Real Estate SEO

Archive for the ‘Content’ 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

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!

Let’s get something clear here. Joomla is not the right platform for building real estate websites.

For our readers who aren’t familiar with the system, Joomla is an open source content management platform. It was built to make building a generic website easier. It was not built for real estate offices or agents.

If you’re going to build a real estate website, you need to use something that was designed for the real estate industry.  At Boston Logic, we’ve developed the ONE System Real Estate Website Platform, but I’m not going to write about that today. Before we invested the thousands of hours that we’ve put into building this system, we did use Joomla to build some sites. So, I’m speaking (writing) from experience here. Let me tell you about some of what we learned:

1. Joomla is not built to integrate with an MLS. This is critical. Your real estate website should be built with an integrated MLS search. The search should not be on another website or in an iFrame. You should be building on a platform that has the search, search results, and property details pages right on your site. In addition the interactive user tools should be part of the site and so should your lead management system. Obviously, joomla doesn’t have a real estate lead management system for you to leverage.
2. Joomla’s content management system is overcomplicated for real estate. When you design software, you start with requirements. Joomla was built to do a lot of things. Most of these things, real estate agents and offices will never ever do. Advanced content management requires a lot of user access levels and controls. Realtors require a simple and easy to use interface for managing their content. Joomla, we found, confused our clients more than it enabled them.
3. Joomla is relatively laborious to style. Our team has worked with Joomla plenty of times. It’s still a bear to make the pages all look good. If you think you’re saving money, think again.
4. Customization is harder. When you get down to it, working with open source systems can get you a lot of functionality for no money. That said, going beyond what the system includes and/or what the plugins you find can do is a challenge. So, if Joomla will do 80% of what you want for your real estate website and then you think it’ll be easy or cheap to hire a developer or web development shop to take you the rest of the way home, think again. Customizing Joomla gets expensive quickly. As a point of reference the last Joomla site that we worked on required about $75,000 in work to get to what the client wanted.
5. Joomla is hard to turn into an effective real estate website. Great real estate websites have lots of features that are not part of the Joomla platform. I’ve already mentioned the MLS search above. Agent profiles linked to their listings. Pages on developments and/or buildings with available listings right on the pages. Live Chat. Lead distribution and management. Featured property pages. Maps. And many of the other features that make for a great real estate website are missing.

Here’s the all important conclusion. Joomla should not be used for real estate websites. It’s unlikely that the cost benefit will outweigh the poor end product that you’re going to see.

A client sent this question to us. We’re not going any SEO for them right now, just PPC Management. This is a typical question that we get from new and potential SEO clients. It’s our constant goal to educate you. So, let’s learn from each other, eh?

We Googled some pretty narrow search terms, like “their term here” and some of our authors’ names, and our site doesn’t come up in the first three or four PAGES of organic Google results. We were pretty surprised by this, so thought we’d check with you whether this is typical when you stop spending money on PPC? I would think we have enough SEO words and content on the site that we would pop up in organic search results.

OK, let’s break this down, shall we.

First of all, if you didn’t know it, your PPC spend does not affect your organic placement. SEO and PPC are not directly related. You can’t buy your way to the top of the organic results by buying sponsored ads. I just wrote the same statement 3 ways. I hope I drove the point home!

Sometimes SEO feels like you're lost in the woods. Here are some answers.

This doesn’t mean that you should spam your content with keywords. Don’t do that! Instead, write good content and people will read it, link back to it, and your SEO campaign will flourish. This brings me to the next part of my answer to this client:

The search engines look at your site and other sites out there and they see how sites link to each other. They look at the text in those links and the pages those links are sitting on and judge the quality of the link. So, if other sites about real estate have links to your site that say “real estate” then you’re more likely to rank for the term “real estate.” The inbound links you have may or may not help you rank for a particular term.

There’s more I could write on this for sure. URL age, how new your content is, even the code of the site, all play a role. SEO answers are often complicated. I hope this sheds some light.

The client is mulling all of this over. I highly expect more question soon. If you have questions about real estate SEO, just drop us a note. Thanks.