Real Estate SEO

Archive for March, 2009

Hey folks. For the local readers (we’re based in Boston) the 3rd installment of the course I’m giving for the North East Association of Realtors is happening this coming Monday. Here’s a link to the course outline. I’m looking forward to seeing you there.

The next session is going to be an in-depth look a the subject of this post. We’re going to be talking about traditional media as it compares to online media. Of course real estate seo is an online marketing medium. So, we’ll be touching on SEO and talking about how it stacks up against the other media.

Now, at Boston Logic, we’re on the side of those who proclaim the digital marketing mantra “Print is dead!” Well, maybe not yet, but it’s circling the drain.

The basic question is, why is this happening? Why is traditional media losing favor while online media is gaining a larger and larger share of the marketing dollar? From our perspective, there are two forces at work.

First of all, our lives are moving online. You need to market to the customers where they are. Your customers are online. Everyone quotes the fact that 80 or 90 percent of real estate buyers start their search online. But the reality is that we do a lot more than just search for property online. We spend hours each day online. We’re buying fewer newspapers, listening to less radio, and we use our TiVo to skip the commercials when we’re watching TV.

The result of this trend is that the number of impressions that each ad spot gets has come down. A TV spot used to be 25% more effective than it is today. And this is steadily declining. Newspaper circulations are falling off a cliff. The news is free online. The paper wastes trees. Pick your reason, we’re all just buying fewer newspapers at the news stand. All of this means that the value of these media is decreasing. So much so that lots of papers are cutting staff, closing their doors, or moving to a completely web-centric model. This means that they’re only going to offer their content online. Hallelujah.

The second reason that marketing dollars are going on line is accountability. Online marketing media, SEO, PPC, social media, banner placement, and email marketing, are all relatively easy to track. You can know how many visitors came from Google’s organic results to your site and how many of these users turned into leads or customers. This means you can calculate the cost of each lead based on the number of leads and your investment into SEO. Calculating ROI is even easier when you’re using Pay Per Click.

In stark contrast, it’s hard to know if a user came from a TV ad or just typed in your web address. Sure, you can print a promo code in the newspaper ad and use that to try and track effectiveness, but then you need to offer some kind of a discount and not everyone will use the promo code. So, you don’t know if your ad is a flop or if it’s actually performing better than your numbers are telling you, based on the number of folks who entered the promo code.

Most small and medium sized businesses don’t even try to track the effectiveness of their print campaign. To most business owners, marketing is a black box. You insert money on one end and hope that it produces business out of the other end. The black box provides little accountability and really doesn’t help you understand your ROI.

If you are one of the smart ones and you are working to understand the ROI on your many marketing media, then the results are probably quite clear. Most marketers know that they get better value out of online media than they do from traditional media. This is the nail in the coffin.

When the numbers tell you that SEO leads are costing you $5 and PPC is costing $7 but the newspaper produces leads at $35. Well, it doesn’t take an MBA to know that you should stop paying for newspaper ads and invest more of your marketing dollars into SEO and PPC. Everyone who runs the numbers is seeing this trend and they’re all moving online.

I could, very honestly, go on. This topic is quite broad. I’ll touch on it in another post soon. I’ll certainly be going into much greater detail on Monday. I hope to see you there! Thanks.

Real Estate offices are, all too often, made up of agents who are in competition with one another. The reason for this is quite basic really. The compensation structure of most offices doesn’t foster team work.

But, without changing the way your entire office works, I want to give you some suggestions on how each member of your team can put in a little work each month to help your office website rank better in the search engines. If you have the right systems setup, then you’ll see more leads for everyone.

1. Make sure there’s at least one link on your real estate agent site to your real estate office’s site.  Inbound linking is very helpful when you’re trying to SEO a site. The best links for your real estate seo will be from other real estate websites to your site.
   1. Make sure the link is HTML text and not an image.
   2. Compose the text of the link carefully. If you practice real estate in Newport, then the text of the link should read “Newport Real Estate” or “Newport Homes.” If you practice in Boston, then the link might read “Boston Real Estate”  or “Boston Condos.” Choose terms for which you’d like your office site to appear higher in the search engine results and make that the text in the link.
2. Start an office blog and divvy up the writing assignments. The average real estate office in the USA has 10 agents working in it. If each agent writes a post every other month, then your blog will be well populated before you know it and you’ll start to see reader traffic, comments, and leads. Here are some tips on how to make that blog engaging. Also, if you didn’t know that blogging was good for real estate SEO, there are plenty of posts on this blog that will explain why and how to do it better.
3. Each agent in your office should use social bookmarking websites to promote your site and each post to your blog. Every real estate agent and even the admins in your office should learn how to use StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, del.icio.us, and other social bookmarking sites. When a new post goes up, a few members of your staff should bookmark each post on each of these sites. This should take no more than a couple of minutes. Have a look at the bottom of this post and you’ll see links to lots of social bookmarking sites. Social bookmarking will bring referral traffic to your site and the backlinks will help your search engine ranking.
4. Make sure every agent in your office has accounts on Facebook, Twitter, and Linked In. Make sure the office has a page on these sites too and that you’re all fans of or connected to the office page. If you don’t know how that works or if the last sentence I wrote makes no sense to you, you need to learn more about social media sites. Call Boston Logic immediately. Social networking sites are a great source of referral traffic, don’t miss out on these visitors!
5. Aggregate email lists. Make sure the office is sending out a newsletter at least once a month. The content can be pulled from or at least reused on the blog you’re going to start.

Ok, these are all simple SEO tasks that just about any agent in your office should be able to do. If you’re reading this post and thinking how great it would be to get the whole office behind an effort like this, just remember that people love to follow leadership. Be the leader in your real estate office who starts the organic SEO effort. Your colleagues will thank you.

Have a great weekend.

Many people out there may have a hard time thinking of SEO as anything other than being the business of ranking. For years that was the measure by which you assessed the strength of your online marketing presence. Well, at this point you’ve probably heard it before…ranking is not the be-all and end-all it once was.

Search engine algorithms are (the formula by which search engines like Google, MSN and Yahoo! qualify and display relevant search results – by the way algorithms vary from search engine to search engine – it’s like grandma’s secret sauce!) ever changing. While at one point it may have been enough to only add and occasionally update “meta data”, there are many more factors that take the stage these days. Some are more obvious than others, and then again some are debatable. (Little secret: if you are not already, you should be following Google Guru, now Head of Webspam, Matt Cutts.)

A few key items that come into play: page meta title and description, SERP friendly URLs, H1 and H2 tags, quality/relevant content, keyword usage and variation (on and off page), a good internal linking structure, proper HTML coding, your domain age (strength lies in older domains), number of quality inbound links, user data (number of visits, time spent on page etc), and overall good housekeeping aka. keeping the site alive and current (or “fresh” as I like to call it).

SEO involves ongoing work, tweaking, and sharing, and once you’ve done that – you do it again. All of this time and work, though I’m not saying it’s guess work just because search algorithms are not publicly shared, will play out and make your site and its content highly relevant for both search engines and searchers, which means more traffic.

Measuring success…

It’s not to say that successful search marketing doesn’t help a site gain top positioning for relevant words and phrases. It does. We know that. However, rankings alone do not equal traffic. While a search engine presence is essential in order to generate user traffic, a successful SEO campaign is measured by the increase in search engine traffic and the rate at which that traffic performs the desired actions on your site (i.e. sales leads, purchases, sign-ups etc). My advice to you (whether you are a do-it-yourselfer or a SEO professional) measure and track your site’s increase in traffic over time, follow where traffic is coming from and where its going, and make sure you track conversions/leads. That’s the goal!

Hi all.

You know, one of the nice things about my job is that I communicate with folks about real estate seo all the time. So, I sometimes write answers to questions that I can re-use as Blog posts. Today, this happened. So, I’m re-purposing something that I wrote about real estate seo to share this story with you all. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoy sharing it.

Here’s what I wrote. It’s an excerpt. So, sorry it starts rather abruptly.

“SEO is about more than two or four terms. You have to focus on a larger number of terms in order to see true results. This is why we work with a minimum of 10 terms. Yes, the two terms that we’ve been discussing (Martha’s Vineyard real estate and Martha’s Vineyard real estate) may be the *Marquis* terms, but they’re not going to truly get you the traffic and leads that you’re looking for. For example, you wouldn’t want to rank for these terms while losing your ranking for the other terms for which you’re already on page 1. Also, a diversity of terms is far preferable to just a small number. The following story illustrates this:

We used to provide SEO services for a company who was ranking in second position for the term Boston Real Estate, at least under our SEO management they were. Yes, this is a good term and they were located in Boston and so we felt we were doing a good job for them. We were also helping them to rank for a number of additional terms. The result was that we doubled their organic search engine traffic over the course of about 6 months. They were seeing about 450 visitors per day to their site and 300 or so of them were coming from the organic search results.

Now, here’s the real point, only 10 percent of their search engine site traffic was coming from the term Boston Real Estate. Also, that term was not converting into leads as reliably as the term Boston Condo, for which they were also ranking quite well.

Lots of clients come to us thinking that 1 term is all they need. When, in fact, a list of terms is needed in order to see strong search engine and lead traffic.”

I hope that they got my point. We’ll see.