Real Estate SEO

Archive for the ‘Email Marketing’ Category

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.

This blog is about more than simply Real Estate SEO. Our regular readers know that. SEO affects so many parts of your marketing campaign. Also, to get the most out of your investment in SEO, you’re going to need to need to make some other marketing and technology investments. Email Marketing is just such an investment.

For a long time now, we’ve been partnered with Constant Contact. We’ve done work with iContact, and we use Campaign Monitor regularly too. We’ve been designing email campaigns for years. Every one of these campaigns is designed to help our clients maximize the value of each contact in the email list. This is the reason email marketing is so important. It’s going to help you get the most out of your other investments.

In Real Estate, as in many industries, your SEO efforts are focused on finding leads and customers. Often we judge the effectiveness of a marketing media - be it SEO, PPC, or any other - based on the cost per lead. Now that you’ve paid that money for each lead, you want to maximize the conversion of those leads into customers. Email marketing plays a key role in doing so.

Every lead you get needs to be added to your email list. When they sign up on your site, they should be automatically imported into your contact list and be saved in your CRM system. If you’re using the ONE System by Boston Logic, this is already happening for you automatically.

Now that your leads are in the list, you need to communicate with them. Send them a newsletter. Send them nightly property updates. Add them to your drip campaign. Our clients with email campaigns are far more likely to convert their leads into clients. Alert! this is the conversion rate that really matters. Now we’re talking about client acquisition cost and this is really where the dollars and cents get counted…

A small example:

Let’s say you’re spending $10,000 per month on your online marketing campaign and this is generating 1000 leads per month. This means you’re paying $10/lead. Now, if you’re not emailing them, you might be converting your leads at 2%. So, for those 1000 leads you’re generating, you’re doing 20 deals. Your customer acquisition cost is $500.

Now, you implement an email marketing campaign. Say each month your list grows by 1000 email addresses. Remember, it costs very little to email each person. So, the incremental cost of adding each email address may as well be ignored for the math in this example. So, you’re collecting these email addresses and you send them a message on a regular basis. Over time, you see your conversion rate go up to 3%. Now, your cost per lead has stayed the same and you’re only paying a $333 customer acquisition cost and you’re doing 30 deals per month instead of only 20.

In this example, you can see that your marketing expenses don’t change all that much, but you do 50% more deals! And these numbers are realistic. These kinds of results don’t happen overnight, but they do happen. Your list is gold. You’re investing in SEO in order to get leads, but that’s not the end of the end goal, of course.

When you’re making your strategic SEO plan, think about how you’re going to maximize the conversion of those loads into sales. When you do, remember that email marketing is an important link in that chain.

Thanks for reading.