Real Estate and SEO
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is similar to Real Estate in many ways…
See, Real Estate as a “topic” is something I think most people have a relatively good grasp of. Almost everyone will own a piece of Real Estate at some point in their life. And even if they don’t, they’re likely to have at least looked into it. Few purchases in life are as heavily researched as a Real Estate purchase, wether it’s a first home, or 10th investment property. The sheer scale of dollars invested necessitates it. So, subsequently, most people have a pretty good grasp of the factors that influence the true value of a home:
- A solid foundation
- Quality of the structure
- A good neighborhood
Hopefully by now the similarities between Real Estate and SEO are becoming apparent. If not, allow me to explain…
Build a Solid Foundation
Almost everyone understands that a house is built from the ground up. If the foundation isn’t solid, everything else is compromised. The same is true of your SEO efforts. A solid foundation is imperative to long-term success. And in SEO, keyword research is your foundation. Everything you do must be built upon it, and if you don’t have a content strategy based on keyword research, you’re just wasting time when it comes to creating a website that converts. So again, without an analysis of customer search behavior and the competitive landscape of the Real Estate industry, an SEO program will lack the insight needed to get your website off the ground. Just like a house with a crappy foundation.
The Quality of the Structure
While the foundation is essentially the building blocks of a solid home, it achieves very little on its own. How many people do you know that live on a concrete slab? Hopefully none.
The value of the foundation is that it provides the base upon which a quality structure can be be built. And the quality of the structure is ultimately just as important as the foundation in determining property value (in this case, success of your website). As the three little pigs found out, a house made of straw holds no real value.
Look at it like this… your website is the house, and Google is the home inspector. Google (and other search engines like Yahoo and Bing) look at a wide range of on-page factors (permalinks, keywords, anchor text, tags, alt text, etc.) to determine the true quality of your structure. Just like in real life the architecture of your website is crucial in the assessment of property value, as is the quality of materials used in building that structure.
From an SEO perspective, these materials include:
Code: Clean and well structured code is necessary to help Google’s spiders access every square inch of your “house”. These are the good spiders and lucky for us (assuming you’re using WordPress) we don’t have to worry too much about the code issue anymore.
Content: The old adage that content is king is still as relevant as ever. With the appropriate foundation laid (keyword research), your content can be crafted to deliver maximum SEO impact via “on-page” elements like I mention above.
A Good Neighborhood
The final piece of the value equation is the neighbourhood in which your “house” is located. External factors will always influence the value of a property. Even the most luxurious home will fail to reach its true value if it’s located in the ghetto.
External elements can contribute significantly to property valuations and likewise, circles of association play a crucial role in Google’s assessment of a website. From an SEO perspective, links are your neighborhood. Search engines analyze the link ecosystem of each website to determine the quality of the neighborhood in which it resides. If your site is connected to known link farms and spammers, don’t expect search engines to attribute much value to your home. You’re in the online ghetto. Want to prove to Google that you’re from a good neighborhood? Make sure your link building efforts are focused on the acquisition of a mix of quality links.
What else is SEO like?
That sums up my little analogy. If you’ve got one that works for you, feel free to share it in the comments…
