SEO Pro Tips When Working in Real Geeks Real Estate Platform

Our agency normally works in WordPress for our SEO clients. This provides the most familiarity for our development team and flexibility with plugins. In some cases, a client approaches us to do SEO work on another type of CMS or web-building platform. RealGeeks is such a case. 

RealGeeks is a good all-in-one solution for realtors but provides some distinct roadblocks for SEO agencies. 

We’ve listed a couple of considerations for realtors trying to improve their SEO with a RealGeeks website OR SEO agencies with a client website in RealGeeks. 

What is RealGeeks?

RealGeeks pitches itself as an all-in-one real estate platform that is easy to use for realtors. They provide “IDX” websites (stands for Internet Data Exchange; basically a fancy term for displaying MLS listings) and a full suite of CRM options, which allows realtors to control the full life cycle of a client. I think this is the main reason why some of my later critiques of the platform exist: RealGeeks is for realtors, not web design agencies.

You can check out their website here

Pros/Cons of SEO in RealGeeks

Pros

• Agencies don’t have to build the entire platform from scratch. There are a lot of widgets and core features in the RealGeeks platform, like property search features, CRM functionality, mortgage calculators, real-time market data, MLS integrations, etc. 
• Simplicity keeps designers in check. Sometimes web designers get a little crazy and do things that are detrimental to SEO: using massive hero images and employing heavy JavaScript to create visual elements. Limitations required you to make more with less.

Cons

• Web designers will find there are severe limitations to the range of things you can do on the website.
• If you want to embed Google Tag Manager or Ahrefs code into the head area, this must go through the Real Geeks support staff. There is no access to this on the editor side.
• All content beyond simple text and photos must be written by hand in HTML
• SEO tiles are hard to edit/hard to suggest to Google – we’ve had some issues with Google getting the title case SEO titles to display…with one of our pages having mostly lowercase letters. We are still working to solve this one.
• Analytics attribution is difficult: due to CTA complications, it can be hard to track bottom-of-funnel conversions like button clicks and phone number clicks.

Pro Tips

Build pages like you are doing email marketing

Normally, we use a visual builder called Beaver Builder when creating service area pages, landing pages, etc. There is no such visual builder in RealGeeks. All additional page content must be created in a 730-pixel-wide space. This presents design and CRO (conversion rate optimization) challenges: there’s no way to make full splash images, and buttons are virtually nonexistent to an editor-level user.

The best design approach is to consider building pages like you are developing them in an email platform like Mailchimp. Everything is built in one or two columns. Text and headings are formatted in ways that are easy to read. Buttons are simple.

If you want complex designs or images, consider building them in Photoshop or Canva first as a rectangle image and then embedding inline with other content.

Get creative with calls-to-action (CTAs)

Our client wanted to improve the property management wing of their real estate business. We created a main property management page, along with service pages targeting property management queries. Our team discovered that the popups available through RealGeeks are hardcoded into the website and cannot be changed.

We used three types of CTAs on the website: simple button, phone link, and email link. The buttons look nice but are limited in functionality. Our team was originally trying to create a custom popup form to collect property management leads. However, the popup forms cannot be changed (see our earlier point) and this makes for a vague customer experience (trying to sign up for property management services, but the form is styled and communicated in a way that signals they are looking to buy/sell a house). 

It’s helpful to also have phone and email links on the website. These help to mix up the calls to action and provide clients with a way to reach the property management team. 

It’s still a work in progress to perfect CTAs on the Real Geeks platform when working outside of the traditional buy/sell aspect of the real estate business. 

Save & reuse HTML templates in Google Docs

The first template we created for a service area page took several hours to develop. We were attempting split columns, custom testimonial blocks, FAQ markup, etc. This takes a lot of time and testing to get right. 

We save all of our “page designs” in Google Docs and use them as the base for developing other pages. We mix things up, make additions, etc. to keep the design fresh and Google happy…but it’s a great time saver, rather than starting from scratch each time.

ANOTHER PRO TIP: Save any existing page content in another Google Doc if you are testing your HTML on the live site. This way you can copy/paste into the website and “reset” the page back to the original. You’ll thank us later. 

Use the Support staff at RealGeeks for questions

Real Geeks has a support staff available to answer questions on their platform or to perform more technical tasks on the website. We’ve asked them to embed some code to set up Ahrefs site crawls on the site. They were able to add this to the site within the same day, which is great! 

There will be things you as an SEO or developer simply cannot do with the tools you are given. Put it into your workflow to keep Real Geeks contact information saved and ready to go when you have a question.

You can submit a ticket on the support site: https://support.realgeeks.com/kb-tickets/new. The staff will likely get back to you in a day or two.

Wrapping Up

We are still working to improve our skills and work within the RealGeeks environment. Doing SEO in an unfamiliar environment is always a challenge, but it’s been fun to grow our toolbox of skills.