Alex Zuev

To sell the property in the United States, you need to have a license. To get the license, you have to pass the exam in a specific state. You have to have a license in each state that you’re going to work in. Before the exam, you need to do the training and when you have a license, you need to join a brokerage. Brokerages handle all the legalities: contracts, money, etc.

So, every real estate agent needs to have a broker. There are many brokerages in the United States. 

You probably saw real estate websites. They have listings with properties they work with. To get a listing on your website, you can either publish it by yourself by uploading the images of your properties or you can get access to a Multiple Listing Service. It’s also known as MLS, which is a database that has all the listings in a specific area and can be connected to your website through IDX. 

IDX is basically the plugin that allows you to connect your website to listings, and there are a few plugins like that: 

• IDX broker;
• iHome finder;
• KV Core, etc. 

You can’t get MLS without a license, you need to have a license in this specific state and then, you can get it. You have to have a social security number to get a license in the US. But I know that if you open the company here, you can get a tax number, and then with a tax number you can get the license without being a U.S. resident.

Here are a few stats about eXp, one of the fastest-growing real estate brokerages: over the last few years, it has grown from 25,000 agents in 2019 to almost 90,000 last year. 

There are lots of sub-niches in real estate to work with: 

• Short-term real estate – it’s basically buying apartments to rent them out on Airbnb;
• Multifamily real estate;
• Self-Storage investing;
• Mortgage services;
• Commercial real estate, for example, NNN Lease Properties;
• Real estate coaching;
• Real estate on the blockchain.

Pros and cons of working in real estate

Cons:

• There are strong competitors. You can’t beat competitors like zero.com, realtor.com, apartments.com. They’re too big, they spend millions and millions of dollars in marketing every year so, you mostly have to focus on long-term keywords and supporting articles. 
• Also, most of the clients are old-fashioned and not tech-savvy. You have to have a good account management department that can educate the clients and help them to understand the value and explain what the agency is working on and why. 
• Real estate agents are very busy and most of them don’t sit at home, they don’t sit in front of their computers, they spend their time in the car traveling around the state and meeting with clients. So an account manager should be able to get the information they need from a busy owner.
• Real estate agents either don’t have a website or they use something simple like Wix. 
• Sometimes they are difficult to track.

Pros: 

• The real estate market in the United States is huge
• There are many agents
• There are high commissions

Here are other important aspects of real estate SEO to consider:

SEO Processes

• System Administrator
• Content
• Link Building
• Local SEO
• Social Media
• Branding, PR
• Podcasting

Content Writing Processes

1. Full-time writers
2. Training

• Books (Story Brand, $100M Offers, What the Heck is EOS)
• ChatGPT

1. Internal System (AMS)

• Specs writings with AI
• In-built plagiarism checker
• Automated posting (AMS -> WP)
• Client separation (different writers for different clients)

Link Building

1. Partner Network
2. AMS

• Allows us to order quickly
• Allows to calculate the numbers
• Can be customized as we want
• Check links

1. Different varieties of strategies

• Direct outreach
• PBNs
• Wikipedia
• Local citations
• Social profiles
• Press releases

Local SEO

1. Multiple accounts (different locations)
2. Local citations
3. Reviews (velocity and frequency)
4. Local guides
5. Local services (GLS)

Recommendation from Alex: Check out the course on local SEO from Matt Versteeg, who was also a speaker at the conference. 

Podcast Production

We do podcast booking for our clients to help them grow their brand authority and we also provide them with a service to run their own podcasts. Earlier we just did the booking, but then we decided that it’s probably a much more efficient approach if the clients can have their own podcast. We also do video editing, branding, and SEO optimization. This all helps to improve the EEAT factors.