and trust.

2. Increase traffic

If your site has a high ranking in search results, you’ll get more visitors. But, you don’t want just any organic traffic – you want visors that could be your future customers. This is why keyword research and matching intent is so important so you don’t waste time and money on the wrong terms.

3. Cost-effective marketing

SEO can be an affordable way to grow your online presence. It takes a while to see results, so you’ll need to be patient, but once your content ranks well, it can keep driving traffic without ongoing costs. This is different than paid search, which you have to keep spending money on for it to work.

Here’s an example of a client’s site that had zero content prior to August 2024. You can see when we started posting content and how the site keeps growing. As we add new content, Google recognizes more keywords related to relevant searches. This then drives traffic and clicks.

AHREFS screen shot

4. Stay competitive

Your competitors are likely investing in SEO already, and if you’re not doing the same, you could lose potential customers. When your website appears higher, potential customers may click on it instead of visiting your competitors’ sites.

The site we shared above is an example of this. Their competitors have sites with 50,000-80,000 keywords. They are at 311. Why? They didn’t have digital marketing as part of their strategy, but their competitors did. Now, they have a big gap to close.

5. Trackable results

SEO is measurable. You can track website traffic and visitors who convert into leads or customers. This makes it easy to see what’s working and where you might need to make adjustments. We use tools like Google Analytics to see which content works well so we can double down our efforts in these areas.

Search engine optimization in 2024

SEO keeps changing, and each platform constantly updates its technology to make it easier for users to find things. Besides the basics we discuss above, you can also work on:

  • Smart keyword use: Use keywords naturally within relevant and high-quality content. Don’t say a phrase over and over in a repetitive way that makes it terrible to read.

  • E-E-A-T: Google looks at content for experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T). Make sure your content shows expertise, comes from credible sources, and builds trust with your audience.

  • Paid search: You might be curious about paid ads and if they are a better strategy than SEO. The way these ads work is by pay-per-click (PPC), where you bid on keywords related to your business and pay when someone clicks on your ad. We already covered that paid ads cost more because once you stop running them, people stop coming to your website.

Tools for SEO optimization

Here’s a list of the tools we use to help our clients with SEO optimization.

Keyword research

To find the right keywords for each website, we use:

  • AHREFS

  • Google Keyword Planner

  • Keyword Insights

  • Answer Socrates

On-page optimization tools

These tools will help you optimize elements on your web pages, like titles, meta descriptions, and content:

  • Screaming Frog

  • RankMath

  • Yoast

Off-page optimization tools

Off-page includes backlinks. We use AHREFS to see the current list of backlinks and compare it to other sites to see opportunities. You can see which links competitors have and see if there’s a way you can also get a link from them to your site.

Monitoring tools

You can monitor your overall progress and see what pages or content perform well using:

  • Google Analytics

  • Google Site Kit

  • Google Search Console

Does my website need SEO?

As we discussed, not every website or business needs SEO. But, if your competitors are spending money here and you need to get found online, SEO is worth it.

Be patient as it does take time but once it builds, good SEO can give you a steady stream of new client leads every month.

If you want to learn more about SEO or just content ideas for your business, book a call with us now!

Do I need SEO? FAQs

What happens if you don’t use SEO?

If you don’t use SEO, your website might not appear in search engine results pages when people are looking for what you offer. This means less visibility, fewer visitors, and missing out on new customers.

Does SEO matter anymore?

Yes, SEO still matters. It’s still one of the best ways to make sure your website ranks well on Google or other search engines.

How much does SEO cost?

The cost of SEO depends on your needs and whether you hire an expert or do it yourself.

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