SEO for a real estate agency

Tak Makelaardij was one of my first clients when I started offering SEO as a service. The agency is based in Cadzand, a seaside town in the south of the Netherlands, and sells both regular homes and vacation homes. They're listing agents as well as NWWI-validated appraisers (the NWWI is the Dutch home valuation institute). They work across the whole western part of Zeelandic Flanders, and many of their clients come from Belgium and Germany.

These days they're the go-to real estate agency in Cadzand and the surrounding area: they sell the most homes in the region. It's one of my favorite collaborations. They work hard and do what they say they'll do, and I relate to that, because it's how I like to work myself.

Tak Makelaardij started out in 2019 with a basic WordPress site. "We had a WordPress website. Made by a friend of Peter's. And yeah, with just the bare essentials on it, I think," says Marriët of Tak Makelaardij. "At that point we weren't doing anything with it at all anymore. So we didn't come up in the top three either."

An agency that mostly sells vacation homes on the coast, with lots of buyers from Germany and Belgium, needs to be found online, and the old site wasn't making that happen. What was missing was a well-thought-out SEO approach for real estate agents: good copy and a plan to get found for the right search terms.

I started with new SEO copy for the site, and from there things moved fast. Back then I still worked mainly as a copywriter; it was only later that I focused fully on SEO.

What Marriët valued most was the working relationship. "Personal contact. Approachable," she says. "You put your own spin on it. In the copywriting, you positioned us as the 'new kid on the block.'" That role suited them well, because the region has a few established real estate agents they had to compete with.

Besides the copy, I also took on the link building: making sure good, relevant websites link to the Tak Makelaardij site. As soon as those links started to count, the rankings went up fast.

At some point, Tak Makelaardij brought in another agency for extra marketing, while I stayed involved as well. Tak Makelaardij wanted to see whether that extra effort would bring in even more.

The opposite happened: their rankings in Google started to drop. According to Marriët, the difference was mostly about involvement: "The contact was very different. They weren't nearly as involved as you are. And knowing how our business works. And what we need."

She explains why a standard approach doesn't work for them: "We're a real estate agency. But we mostly have vacation homes. We mostly have Belgians. We mostly have Germans. So you can't compare that to another real estate agency."

Tak Makelaardij stopped working with the other agency and went back to working fully with me. After that, the results got even better than before. "Luckily, of course, we figured that out very quickly. So we just stopped it very quickly. And it confirmed once again how happy we are working with you."

Tak Makelaardij now ranks well in Google for "makelaar Cadzand" (real estate agent Cadzand), and also for search terms like "huis te koop Cadzand" (house for sale Cadzand) and for searches with the names of the towns nearby. How much difference does that make? "A lot," says Marriët. "Those are the words people search for, of course."

Marriët mainly looks at it from the seller's side: "Well, these days most of it happens online. So a potential seller will also look at what our position is online. Because that in turn benefits their home, which might then go up for sale with us."

She stresses that it works both ways: "The home has to be found, and the seller has to know that we're easy to find online. There's no getting around that anymore."

I see that across the whole real estate business. In almost every region, several agencies want to be found for the same search terms, like "makelaar" followed by the name of the town, and the agency at the top gets seen first.

These days I work for Tak Makelaardij in maintenance mode. I keep an eye on the rankings, and every two months a new blog post goes up, so they hold on to their place in Google and keep building on it. Marriët is looking ahead, too: "I think online marketing will keep playing a role. And that it's only going to get more important."

You can read more about how I work with real estate agents on my page about SEO for real estate agents.