u/lakestaterealty Best SEO Tool for Someone Not in the Industry. Hello! I am a real estate agent who decided that their main marketing focus is going to be through Search Engine Optimization (SEO). I am not in the industry and am only looking to optimize one site, my own. Which tool or tools would you guys recommend? I am not looking to spend more than a couple hundred a month. If I can get away without spending any money that would be great too! For some context I am looking for mostly hyper-local SEO as my business is concentrated in an area extending at most 40 miles from place of work. Any input would be greatly appreciated. 32 💬🗨📰👈
boostedgts This is going to be very blunt, but save your money. If you're not going to learn Search Engine Optimization (SEO), you're going to waste all of your time and monthly fees staring at dashboards that make no sense to you. None of the tools mentioned are going to take you to the first page. Your industry is competitive, too competitive to just "on-page SEO and win". Find someone who knows SEO, who will work within your budget and get them to provide you the services. If you don't, you're going to waste time and money while barely moving the needle. Your hardest part is going to be finding someone willing to work for a couple hundred bucks a month. Most will buy services from Fiverr and destroy any chance you have to rank and the rest will just take your money. You're realistically better off just putting your couple hundred bucks a month into Google AdWords.
NHRADeuce I'll second this. Your industry is highly competitive and a 40 mile radius is not hyper local, not even a little bit. In that size area you have at least 200+ competitors and a handful of those are spending a lot of money on digital. Likely over $10k per month. Unless you devote yourself to doing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as a full time job, you are not going to outrank those competitors. Even then, you have to overcome the relevance and ranking they have likely spent years earning. tampaguy2013 Both these guys are right on the money.
smiley44 You need Google Analytics and Google Search Console, both free. You do not need anything else. As /u/brady2525 said, Moz has tons of articles for you. Start there. Real estate is a competitive niche, and you may need to consider Pay Per Click (PPC) at some point down the road. PM me your site if you want any additional advice.
xin-yii Agree 100% on Google tools – I use a couple of other tools for backlinks and comprehensive technical crawls but for a decent overview the Google suite is perfect
brennanf Moz's "Open Site Explorer" tool can give you a little bit of free information without paying for a monthly plan. The other tools mentioned ( Ahrefs , SEMrush) are also great tools but the bulk of their product they will make you pay for. I would not spend money on those tools unless you spend a lot of time on it or plan on having somebody else at your company work on it. It's really a lot to take in, and SEO best practices change faster than people can learn them in a lot of ways. I would suggest start small. Look into Google Trends. Type in a couple of key words like "homes for sale in Chicago" or whatever area you are in. Add others like "homes for sale in Chicago Illinois" and compare the popularity to see what people are searching. Write a couple of blog posts that have the keywords you want in them (but make them natural). Make them relevant and useful to someone who would be doing those searches. Also go back into your site and change little details around. For example: • Home page: Search for homes in Chicago Illinois! • About page: John Doe has been serving residents of Chicago Illinois for 15 years. He's lived in Cook County his whole life, and has been helping people buy and sell homes in Chicago, Evanston, Gary, and Orland park his entire career. Etc. Hope that helps! him_tyagi If your website has less than 500 pages then you can use free SEO tools to audit it. These SEO tools will give you optimization suggestions like missing meta tags, description, broken links, link building opportunities, keyword tracking, etc. Though, I will recommend you to read some theory first from Google's Webmaster tools, Search Engine Land, and SEO MOZ. After that, you will be able to use these tools efficiently. Here's the list: • Visual SEO Studio • Traffic Travis • Screaming Frog SEO Spider • IziSEO [deleted] For local SEO, Google search console is key. You can see the terms that users are using. Also Google analytics of course. And if you have a physical office, Google maps too. (Except if you start to receive fake bad reviews on Google maps and don't want to deal with that, trust me, it will happen) And check out the moz tutorials for local SEO. If you subscribe to the newsletter they also send a weekly list of articles. Everything for free. And for doing keyword research there are a ton of good free options. KhalessiOfContent Check out Google Analytics (Free), Google Keyword Planner (Free), Google Trends (Free), Moz (Paid), AnswerThePublic.com (Free), and SEMrush's Content Analyzer tool (Paid). Hope this helps!
