Real Estate SEO

Archive for the ‘Goals’ Category

Are you proud of your ranking? Are you psyched that you’ve got so many Twitter followers? Do you have 1000 friends on Facebook?

Well, all of those are indeed reasons to celebrate, but not too much. It’s like the old saying goes: That, and a token, will get you a ride on the subway.

At the end of the day, there’s no revenue generated directly from being at the top of the SERPs. No one is paying you to be your Facebook friend and Twitter followers aren’t a revenue stream. These are all means to an end. The end goal, of course, is revenue.

Let’s examine this process. A user is out there on the web, they’re tweeting, let’s say, or they’re searching for a real estate agent on Google. The first goal is for them to find you and click to your site. Great. Step 1 is implete, you’ve generated traffic. users are clicking on your organic listings which rank high because of all that SEO you’ve invested in.

Now, the user arrives at your site. What do they find? Is your site engaging? Can they easily find what they’re looking for? Are they compelled to sign up and become a lead? We’ve written many times on this blog about the fact that SEO is a WASTE if your site isn’t any good. It’s true that we often have clients contact us for SEO services and we tell them that we’ll need to redesign their website before doing any SEO. Otherwise, they simply wouldn’t see any benefit from our SEO services. Some folks out there, some in real estate and some in other industries, think that SEO gets you clients. Well, it doesn’t.

SEO is a means, not an end.

So, let’s be optimistic. The user found you, they arrived at your site. They became engaged. They even signed up and converted from a user into a lead. What now? Does a lead = money in your pocket? No, a real estate buyer or seller lead is only worth cash when the deal closes.

That said, it’s easier to understand the value of a lead. The closer you get to the transaction and the smaller the numbers get, the easier it becomes to assign a dollar value to each unit. If in a 1 month period you generate 100 leads and sell even just 5 of them a home, and your monthly marketing budget is $2000 that means you’re spending $20/lead and your customer acquisition cost is $400/customer.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. We have search engine ranking producing website visitors. The visitors are converting into buyer and seller leads. Now we want deals. How do we maximize the conversion of those leads into deals. Here are two ways.

First, email marketing is essential. Lots of your leads will not come back to your site unless they’re prodded to do so. Send them nightly listing updates. Send them your newsletter. Email marketing is the best way to re-engage a lead. It’s also the best way to stay in touch with your past clients, a source of repeat business, referrals, and testimonials (which are great for SEO).

Second, your site needs to be a resource to the buyer. They’ll keep coming back, and therefore be more likely to convert into a deal, if they are engaged with the tools on your site. Your property search should be fully featured. A user should create an account and save favorite listings, save favorite searches, take notes, save and edit their listing update criteria, and communicate directly with you, right through the site.

To review:

1. The user finds you on Google or Twitter or where ever
2. They become engaged by your site’s design and functionality.
3. Conversion from a user into a lead
4. User returns to the site as their buying or selling resource.
5. Conversion into a client signaled by a deal closing.

Remember, steps 1 through 4 are all means to an end. It’s like my football coach used to say, “you can celebrate when you cross the goal line.”

I was speaking with a potential client about SEO just the other day. They’re in real estate and they offer residential real estate sales and rentals. They also offer investment sales and commercial leasing. Needless to say, there are a lot of stake holders to satisfy and lots of terms that could bring them leads.

The client also happens to own several real estate websites. They have a main website, an apartments website, one for commercial leasing, lofts, etc. This is a strategy that we’ve seen several real estate firms use. They opt to own several real estate sites rather than just one. It’s not a bad strategy, so long as you have the budget to build, maintain, and market each.

This particular real estate firm told us that they didn’t have the budget to spend on optimizing each of the firm’s sites. They want to invest a small real estate SEO budget into their main website. Now, the main site offers residential sales and commercial leasing searches, information, etc. The apartment leasing division has it’s own website.

When discussing a list of terms to focus on, the client was adamant that they needed to include “apartment” terms in their list. We advised against this. We told them that the SEO campaign would be hampered for several reasons:

1. The site doesn’t currently have any content related to apartments, apartment leasing, the apartment market, or anything else apartment related. So, we informed them that we’d be starting from a virtual SEO stand-still and that ranking for the apartment-related terms would take much longer than some of the other terms they were interested in.
2. The site doesn’t currently include an apartment search or even a tenant inquiry form. There’s no way to know when a rental lead is created or a rental goal (using the Google analytics notion of a goal) is reached. So, we’d probably want to ad a search form to the site. This is not an SEO task, so we told them that they should increase their budget to account for this expense.
3. Lastly, the if you’ve chosen a strategy where one of your sites includes LOTS of content for a set of users and the site has been designed to appeal to those users, then it makes much more sense to SEO that site for applicable terms. I’d liken this SEO strategy to the good old adage that talks about square pegs and round holes.

This all boils down to planning ahead. You can’t just pick a list of terms and start working. You need to think about your long term Real Estate SEO prospects. Choose terms that are achievable, who your site was built for, and those that the users who arrive will respond to. Make sure that your site has tools and content that are intended for that group of users who might search for those terms.

Not doing so will mean that you work harder or spend more money for less results. Real Estate brokers and agents can’t afford (really no one can these days) to be inefficient and wasteful. Listen to your SEO professionals. They probably do have your best interest at heart and they’re going to steer you towards best practices.

Thanks for reading.

This post is going to address a couple of major SEO topics. Why am I tackling 2 in one blog post, because they jumped off my computer screen in rapid succession!

First, I’m going to call out another snake oil seo salesman. The first thing I saw was that their ad read “Good SEO = More Traffic.” This immediately screamed AMATEUR SEO. Then I clicked through to their website (yes, the PPC click probably cost them a couple of bucks) and I started reading. I immediately thought, this was not written by someone who speaks english as a first language.

I couldn’t believe it, I was reading what was supposed to be marketing copy and I could immediately tell that it was written by someone who wasn’t qualified to be writing it. So, I clicked on the contact page on the site. Sure enough, they gave an address in Mumbia, India.

The company is called Convonix. I’d never heard of them before, so that’s why I decided to click on their ad. It’s a bad sign when we’ve never heard of an SEO firm. We’re pretty well aware of who the players are in the industry. It’s not hard for us to suss out the riff raff. Like I said, I knew they were snake oils salesmen. Here are two major reasons why.

“Good SEO = More Traffic” is how their PPC ad read. THIS IS FALSE!!!

GOOD SEO = MORE CUSTOMERS

Results are what matter. I would shout this from the rooftops if I could. Any SEO firm that’s trying to sell you on placement is behind the times and should not be allowed to practice SEO. Who cares where you place and how many users come to your site if you don’t gain any customers as a result? Good SEO = Revenue. Good SEO = Business Growth. Good SEO = Speaking the language.

This brings me to my next point on SEO and really marketing in general. Years ago, one of the fathers of direct marketing described the practice of marketing as “salesmanship in print.” In the 21st century, we can expand this definition to say “salesmanship through another medium.” The medium could be a website, print, radio, you name it. The marketer’s job is to help promote and sell the offering.

Now, let me ask you bright people the following question. Is it wise to have someone who doesn’t have a good command over the language write your marketing copy? Do you want the content of your website to be written by someone in India? Will they understand idioms? Slang? Irony? Let’s remember, when we talk about SEO, content is King! The answer is simple. You need someone with a healthy command of the language to do the SEO work. SEO is not something that should be outsourced to Mumbia or Paris or Moscow. Marketing requires someone who knows your language and your market and SEO is marketing!

This is twice as true for the real estate industry. You need someone who speaks your “language.” I’m using the word language a little more loosely here. The language of real estate, which is required for good real estate seo, is specific to the industry, your geography, and to your market. The home buyer or seller, whom you want to click on your listing in the search engine results, is going to search using works and phrases particular to the real estate industry. They’re also going to use real estate terminology specific to your area and the current market condition.

This brings me to my last point. We’ve had clients in the real estate industry ask us how we can work with multiple real estate companies in the same market, which we do all the time. The answer is pretty simple. You can work with a real estate seo firm, like Boston Logic, who speaks the language, with domestic staff, who know the real estate vertical extremely well, or you can pay someone else to ride a learning curve on your dime. Also, it’s a big market out there. If we can help a few clients in each market gain more market share, then we’re doing our job.

That’s what good SEO equals…more market share. Not just more traffic.

How much should I be spending? We get asked this question all of the time, in one way or another.

• How much do I need to spend in order to be successful?
• What budget do I need to allocate for SEO?
• How much should I spend per day on PPC?
• What does it cost to get onto page 1?

It all boils down to the same question: What does it cost to run a successful search engine marketing campaign?

I’m sure that you won’t be surprised to know that there isn’t just one answer to this question. First of all, it depends on who is asking the question. Next, you need to understand the marketing you’re in. Then, you need to do a little math.

Let’s examine one case:

If you’re a broker and you’re looking to invest in real estate seo in order to provide your office with leads (Real Estate brokers asks us this question most often) then the answer starts with another question: How many leads/week do you want to give to each of your agents? 7 leads? 10 leads? 20? These are all fine answers. If you said 3, then I don’t think I want to work for you and your agents are about to leave you for the broker across the street or across town who actually tries to help his agents succeed by leveraging the web. If that sounded a little harsh, well, I’ve seen it happen a number of times and I’m watching it happen in our clients’ favor every day.

Anyway, I digress.

If you know how many leads you want to give each agent/week or per month, then you have the first number you need in determining your SEM budget. Let’s assume that you have 10 real estate agents working for you (this is the average size of a real estate office in the US).

Now, it’s time to think about your market. How much does it cost to source a real estate buyer or seller lead online in your market? Well, this is where guys like us SEO consultants come in. We can help answer questions like this. A mature real estate SEO campaign in a market of medium competition will generate leads at approximately $4 – $7/lead. If you’ve been SEOing for a while, then you can do even better than that. If you’re in a metropolitan real estate market and there are lots of firms competing for search engine placement, then this cost can climb significantly. For the purposes of this example, let’s use $5 per lead.

So, if you have 10 real estate agents working for you and you want to give them each 7 leads/week that’s 300 leads per month. At $5/lead, you should allocate a budget of  at least $1500/month.

Ok, now, if you go looking for a real estate seo provider out there and someone tells you that they can provide seo services and they don’t talk to you about your business goals in a way similar to how I just did, then you know that they don’t understand the business that you are in. They don’t know the real estate market and they don’t know how to generate real estate buyer and seller leads.

One last point here. Frequest readers of this blog know that we talk about the fact that SEO is an investment. You’ll notice that earlier in this post I referred to “Mature” SEO campaigns. If you’re asking how much to invest, you should remember that investing in real estate SEO, like investing in real estate, is not going to bring you returns over night. Superior performance takes time and consistent investment. Proper planning, strategy, and implementation will maximize your investment in real estate seo. Just don’t expect it to make you a millionaire tomorrow.

That’ll take at least a week.  )  Thanks for reading.

If you are not already among the many Realtors on Twitter then let me ask this, what’s keeping you? If you are on Twitter, are you posting regularly? Besides SEO experts, Realtors are among the highest proffessionals “micro-blogging” on Twitter.

Here’s why: it’s an easy account to set up, only 160 characters for your profile, though that seems to be a challenge for some, you can link to virtually anything or anyone, it drives traffic, establish a direct connect to your blog, and could generate leads…

I digress…

This post is actually meant to remind, nay urge, you to keep up with your writing.  Whether you are on Twitter, Active Rain, your own blog or any other forum for that matter, you have to stick to your guns! I know that we’ve said this before, we’ve even given you tips on things to write about.

The reason I bring up Twitter, again as I said there are lots of Realtors using it, is that I noticed that there is a large number of Realtors who join and then post once or twice, or otherwise only once every few weeks. Really, to gain more followers and potential leads you have to keep writing. If people see that you are genuinely connecting to the readers and/or followers then they will keep coming back, not to mention they will share what you write. And really what is the excuse, Twitter after all is a “micro” blog where each post only requires 140 characters. You can also download (most free, just google twitter applications) applications to your desktop or smartphone, just so you can twitter at your own convenience any time you want, from anywhere too.

If you follow us on Twitter we even give you tips on things you can talk about. Our tips don’t only apply to Twitter either. Tips such as: talked about a featured property, pose questions to your readers and/or yourself, give advice, neighborhood news, current events etc., can be practiced on any forum. So, give it a try, you never know unless you give it a try and stick to it.