Real Estate SEO

Archive for the ‘Blogging’ Category

Follow these steps and see more organic traffic in 100 days.

Folks, I’m going to give you a simple formula to achieve more search engine traffic in just 100 days. The formula isn’t hard to write down. You will need to dedicate an hour or two each week in order to execute this plan.

You will also need to have a few things in order to follow these steps. They are:

1. A decent real estate website
2. A blog as part of your website ideally in the structure xyz.com/blog (if you have a boston logic website with a blog, you’re all set)
3. A site with a dynamic site map that updates when you publish a new blog post.
4. The pages of your site (not just the blog pages) should be somewhat optimized already. H1s, Title and description tags, sufficient paragraph text and a good internal linking structure all help.

Now, this is by no means all you can do before launching the following steps, but it should give you a nice starting point.

So, we’re going to increase your site traffic by producing good blog content. Each week you’re going to blog 2 or 3 times so that you are posting 10 times each month. We’re going to use the following post types:

• Listing posts - You take on a new listing. Someone in your office takes on a new listing. Or you simply go on a showing. Write a blog post about the home. Here’s an example listing post.
• Market reports - Write about a present market trend. Prices going up, down, or remaining the same, for example.
• Guest blogs - Have a friend or co-worker write a post for you.
• Answering a common question - every day, practically, you answer questions from buyers, sellers, and renters. If you do this by email, which you probably do all the time, you can anonymize and re-use the content. Others have the same questions and this content is fantastic blog fodder.
• Real Estate news - If there’s an auction announced, a big closing  in the market, a national news story pertaining to real estate, or anything newsworthy, write about it. State some facts and give your thoughts. Here’s some real estate news.

Step 1 - Create 10 to 20 categories in your blog. Give the categories the same names as your keywords. If you’re trying to figure out what keywords to use, search this blog some and you’ll find posts on how to do that.

Step 2 - Set a schedule, put the time into your calendar. Write a check list. Do whatever it takes to make sure you’re going to do the posts.

Here’s what this can look like:

1. Week 1
   1. Real Estate listing post
   2. Local Market report
   3. Answering a question
2. Week 2
   1. House listing post
   2. News item
3. Week 3
   1. Answer a seller’s question
   2. New Listing post
   3. Guest post
4. Week 4
   1. Home Listing post
   2. Answer a question
5. Week 5
   1. Real Estate Market report
   2. Realty News item
   3. listing post
6. Week 6
   1. Answer a home buying question
   2. new listing post
   3. Guest post

I think you get the gist…

When you create a post, make sure it is listed in every category that is even remotely applicable. Tag your posts too, using keywords in the posts that are close to or the same as your category names.

Step 3 - track your progress. Make sure you’re posting 2 - 3 times each week. In the first 100 days, you should post over 30 times. Yes, more than 30 posts. If you want to see an even greater impact on your ranking and traffic, post 3 or 4 times each week. In short, produce content regularly and post it properly.

You will see results.

SEO is about more than just a few marquis terms.

Month-over-month, a client of ours just saw a 22% increase in traffic to their site from search engines. Looking at their list of target terms, there wasn’t all that much improvement in placement. Of course, this is to be expected, SEO isn’t a game of ranking for just a handful of terms.

A popular business book came out a couple of years ago. It’s called the long tail. It’s principles apply to SEO in great ways. First let me give you some basics:

The concept of the long tail is pretty mind-blowing. We now live in a world of options. Volume is often the name of the game. We no longer live our lives in a 25 mile radius. We have access to so much.

For example, google returns millions of records for most of your searches. Content on blogs is being created every second. itunes offers millions of songs, just imagine trying to fit all of those on the racks of a music store. Just a few decades ago, you could only get 6 or 10 TV channels. Now, you can subscribe to hundreds!

Long Tail of SEO

The Long Tail principle tells us that many actions follow a graph like the one to the right. The numbers start high, but degrade rapidly at first, then much more slowly. Total user volume is calculated by taking the integral of the curve. sorry if I just scared you back to high school calculus.

Let me bring this back home. 75% of those millions of titles on itunes sell at least once a month. The top 20 or 50 get a lot of press, but Apple makes the vast majority of it’s revenue from the millions of other songs in its catalog.

SEO works the same way. If you think SEO is about ranking for a few terms, you’re dead wrong. If you think that users only type in a few terms to search for the property that you sell or rent, that’s false too.

Searchers type in all sorts of strings. For example, if you think they’re going to google for “Newport Real Estate” and only for that term, then you’ll miss out on everyone who searches for terms like “Newport real estate for sale,” “Newport vacation homes” and “newport houses.” Not to mention the folks who might be very specific and google for “newport real estate open houses” or “newport 2 bedroom house.”

The point is that you may think that there are 20 or 40 terms that will bring you traffic, when the reality is that strong traffic comes from leveraging hundred and thousands of terms. Lots of those terms may only bring you 1 or 2 visitors per year, but when you add them all up, you’ll see real, lasting traffic.

The book: The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More

On Monday, we offered our first Logic Classroom. Realtors from all over the country dialed in. Local agents joined us in our offices!

Our next Logic Classroom will be on 12/8/09. Learn how to turn your blog into a lead generation machine!

If you missed the class here’s the slide deck:

If you’re one of the hundreds of people who follow us on Twitter, know that you’re not alone. Based on statistics just published yesterday, Boston Logic is among the most followed on twitter. Fewer than 1% of twitter users have more than 500 followers. If you’re reading this on Twitter, you’re one of more than 1700 and counting!

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/05/twitter-data-analysis-an-investors-perspective/ This is a great article by Robert Moore.

Like most web application, a large percentage of Twitter’s users don’t do anything. Lots of them don’t follow anyone and don’t tweet at all. less than 25% of twitter’s users make up probably 99% of the activity on the site.

But that’s ok. Twitter has over 50,000,000 users. The laws of large numbers tell us that a small piece of a big pie is still a lot of pie! So, if you can get our there and grad some more followers some percentage of them will be active.

In fact, I’m going to assume that only10 or 20% of our followers will actually read this blog post when it’s syndicated as a tweet (This happens automatically via rss). That’s ok that means that over 300 people will read the tweet and a few of them will click to this post and read more. The tweet will only be 140 characters.  So, this very sentence will not find it’s way onto twitter. Only the first 2 or 3 sentences of this post will. Some of our growing follower base will then click through. That’s all we want.

If you found us through twitter, let us know!

Also, we’re hiring: http://www.bostonlogic.com/careers

Thanks!

I almost can’t believe that I wrote that headline?

Yesterday, I spoke with a guy who told me he wanted to run a direct mail campaign to drive traffic to his website and capture leads to “farm” (his word) into clients.

Now, first let me say that farming a cache of leads is a great strategy. You can source your leads lots of ways. We recommend a strong online marketing campaign including strong real etstate seo efforts, ppc, email marketing, and a highly accountable reporting system.

So, this guy isn’t completely off the mark. Yes, your database of leads and customers is gold. You need to nourish this list and grow it. The more qualified users you can drive to your site, the more leads you will generate. If your site is well built to convert real estate buyers, sellers, and renters into leads, then the more traffic you have the more leads you should have.

As we’ve mentioned many times on this blog, you need to consider the cost of each lead. What did you pay to acquire the lead? If you paid $4000 for 8000 clicks (that’s $0.50 per click or site visitor) on Google Adwords and that generated 400 leads, then you paid $10 per lead. Got it?

Well, let’s think about this direct mail campaign that the guy on the phone wanted to deploy. He’s going to spend money sending those mail pieces upfront. Let’s say he sends our 10,000 pieces at $0.40 each. That’s $4000.

Now, he told me that these mailings were going to direct the users to his website. So, how many of the recipients will actually go to a website on a postcard? Here’s where the plan falls off the tracks.

It’s not likely that many of the recipients will actually go to the website. I don’t know about you, but I toss those mailers in the trash. I pick up my mail on the way into my building and the next thing I do is filter out the junk mail straight into the garbage.

So, if our friendly realtor is lucky, he’ll get maybe 5 or 10% of the recipients visiting his site. If the site was fantastic and converted leads at 10% (which is pretty high) he’d have 10000 x 0.1 x 0.1 = 100 leads. That’s $40/lead. Honestly, the cost would likely be even higher.

Bottom line - For real estate marketing campaigns, SEM, SEO and PPC are far better investments than direct mail. And please don’t be fooled and think that you can generate web traffic efficiently using traditional marketing like direct mail.

Hopefully, we just saved you some time and money.