Real Estate SEO

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Facebook Announces ‘Facebook Places’ and purchase of Hot Potato!

Facebook recently announced a new geolocation feature for its users, Facebook Places.  You may be familiar with other geolocation services, such as the start-ups Foursquare, Gowalla, or Hot Potato.  Hot Potato was recently acquired by Facebook, which has brought all eight Hot Potato employees on-board, presumably to expand and develop Facebook Places.

In a statement released to Mashable.com, Facebook announced, “We’re excited to confirm that we recently acquired Hot Potato, a service that helps people socialize around live events and share what they’re doing with friends.  We’ve admired for some time how Hot Potato is tackling this space and look forward to working with them to bring Hot Potato innovations to Facebook.”

Will Facebook Places eliminate these other small geo-location services?  Only time will tell.  Foursquare and Gowalla offer fun game-like features with their services, and often work with business to offer discounts for users.  Facebook Places doesn’t offer any of these features yet.  One thing’s for certain, though- Facebook serves over 500 million users compared with Foursquare’s 3 million users, and Gowalla has even less.  Also worth noting is the strong relationship between Facebook and Yelp.  I can only imagine there will be more integration with Yelp and Facebook Places in the future.

But how does Facebook Places work?  How will this new feature be implemented and effect user privacy?  How can Business Owners capitalize on Facebook Places?

Facebook Places Basics:

Facebook Places is currently only available to some users in the united States and on the Facebook iPhone app.  Places will be available to other smart phones that support HTML 5 geolocation, such as the Droid, in the near future.

Facebook Places on the iPhone

Places works by allowing Facebook users to ‘check in’ to the various locations they visit, such as restaurants and bars, your local library, a friend’s home, etc. by logging into Facebook Places from their phone application or via touch.facebook.com.

Upon checking in, Facebook will announce to your friends that you have arrived at this destination.  You can also ‘tag’ your friends that are with you, much like you would tag someone in a photo, and find out who else is currently ‘checked in’.  If you tag a friend that is not using Places, it’s just like mentioning their name in a status update.

If you tag someone who is already signed up for and using Facebook Places, it will mention it in their Newsfeed and add them to the ‘checked-in’ list as if they checked-in themselves.  The first time you are tagged, Facebook will send you a notice and give you the option of allowing your friends to check you into places or not.  You are always notified of when someone checks you into a location, and you can always selectively delete check-ins, much like you can delete a comment on your wall or a status update.

Privacy Concerns with Facebook Places:

Facebook learned a lot (the hard way) when it changed the structure of its Privacy Settings, automatically setting all users’ accounts to share EVERYTHING with EVERYONE as the default setting.  This time around they have made the automatic sharing settings much more conservative, with the default setting only sharing your location with the people on your Friends list.  However, what if you still want more privacy?  Maybe your boss is on your Friends list, or you have an ex you’re trying to avoid.

Don’t go deleting your Facebook profile yet!  You can customize, or even completely disable the Places feature!  Facebook has even made a helpful demo video for you to show exactly how to customize your privacy settings.

Facebook Places for Business:

Right now, Facebook Places is in it’s Beta version, so there’s not too much information about how business will be able to interact with it and use it to promote their business, although when Mark Zuckerberg announce Facebook Places he hinted that there is more to come.  If Places follows in the footsteps of Foursquare, business could start offering promotions to customers that check in a certain number of times, etc.

In the meantime, if you’re a Business Owner, you should probably log into touch.facebook.com, add your business address, and check in!  There still aren’t a lot of businesses listed, and new users will be eager to test the software out and visit new places they find.  You should also make sure you have a business listing on Yelp, too.  Your clients/ customers can and will add your business to these listing services sooner or later, if they haven’t done so already.  It’s in your best interest to be an active member of these online market places.  By adding your business to Facebook Places, you are making your business easier for the 500+ million Facebook users- for FREE!

If you want to learn more about Facebook Places, visit the Facebook Blog.

We’ve all known about Google Trends for a while. I’ve had a thought about using Google Trends to normalize our search engine optimization campaign reports. Let me explain.

If your campaign is producing 1000 visitors per month in month 1, then 1100 in month 2, then 1200, that’s great. Let’s say that the trend in month 4, 5, 6 then goes 1200, 1150, 1100. Well, that’s not so good, it was going up ~10% per month, now it’s falling about 5% each month. Well, if the site is optimized around a set of target search terms, and then other traffic comes from halo terms, then to assume that the SEO is providing more or less traffic is also to assume that search volume for this family of terms is constant.

If we used Google Trends to normalize, we might find that the number of times a term was searched on fell 15% during those down months. So, the 10%/month upward trend was actually sustained.

Another way to look at this is to simply ask, what percentage of potential clicks did you get? If this percentage is trending up, then you’re in good shape. This means you’re taking more market share.

Another way to think of this is the following: Let’s say that you’re doing search engine optimization for a site that sells air conditioners. Let’s further assume that you start the SEO campaign on January 1st. Well, no one is really looking for AC units in January. Then, in April, you start to see an upward traffic trend, it goes higher and higher and peaks in August. Then, by mid September, you’re not seeing any traffic from the search engines. You start Googling around and see your site, but no visitors.

Well, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that people just aren’t buying air conditioners in October. So, you’d pretty much expect to see less traffic. In this case, the best way to judge if the SEO campaign is succeeding is to either look a target terms and catalog placement in search engine results pages, or to normalize your numbers. Take a benchmark at the beginning of the campaign, say a ratio of traffic to searches, then, each month you’d want that ratio to climb. This way, you’ll know if your SEO is working, regardless of market trends.

I’ve recently learned some new things about YELP and I figure our loyal readers would want to know them too.

Some of you, I’m sure, haven’t heard of Yelp. You should check it out. Here’s a link to our profile on Yelp. Yelp is a site where you can write a review for any business with a physical location. People put up reviews, good and bad, of the businesses that they interact with. I recently reviewed a coffee shop that I like a lot. I mentioned that people like it too much and there’s  a long line almost every time I go, but it’s worth it. This is the kind of real world reviews you’ll see on Yelp.

BTW, we’d love it if you wrote a nice review about Boston Logic on Yelp. Click here to review Boston Logic. Thanks.

Here are some interesting and important facts about Yelp:

Reviews
First, the reviews that show up highest, by default, are the ones written by users who have written a lot of reviews. It’s not just the most recent review. You’ll notice above the reviews and below the profile of a company, there are sort options. The default is “Yelp Sort.” If you want to see the most recent just click on “Rating.” Notice also that there are lots of other ways to sort reviews. I don’t know how much this gets used, but while you’re on there, you may as well play around. If you like a review, then you can click “useful” the nice thing about this is that you can sort reviews by how useful other folks have found them.

Bad Reviews
Business owners, if you get a bad review, it’s not the end of the world. First of all, I’ve noticed that truly mean and bad reviews are usually short and often put up by people with fake accounts or accounts with little personal information and fake names. My account is linked to my Facebook account. So, I’m standing behind anything I say. Also, you can flag a review. This won’t make it go away completely, but it can put the review off your page and mostly out of reach of people. The casual user would need to dig in order to find it.

Paid Ads
Next, Yelp does sell paid ads. Or, really, they offer a ways to make your profile on Yelp more prominent and more engaging. For example:

1. You can pay to have your listing appear at the top of search results. This is like using Adwords to have your link come up on the first page of Google’s search results.
2. You can also pay to enhance your profile. So, if someone does find your biz on Yelp, then they’ll be more likely to stick on that page and maybe pick up the phone and call you.
3. Also, it should be noted that Yelp has tile ads on their home page and tower ads on other pages.

Social Network
Also, Yelp is more than just a site to post reviews. They’re a social network too. You can upload photos of yourself, give more details about your life, “friend” other members, become a fan, send a compliment, follow someone, and send a message all within Yelp. I’m not too sure how much this stuff gets used by the average user, but I’m sure the power users are making good use of it.

Like all Social Media sites, Yelp’s value increases as more people use it. If all anyone did was write a review, it would just be opinions stacking up. But Yelp has taken the time to make the more relevant content come up first. In some ways, this makes them a go-to search engine when looking for something great. I’ve often complained that Google is great for finding information, but horrible for rating that information’s quality, trustworthiness, and value.  Sure you can find pizza using Google, but there could be a great pizza place around the corner from you that has no website! This means it’ll never come up on Google at all!

Yelp is showing you the reviews by people who do the most reviewing and by the nature of the site and its use base, they’re probably showing you a more comprehensive results set. If you’re looking for a service provider, I highly recommend Yelp.

Competitors
To be fair, I wanted to point out a few Yelp-like sites. Maybe I’ll write a comparison post soon?!?

• www.citysquares.com
• www.yellowpages.com
• www.citysearch.com
• local.google.com
• Send me more and I’ll grow this list.

YELP PR PEOPLE - I’m sure you’ll find this article. Would love some feedback, thoughts, etc? Tell us how Realtors are using Yelp?

The other day, a fellow submitted the following to one of our websites:

My name is Phillip R***** and I am representing interested parties looking to unload some top-level real estate .com domains. Here are some examples of these domains available:

austintexasrealestateagent.com
desmoineshomerealestate.com
desmoinesrealestateagent.com
desmoinesrealestateagents.com
idahohomerealestate.com
newyorkcityrealestateagent.com
newyorkcityrealestateagents.com
newyorkhomerealestate.com
arkansasHomerealestate.com
batonrougelarealestateagent.com
berkeleyrealestateagent.com
bethesdarealestateagent.com
brooklynrealestateagents.com
coconutgroverealestateagent.com
costamesarealestateagents.com

These domains, because of their keyword rich nature, will surely send an optimized website to the top of Google, Yahoo, and Bing, which can save you a tremendous amount of time and money in the optimization process.

Should you or a client be interested in purchasing or leasing any of these domains – or would like to inquire about additional domains we have available to us, please contact me at 206.xxx.xxxx via email at his.name@gmail.com.

Wow, that’s just completely wrong! The fact is that your web address does not affect your Google ranking at all. Google Doesn’t really care if your URL is bostonlogic.com or Google.com or anything else. Google cares about the content on your site, how new it is, and how many other people think it’s great.

Now, a good URL can be helpful. If you were doing a search, would you click on a website with an unfamiliar name, or would you click on a website that has your search term in it? ex. if you were looking for Newport real estate, would you click on newportrealestate.com or realestateagentsRus.com?

So, there is some value in a good URL, but don’t get carried away. Having the right URL doesn’t vault you to the top of the search engine results pages.

One last note: A lot of folks think it’s just SO HARD to find a web address that’s not taken. They search sites like GKG.net for an available domain name in vain. Well, we help clients do this all the time. Most of the time, clients are just so frustrated that the names they come up with are taken. Well, in most markets, the marquis names are taken. You’re just going to have to get a little creative.

Making a big move and getting noticed can have lasting effects.

Lots of folks take the slow approach to real estate seo and seo in general and, well, this does work. In fact, it’s what we talk about most often on this blog. It’s no secret that with a well optimized site and by producing good, new, optimized content on a regular basis for months on end you will see better search engine placement and traffic. Some attention to strategy and detail is required, of course, but this is a pretty sure fire way to see good results over time.

But what about seeing superior results and sooner? What does that take? Clients ask all the time, how can I get to the top of the search engines without paying for every click?

Well, the answer is to make a splash. Provide something that everyone else does not. Give potential customers a reason to visit your site. Even better, give them a reason to talk about your site, to tell their friends about your site, to blog about your site and link to your site. In short, stand out from the crowd.

Now, the questions become:

1. How do you do this?
2. What effect with this have on my SEO campaign.

Well, I’m going to answer these questions in reverse order.

First, if you create something great, people will come and use/view it. Think about viral videos, Facebook, youtube, ebay, heck even google! If someone produces content or features and functionality that brings in the masses, there’s a lot to be gained from this. If you have the best information in town on your site, first time home buyers will tell eachother about your site. People will blog about it. They’ll tweet about it and include links on their facebook status update. They’ll do all sorts of promotion for you. You’ll get lots of inbound links and visitors and the leads will follow. But it has to really be something that sets you apart.

Now, to the tough question: How do you do this? How do you create something that gets noticed?

You have to either get very creative OR make a more significant investment in technology and functionality. Let’s look at these methods separately:

• Traffic through Creativity - People will consume awesome content. Great videos, good educational presentations, funny songs, well thought out lectures…we’ve all gotten an email to check out something cool, informative, even mind-blowing. You’ve probably even forwarded something like this on to a friend or family member. Put your energy into creating that and people will find you.
• Traffic from Innovation - Do you have the most innovative property search in your market? Is your website the most advanced? Does it have a design that puts it far above the crowd? If you’re hoping to take a $100/month site and make a splash, stop hoping, it just aint gonna happen. You’ll need to work with a skilled team of designers and technologists to produce something superior. Marquis examples of this are the guys at zillow and/or trulia. They made splashes 5 years ago and continue to ride the wave.

  But let me put this another way. If you have a $50,000 annual SEO budget, or even a $20,000 annual budget, consider setting aside a big piece of that budget to make a splash. Take $20k and build something that will be a huge leg up over the competition. Then, promote the heck out of it. This promotion will help drive and direct your content creation. People will take notice and they will come and use the tool you now own.

If this strikes home with you, if you’ve been looking for a way to have a coming out party, give us a call. We love doing these kinds of projects. Thanks.