eXp Realty Agent Tyler Ford Shares His Secrets to a Successful Organic SEO Strategy
After running a successful pay-per-click advertising campaign for his real estate listings, Tyler Ford, with eXp Realty in Tucson, Arizona, wanted to find a less expensive way to achieve the same results.
“Organic SEO can be just as effective as pay-per-click if you’re willing to put in the time and do the work,” says Ford. “It’s a long-term strategy. It’s not that pay-per-click doesn’t work. I just decided to go a different direction so I could trade my time for things that work and cost less,” he adds.
Ford says that many agents get frustrated and quit or set unrealistic goals when it comes to SEO. “You won’t get instant results. You have to see the long-term vision of what it can be over time.”
Here are his tips for an effective organic SEO strategy:
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Consistency is key.
“There’s all different kinds of content that people can put out depending on the strategy. But from a real estate perspective, I do very specific community pages that I get indexed and ranked in the various search engines,” says Ford. “When people are searching for particular things within my local market, they find my page.”
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Create compelling content.
“I create a lot of content around the IDX plugin. When people land on that content, they then start searching for homes based on what they landed on. As they search, their information goes into the backend CRM that does the heavy lifting in terms of texting, emailing, and automatic home updates.” Ford is generating enough traffic, and enough leads to be organically doing one to three deals a month.
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Blog about it. Content is king.
“I’ve heard from many organic SEO people that’s it’s all about content, content, content,” says Ford. “But, it’s more than that, you have to write good content. I recommend Yoast to help you figure out if you’re writing to maximize your SEO,” he says. “It’s helped me get good at writing it for SEO optimization the first time around.” Ford writes most of his content but recently hired a writer to help him build out his community pages.
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Be patient.
“I’ll be honest; it took me well over a year to get any traction. You’ve got to have a long-term vision. You’ve got to be willing to do this for a year without anything.” He recommends agents start with a pay-per-click SEO strategy, because, he says, “That’s now money, and then I would evolve my SEO over time. You can gradually start to reduce the amount of money that you spend on SEO because now your organic SEO is starting to replace that.”
Want more tips from Ford? He wrote an ebook that offers tips on search engine optimization, along with strategies for finding investor properties. SEO Strategies by Tyler Ford
