How to market an estate agent online

Daniel,

Are these exact match searches with significant search volume?

Are these search terms most likely used by your friend's target audience when they're looking online for something that your friend can offer?

Maybe you could uncover other significant exact match search terms by digging deeper through the updated ideal customer profile of your friend's target audience?

Since you already know your friend's top competitors and their sites, then it would be good to spy on them and what they're doing ...

For example, you can use SimilarWeb.Com and SpyFu.Com to do the following things:

1. You can identify the most effective traffic generation strategies of your friend's top competitors. These include direct traffic, referral traffic, organic search traffic, paid search & display traffic and social traffic;

2. For sites with significant direct traffic, you can study what they're doing to get direct traffic, i.e. Are they pitching irresistible opt-in offers? Are they offering members-only content and services? Do they have apps? etc. You can then test if any of these tactics would also work on your friend's Web properties;

3. For sites with significant referral traffic, you can identify which specific sites are driving referral traffic to them. You can then confirm if your friend has any paid advertising and content-sharing opportunities in those referring sites;

4. For sites with significant organic search traffic, you can spy on the keywords used by those sites for their SEO campaigns;

5. For sites with significant paid search & display traffic, you can spy on the paid keywords that they're using for their paid search campaigns in Google Adwords, and also spy on how they're creating their ads among other details (especially for long running ads); and

6. For sites with significant social traffic, you can identify the social networks that are used by those sites to get social traffic. You can then check on what they're doing in those social networks, and if your friend has any advertising and content-sharing opportunities in those social networks ...

The details that you can gather from those tools could also help your friend know more about his ideal customer; and

You can also spy on non-competing sites where your friend's target audience hangs out. You can then check if there are any advertising and content-sharing opportunities for your friend in those non-competing sites ...

I'm not sure how to answer your question. Well, you can maybe tell your friend that the point is to find where your friend's target audience is hanging out online, grab their attention with your offers, convert them into subscribers, convert those subscribers into paying customers, and convert those paying customers into viral marketers and repeat customers; and

There are many more straightforward ways to get targeted traffic than trying out a lot of different things to get top Google SERPs, especially for competitive keywords, since nobody outside Google's search team knows what they're exactly doing to rank pages ...

im curious

how did you figure out that the top of Google is out of your reach for the keyword he wants?

is he expecting that you put his site there?


-Ike Paz

'To be at the top'...interesting. How can you give him guaranty that it will be so?...
In any way social media networks are always good. And to promote this website you should have a perfect content.

First of all, is this an estate agent or real estate agent? An estate agent would be someone that helps people create wills, trusts, and administer an estate when someone dies.

Either way, social media is not going to really bring in new leads. If I am looking to buy a new house or to get a will, I'm not going to go searching on Facebook for those things.

Google is where your friend needs to be. Even if the top listings are currently dominated by big companies, that doesn't mean they are always hard to beat locally. Rankings may not be easy to obtain, but it won't be impossible. For local SEO, the biggest thing you want to focus on is citations. You can look up what those are if you don't know, but they are one of the most significant factors in ranking locally. Also make sure they setup a Google My Business Page and link it to their website.

I would probably just sign up for a service like Yext to take care of the citations. It is about $500 per year, but worth it, in my opinion.

AdWords is another possibility. If you don't know what you are doing, you can lose a ton of money pretty fast though. Even if you do know what you are doing, you will likely lose money initially until you can tweak things to be more efficient.

If you have some experience with SEO, then you should know that competing in local search results is a lot easier, rather than trying to rank for generic terms like "make money online".

Build up the site, make sure the on-page SEO is done properly, build some contextual backlinks, varying the anchor text and mixing up your link sources. Give it a couple of weeks and I'm sure you'll be on page 1-2.

if he needs leads than Craigslist + Google Places Top rating brings him a lot.

If you want to know how to post craigslist. its pretty simple but you need to be detailed for his ad.

If you want to rank him on Top of the tier in his area than you need a Google Business Listing(you need a real office location to verify from Google). and Verify it and Do some Citations with same NAP on High DA Directories. do it manual so you can edit it laters in case of address or phone number change.