The
High Tech Commercial Real Estate Agent
Do you ever wonder how easy the commercial real estate business would be if you could sit behind a desk and leads would casually contact you via web, phone call, or messaging? Gone are the days of door-knocking, cold calling and sending out mailers, so read on. Whether you are new to the industry or a veteran, you should implement these 3 simple real estate marketing tools and strategies immediately. It will not only give you an edge on competitors, but it will also ensure you have a sudden stream of leads in your pipeline, which will increase sales. You can implement these strategies yourself or hire a commercial real estate marketing agency like My Perfect Workplace to implement them on your behalf.
Strategy
1: Activate Google My
Business. This is perhaps one of the best kept secrets in the real estate
industry, and it is absolutely FREE. Set up your business profile with
professional photos and add a description of your business which shows the
uniqueness of your company compared to your local competition to ensure
customers choose you every time.
Each
customer communicates differently with a service provider. Google My Business has
the functionality for customers to engage with you in an array of ways.
Therefore, it is important that you set up your business profile to meet each customer’s
needs.
Ensure you set up your profile to
allow customers to reach you by calling, messaging, leaving a review or by visiting
your website. Let’s face it, with over 9 billion searches every month, the
world uses Google. Turn those Googlers into your customers today!
Additionally, the layout of the
Google search engine results page (SERP) displays pay per click (PPC) ads
first, the local 3 pack, also known as Google My Business, second, and finally
the organic rankings, which are much less visible. This makes it imperative
that you utilize this free Google service in order to stay at the top of the
organic search results.
The local 3 pack not only drives
qualified leads your way, it also ensures you are working with local prospects
in search of their next ideal property.
Strategy 2: On-Site
SEO for Commercial Real Estate Agents. What does that mean? On-site SEO refers
to the optimizations made to a website’s content to help Google, Bing and other
search engines understand what your website is all about, what services you
offer, and beyond.
Since most new commercial real
estate agents have a small marketing budget, they may not be able to hire a
reputable local SEO agency to help them develop their on-site SEO strategies.
In those instances, we recommend you start with freelancers on UpWork. You can find SEO gurus for as little as $3/ hour who reside
elsewhere. Local freelancers are also a great option. However, local SEO
freelancers in high-tech commercial real estate markets like Los Angeles and
San Francisco can cost as much as $20/ hour. For a start-up commercial real
estate agent or agency, that may be out of budget.
No matter how small your budget, it is imperative
that commercial real estate agents hire SEO help. To understand its importance,
let’s look closer at some of the fundamentals of on-page SEO that require
expert knowledge.
Before you can generate organic leads, which are
FREE, as opposed to PPC, you must know your target audience and understand
their intent when they start typing keywords into search engines. For that, you
or your SEO expert must perform targeted keyword research. If you skip this step, you may waste your
content marketing efforts by attracting the wrong customer base, or even worse,
no customer at all.
If you have no budget for this technology at all,
use a quick free tool offered by Google. Start by typing in a “keyword”
or “keywords” you think your potential customer may type in the Google browser.
This will likely return a list of I.P. based additional local queries users are
typically typing directly into the Google search bar. Use those returned
“keywords” when developing your scope of work for your on-site local
optimization.
See example below:
.
Strategy 3: Commercial real estate agents want
to work with local workspace lessees, buyers, and sellers. The same holds true
for potential prospects looking to lease or sublease space. Commercial real
estate refers to many different types of properties. These properties include
office, co-working,
retail, industrial, mix-use, live-work and multifamily properties. Keeping that
in mind, you should pick one or perhaps two specialties in order to best
optimize your website’s on-page elements.
Let’s face it, not all of us can be
a Jack or Jane of all trades. Prospects like working with subject matter
experts (SMEs) in the field of real estate. If your specialty is office and
retail leasing, you want to ensure your business name, address, and phone
number (NAP) are used throughout your website. Be sure to include a call to
action, such as “Call us today to tour our office/ retail spaces at…” and
your local phone number. Additionally, the same NAP that is used on your
website should be used for your local listing citations, such as Google My
Business.
You also want to ensure the backend
of your website has a placeholder for title tags, meta descriptions and body
text. You may then use highly relevant keywords that tell Google and other
search engines what each of your website pages is about by filling in the
state, city, and neighborhoods that you service in your title tags and meta
descriptions. Then write out the description of the city or property in the
body. You can learn how to optimize on-page elements yourself by taking a search engine optimization
specialization course by Coursera or by hiring a SEO freelancer to help you
with this process.
Undoubtably, commercial real estate
is a local service. Therefore, ensure your website makes use of schema local
markup. The schema markup tells search engine bots what they are looking for.
Additionally, if you are a commercial real estate listing agent, ensure your
properties are indexable and have an XML sitemap. Without an XML sitemap,
search engine bots may not read all the web pages of your website, and
therefore may skip the page you have of your property listings.
Although these easy-to-read
commercial real estate SEO tips are not inclusive of all the strategies a
commercial real estate agent may want to implement at the start of his/her
career, they certainly are easy to implement with a budget in mind.