Real Estate SEO

Archive for the ‘Goals’ Category

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 professionals “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.

It happens to the best bloggers. Sometimes, you just don’t know what to write about. The first rule of blogging is that you should be creating original, engaging content on a regular basis. But how?

Here’s a simple answer. Start a conversation.

Craft your content so that it elicits responses from your readers. Then, you can react or respond to their comments and questions. Your blog readers will actually give you the topics you’re looking for. Problem solved.

Common question: Why don’t I get any comments on my blog?

If all you ever post on your real estate blog is factual or one way communication then you’re not going to get a lot of responses. Ask questions of your readers. Ask for their input. Your blog should be a conversation with your readers, and not a speech to the silent masses.

Be topical, this will help your Real Estate SEO the most.

In every market, there’s a hot topic! This might change monthly, or weekly, or even daily. If you blog about a timely topic, more people will be searching for information on that topic NOW.

Here’s an example, a client of ours has a real estate website in a town where IBM has a large office complex. IBM recently closed another facility and is moving those employees to offices in our client’s town. Of course, this will have an effect on the local real estate market. This was the post on the home page of his site for a week.

Think about all of the opportunities that this can bring him.

• People relocating
• IBMers who want to rent
• Residents who want to know how this might affect their property value

These are all great opportunities. If you can identify the hot topics and SEO your real estate site around these topics. you will see the benefits of traffic and an active reader audience.

In the end, this all comes down to the age old problem known as writer’s block. Maybe we should start calling it Blogger’s Block?

Tell us your story of blogger’s block and how you get around it. We’ll be sharing the conversation with all of our readers.

Maybe you’re one of the lucky Real Estate agents? Maybe you’re the top producer in your office, the name on the sign outside, the envy of the rest of your peers. Well, and may not.

It’s a tough pill to swallow, but most of us are not the top producer in the office. There’s only one of those. In the US, there are 10 agents in the average real estate office. That means that 9 out of 10 agents aren’t the top producing agent. That’s OK. This post is for the 9 of you.

If you’ve been in the business for less than 3 years, if you’re having a slow winter, if you had a slow ’08, then you don’t spend your whole day selling real estate. In fact, in this market, you might spend very little of your time actually selling property or working with home buyers. Your job, for a large part of your day, is to find clients.

If you’re really new to the real estate biz, then your full time job is to find clients, generate leads, learn, and cultivate your own brand. Some day, if you do this diligently and well, you’ll spend very little time looking for your next client.

I want you to know that Real Estate SEO is a fantastic investment of your time and money during this period when you have some time on your hands. If you work at achieving search engine placement now, and you have a quality website, then the leads will come. To quote a classic, if you build it, they will come. It’s true in Real Estate SEO, and you never know, old baseball players may come and visit you.

Anyway, let’s assume you’re one of the 9 real estate agents in the office that is not the top producer and let’s assume that you spend less time with buyers and sellers these days than you used to. You’re looking for a way to spend your time which will ad value to your business and help find you clients. Here are some things you can do:

• Start a real estate blog and post several times a week about your local market
• Create market reports on a monthly basis, post these on your blog and send them to your past and potential clients
• Create pages on twitter, facebook, and Linked-In and link your blog to those pages
• Make a goal of having 500 people following your business on Twitter.
• When you get to 500, set a new goal at 2000.
• Set a goal of having 500 fans for your Facebook page about your business
• Make sure you write a monthly newsletter.
• Set a goal of having 1000 subscribers.
• Make sure there’s a link to subscribe to your your email newsletter on your Twitter page, Facebook page, website, Link-In profile, and everywhere else you can put one.
• Add social bookmarking links to the pages of your site and the pages of your blog.

These are just a start. There’s a lot more you can do, but let’s talk about the effects you will see:

Many of these tasks will boost your search engine placement. This will, of course, help you generate leads, grow your email list, and engage perspective buyers and sellers. As you grow your email list, each blog post, market report, and newsletter will require the same work, but be more effective since it will be received by more people. The folks who follow you on twitter will be notified when you post on your blog. This will generate traffic for your site.

The more folks who are your fans, follow you on twitter, or on other social sites, the more traffic your site will see. Many of these are link building tasks. They will help boost your referral traffic and your search engine placement. I could go on. Suffices to say that your real estate seo campaign and your overall online marketing campaign will improve. These are not hard tasks, they just take time.

But let’s be honest, right now, you might have some time on your hands.

If you need help with any of this, just let us know. We’re happy to provide guidance and assistance.

First of all, thanks to those of you who attended the first session of the online marketing for real estate course on Monday at the North East Association of Realtors offices. I’m looking forward to the next session which will be on February 2nd.

While I was giving the talk, I learned something astonishing and I just had to write a post about it. It seems that a large real estate conglomerate called Prudential Prime Properties here in Massachusetts made a BIG mistake. Though, I’m sure they did so unwittingly. They signed their entire 21 offices and the agents in those offices up for a website service that is, to put it mildly, holding their agents back. The company is called RLS2000 and while they’re not selling SEO snake oil, I just had to write a post and put it in this category to talk about why these sites will only hold back your real estate SEO campaign.

First of all, a basic principle of any good SEO campaign is unique content. It seems that the only page that you can edit on your RLS2000 website is the home page. One woman had shown up for the course and only wanted to know how to edit her home page in order to appear at the top of the search engines. Well, I told her that she’d need to edit many more pages on her site than just the home page. She informed me that she could not. Hmm. That’s not going to let you do any real estate seo to speak of.

Another fellow in the room had the same site – yes, it’s almost the exact same site – we looked at his. He had written a great update on his home page about IBM moving offices to his town and how this would impact the real estate market there. I immediately asked him if this was a blog post. No, he said, they don’t have blogging capabilities. What? They’re trying to help you market online and they don’t offer blogging. Run, as fast as you can people.

Here’s the kicker, many of the pages of their sites were exactly the same, and they couldn’t update them. This means that their sites are virtually guaranteed not to rank well in the search engines. I was encouraged to see that the search on the site was not in an iframe, the problem was that there are no static links to any of those pages. So, again, the real estate seo opportunities are completely lost.

So, I asked them the price. It’s apparently $350/year! Well, my surprise was replaced by disappointment. Of course you’re not going to get anything for that price. Good real estate seo is not cheap. What really disappointed me was that a company with 23 offices and hundreds of agents would set back their people so drastically and without asking someone who knew simple questions about marketing and SEO like, “is this going to help our agents?” “Are we doing the right thing to help our agents succeed by signing up with this service?” The answer, very simply is no.

With so many agents, there are great opportunities to work together and really achieve great search engine placement and generate thousands of leads. This is a lost opportunity. Now, I’m sure that this company had some decent reasons for using this vendor. I just hope they rethink their logic before the re-up for another year.

If you’re running an online marketing campaign, there are some equations that you should understand. These equations will allow you to understand the effectiveness of your website and the marketing media that you are using to drive traffic to the site.

Now, real estate SEM, that is PPC and SEO, are both online marketing media. So are banner advertisements and email marketing. You can use these equations to examine all of these and many other media. You can even judge the effectiveness of traditional marketing media. It all boils down to the same math.

First, let’s talk about your website. When a user arrives on the site, they are anonymous. If they register to become a lead (or customer in the case of an eCommerce website) we call this a conversion. The ratio of conversions to total users is the conversation rate of your website. So:

1. Conversion rate = Leads / Total Users

For example. If your site is visited by 1000 users and 50 of them register and become leads, your conversion rate would be 5%.

Next, it’s vital to understand your cost per lead. You should be able to calculate the cost per lead generated by each marketing medium in which you are investing. You can also calculate your overall cost per lead for your entire campaign. Tracking each of these number and optimizing them is the key to superior ROI

2. Cost per lead = Amount spent / Number of Leads

Conversion rate of each add is also vital. You could be trying to spend on PPC, but the ad you wrote is failing. Also, you might be sending email marketing messages that aren’t effective. To judge the effectiveness of the ad or ad copy, you’re going to want to know the click through rate or CTR:

3. CTR = Click throughs / Impressions

Now, when you’re running a PPC campaign, your impressions are free! PPM campaigns require you to pay for the impressions. You’re not guaranteed any click-through traffic from a banner or tower PPM ad. So, you better be tracking the CTR of that ad. If it’s not performing, you can change it or stop spending altogether.

When you’re managing your PPC campaign, you need to understand your cost per click. The Adwords and Yahoo Overture systems will calculate this for you. Overall, you should be able to calculate CPC for PPC or PPM advertising.

4. Cost Per Click = Ad buy / Clicks

If you’re spending on any medium, you can simply divide the amount you spent by the number of clicks or the number of visitors that it brought to your site to understand the CPC.

Combining these equations really gives us a way to measure our ROI:

5. Cost per lead = Cost per click / Conversion Rate

If that’s a little confusing to you, scroll up and have a look at equations 1 and 4. what we really want to know is, how can we get the most leads for our ad buy. So, let’s examine this marketing equation.  My goal is to minimize the cost per lead. So, to do this, I need to either raise my conversion rate or lower my cost per click. This will guide how you choose your PPM ads, your PPC bids, and even how much you want to invest into SEO.

I know this is a lot for some of you. Math isn’t everyone’s forte. If I went through this too fast for you, please drop us a comment and we’ll respond promptly.

I’ll be writing a post soon on how we improve campaign performance using these equations. Stay tuned