When Ryan joined me to work with him on his SEO back in March, I was anxious. Ryan was a real estate agent based in Singapore who did not even have a website at that time.

• Will my 5 Step SEO Framework which worked for the t-shirt printing and art industry work for the real estate niche?
• What if real estate was way too competitive for any of my strategies to work?

My SEO program (unlike most others) comes with a Google ranking guarantee too. While on the outside I portrayed confidence, in reality, I was battling with imposter syndrome. Despite my uncertainty, I took Ryan on as a client and put my SEO framework to the test.

As Ryan did not even have a website when he joined me, I told him to get that sorted as soon as he could. Brand new websites usually take a lot longer to rank on Google than established ones. So I told Ryan, he may need to wait a while before he could see results.

Ryan was super enthusiastic from Day 1. He built his WordPress site in barely a few weeks. And my first comment to Ryan was “to simplify his site!” We cleaned up his menu to what you see now – just the Home page, Blog page, Join Us page and Contact Us page. We wanted to keep the website simple so that website visitors were able to easily navigate the website and contact Ryan.

Ryan’s website was live and active by the first week of May. Now it was time to double down on the website’s SEO. Because a website without website visitors serves no purpose!

Step 1: Nail SEO Fundamentals

SEO Fundamentals covered in this 15 minute SEO course are crucial regardless of the niche that you are in – even for the competitive real estate niche!

Having grown my past businesses to over a million dollars in revenue using SEO, I knew that Ryan had to understand SEO fundamentals thoroughly, before working on his site. On our SEO kickstart call, I made sure Ryan had these fundamentals ingrained to ensure he had the best chances of success!

Step 2: Do Strategic Keyword Research

You cannot adopt a one size fits all approach with SEO Keyword Research in the Real Estate niche. What type of properties will you be selling? What is the keyword search volume for keywords in your locality?

Keyword research is not that straight forward especially if you are new to the world of SEO. There is a lot of strategy involved. For example, you need to find keywords in your niche that have significant enough search volume and that have manageable SEO competition. You also need to find a balance of profitable and educational keywords to write content on.

I shortlisted about 19 keywords for Ryan out of which we picked the best 6 keywords to work on! The best 6 keywords had decent search volume (at least 50 searches a month) and manageable competition.

Next it was time for the content creation and planning phase!

Step 3: Create Outstanding Content

This phase started with studying other real estate websites that were doing their SEO well. Because only when we study our competition can we create better content than them.

Apart from picking the best 6 keywords for Ryan to work on first, I also did competitor research on these keywords. In specific, I studied the real estate websites that were ranking for these keywords at that point of time.

• What were these real estate websites doing well?
• What key pieces of information were they missing that potential real estate clients will value?
• What article topics (and content) will differentiate Ryan from his competitors?

After coming up with a list of 5 article topics to rank for keywords in the real estate industry in Singapore, it was time to come up with the SEO blog content. Ryan worked with 1 writer I had recommended him privately. Providing freelance writers with a good debrief is key to getting the best content out for your website.

After some back and forth with his freelance writing team, Ryan published some great pieces of real estate content on his EmpowerFirstSg website. I will be sharing 2 of Ryan’s outstanding pieces of content here, because they ranked on Google Page 1 pretty quickly!

12 New Condo Launches In & Around Tampines

22 Cheapest New Launch Condos In Singapore From $988K

Step 4: Optimise Your Content

For this step, there isn’t any special SEO strategy involved specifically for the real estate industry. We made all the website tweaks required in line with Google’s best practices.

Here, I share 20 On Page Optimisation Best Practices from easy to hard. Many of these best practices (such as a mobile optimised website) are already inbuilt into web builder platforms like WordPress. Other best practices such as good text formatting and easy readability were already part of our outstanding content. Hence at this phase, we only had to work on customised tweaks such as internal linking within our own content pieces, external linking and more.

Step 5: Build Backlinks

The art of building and attracting backlinks involves a customised SEO strategy once again. My goal was to help Ryan attract SEO backlinks through high authority local websites in Singapore and other real estate blogs.

As there are over 10 link building strategies out there, I worked with Ryan to build out a customised link building strategy based on his needs. As Ryan’s website was brand new and the real estate industry is one that is extremely competitive, I expected our link building strategy to take a long time to work.

I featured Ryan on my Domain Authority 26 website (www.thenoteway.com) in an article titled Top 5 Real Estate Agents In Singapore.

Surprisingly, we started ranking on Google Page 1 faster than I had expected. We started ranking before we had fully executed on our link building strategy. We started ranking on Google Page 1 in just 4 months!

Want to see the magic for yourself?

Simply type “cheapest new launch condo in Singapore” on Google.

Just below the sponsored Google advertisements and Stacked Homes, a Singapore real estate website which has been around for many years, you see Ryan’s article: 22 Cheapest New Launch Condos In Singapore From $988K.

And I was surprised that Ryan’s article was ranking above long established real estate marketplaces like PropertyGuru and 99.co.

Wow.

Full credit to Ryan for his hard work, dedication, commitment and belief in my SEO strategy from Day 1. (See the progress in clicks, visitors and impressions for Ryan’s EmpowerFirst Sg website in the image below.)

Now imagine Ryan gets just 3 new clients every month (being super conservative here) from Google search. 

For not just 1 or 2 years, but for the rest of his career as a real estate agent!

Do the math. 

The ROI?

Infinite. 

Hard work certainly pays off. 

If you pair it with the right SEO strategy of course.

Congrats Ryan!

Get More SEO Help

If you would like to discuss the next steps for your SEO strategy, you can enquire with me here.