Why SEO matters: a case study of Bryan-College Station realtors

Why aren’t realtors in College Station doing SEO? Is it like, illegal or something?

Look, we love College Station – Jess lived there for a long time, served as a city councilman, and owned a business there. But holy smokes, realtors – love you guys but let’s get on top of this. SEO for realtors in College Station is low-hanging fruit. We’ll prove it.

We’d go so far as to say that if you’re in College Station (120,000 or so) or neighboring Bryan (90,000), and you’re not doing SEO with a College Station digital marketing agency, well, you’re simply leaving money on the table. The numbers bear that out, for sure.

We really do love realtors here at Precision Outreach, so let’s get real (we’ve got all the dad jokes, folks) and look at realtors in College Station for our brief SEO analysis. This is especially relevant because Bryan-College Station has been rapidly growing, and a lot of people are looking for realtors – including the many parents of students who come to the area every year to attend Texas A&M, and may need a rental (or consider buying one).

Let’s start with a simple premise: anyone explicitly looking for a realtor on Google probably wants a realtor. Simple enough, plainly true, and important to keep in mind as we look at the following.

“college station realtors”

This is the most popular search term relating to finding a realtor in College Station. Our dataset shows that at least 40 people, on average, search this every month in Google. 40 a month is not a lot by itself, but it’s roughly 500 a year, and those 500 are clearly, intentionally looking for a real estate agent – not just anywhere, but in College Station.

We would say that their “intent” is very hight for finding a College Station realtor, too. A lot of people look at homes or cars online just for the heck of it, thinking about “someday, if I win the lottery,” but how many are browsing realtor listings just for the heck of it? They’re wanting to find something…

See what we’re on about?

Now let’s look at the top 10 results for this search, which has some surprising information…

1. Realtor.com listing of real estate agents in College Station

2. BCSrealtor.com, the Bryan-College Station Regional Association of Realtors (this is the MLS listing service for Bryan-College Station)

3. Zillow.com reviews of College Station realtors

4. HAR.com list of College Station realtors (HAR is the Houston Association of Realtors, the MLS for Houston)

5. FastExpert.com, an aggregation service, list of College Station realtors

6. Yelp.com reviews of College Station realtors

7. USNews.com list of College Station realtors

8. TM5Properties.com – FINALLY! A local realtor! Way down at Number 8, receiving zero traffic from this search query, but at least on the front page. 

9. Homelight.com list of College Station realtors

10. ColdwellBanker.com’s local real estate agents in College Station. Phew! Another local realtor.

Notice the two we bolded here. They’re the only two local real estate firms/agents that show up on the “first page” of Google, or in the top 10 listings. Unfortunately, even they are so far down the list that they’re not going to get any traffic from the search term.

Traffic from the search… where’s it going?

Why don’t we re-analyze this list, but this time let’s add the percentage of traffic received by each position, based on research from Backlinko (and I’ll simplify the labels):

(27.6%) 1. Realtor.com

(15.8%) 2. Bryan-College Station Association of Realtors

(11.0%) 3. Zillow.com

(8.4%) 4. HAR.com

(6.3%) 5. FastExpert.com

(4.9%) 6. Yelp.com

(3.9%) 7. USNews.com

(3.3%) 8. TM5Properties.com

(2.7%) 9. Homelight.com

(2.4%) 10. ColdwellBanker.com

We were really surprised by these rankings for realtors in BCS. You’d think, with all the realtors in Bryan-College Station (there are quite a few!), that at least one of them would have thought to locate and then exploit the number one search term relevant to hiring a realtor in the area, used by 500 people per year, and with a very high level of intent.

But… no. No one has taken advantage of the opportunity to rank here, and the keyword ranking difficulty would appear to be very, very low. Focused SEO work by a College Station marketing agency would be able to rank any realtor in College Station within 4-5 months, at most, for this term (and others!).

Not only that, but there are other terms with a combined search volume into the thousands for the area. These people are looking for a community wide BCS realtor, or maybe they’re mostly looking for a Bryan realtor. Bottom line: they want to buy a house! If you’re a realtor, that smells like commission.

Even if a fraction of these searches are serious, that fraction is real business and again, money left on the table. Google searches are now the main way people find most products and services, not just realtors.

Based on the lack of interest by any other College Station digital marketing agency, realtor, or just average joe in ranking for realtor searches there – well, we wouldn’t be shocked if this website ranked in the top 10 (on accident of course) for these terms in the near future. Just because we’re talking about it!

And if you found this page looking for anything else? Well… what we’re talking about works. It works even for big traditional media organizations such as the New York Times, who grew their subscriptions by changing to a SEO/search focus from social media.

Want to get a marketing agency that knows College Station and knows SEO to make sure you get the search traffic you deserve? Give us a holler!