Real Estate SEO

Archive for the ‘google’ Category

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

I almost can’t believe that I wrote that headline?

Yesterday, I spoke with a guy who told me he wanted to run a direct mail campaign to drive traffic to his website and capture leads to “farm” (his word) into clients.

Now, first let me say that farming a cache of leads is a great strategy. You can source your leads lots of ways. We recommend a strong online marketing campaign including strong real etstate seo efforts, ppc, email marketing, and a highly accountable reporting system.

So, this guy isn’t completely off the mark. Yes, your database of leads and customers is gold. You need to nourish this list and grow it. The more qualified users you can drive to your site, the more leads you will generate. If your site is well built to convert real estate buyers, sellers, and renters into leads, then the more traffic you have the more leads you should have.

As we’ve mentioned many times on this blog, you need to consider the cost of each lead. What did you pay to acquire the lead? If you paid $4000 for 8000 clicks (that’s $0.50 per click or site visitor) on Google Adwords and that generated 400 leads, then you paid $10 per lead. Got it?

Well, let’s think about this direct mail campaign that the guy on the phone wanted to deploy. He’s going to spend money sending those mail pieces upfront. Let’s say he sends our 10,000 pieces at $0.40 each. That’s $4000.

Now, he told me that these mailings were going to direct the users to his website. So, how many of the recipients will actually go to a website on a postcard? Here’s where the plan falls off the tracks.

It’s not likely that many of the recipients will actually go to the website. I don’t know about you, but I toss those mailers in the trash. I pick up my mail on the way into my building and the next thing I do is filter out the junk mail straight into the garbage.

So, if our friendly realtor is lucky, he’ll get maybe 5 or 10% of the recipients visiting his site. If the site was fantastic and converted leads at 10% (which is pretty high) he’d have 10000 x 0.1 x 0.1 = 100 leads. That’s $40/lead. Honestly, the cost would likely be even higher.

Bottom line - For real estate marketing campaigns, SEM, SEO and PPC are far better investments than direct mail. And please don’t be fooled and think that you can generate web traffic efficiently using traditional marketing like direct mail.

Hopefully, we just saved you some time and money.

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.

I saw this post on a Yahoo Group that I’m a part of. It’s amazing to me that anyone would even consider this business in 2009.

Hello to all
I am looking for some help. I’m looking for an investor or angel investor. I am looking to start a hobby store in my area. What I would be selling is. All kinds of sports cards. Video games and acssereis, (I think he meant Accessories) and lastly all kinds of coins. If there is any one that could help me. I would be very thankful for the help. If you would like to contact me, my email address is xxx@yyy.com or my phone # is 555.222.4444. if I don’t answer my phone please leave me a message. thank you for the help.

Sincerely.

Wow, this brings back memories. I was a hobbyist when I was a kid. Baseball cards were all the rage. There were coin collectors and memorabilia shops, but those are tough businesses these days. Let’s look at why.

Well, it’s obvious that the internet has changed things in big ways. eBay really killed the collectibles market. Think about it. If you wanted a rare coin and you live in the countryside, well, you’re really pretty limited in your options. So, there’s the local hobby shop or memorabilia shop. Maybe you have a book that tell the prices for things. Remember those books? They were published annually and gave you the going rate for a 1989 Gary Carter baseball card in Mint Condition. PUBLISHED YEARLY.

These days, you can go online and see the last 100 transaction where a Gary Carter baseball card changed hands. The market and the buyers in that market have MUCH more information. The result is that people know what they should pay and the margins are razor thin.

Now you’re thinking, ‘I’m a realtor. What’s this got to do with me?’ Remember, the buyers you’re working with have access to information. They have more than they ever did before and they can get their hands on more every day. The thing about real estate is that you work on a percentage. The guy at the office around the corner is likely charging the same rate for his services. Probably 5 or 6 percent. So, you don’t have to worry too much about eBay coming along and taking your business. In fact, you’ve been able to sell a house on eBay real estate for years and the impact on the industry has been small.

This means that to get ahead of the other real estate agents in your town, you need to capture the market. You need to get your marketing in front of more people. Then you need to provide great service. Now, we’re here to help you with the first part, Real Estate SEO is how you capture more of the market. Providing great service is your job.

You should also realize that the buyer can find out a lot about homes and they can find out a lot about you! They can look you up on LinkedIn and Facebook. They can Google your name and your real estate firm’s name. You need to have your Social Media profile in order, just in case someone goes out looking for you. Luckily we wrote a post about this a while back. Check out how to do social media right.

Lastly, realize that we’re not going into hobby shops any more. We’re shopping on the internet. We’re searching on Google and letting our fingers do the walking. The Real Estate search starts on the web. Realtors come second. Yes, it’s true. The first thing they’re going to know about you is that they found your site and it was helpful! If your site isn’t findable then you need to do some real estate SEO work NOW. If, when they find your site, they’re leaving or not signing up, that’s an issue of design. We can help there too.

Thanks for reading.

What the new deal between Microsoft and Yahoo! means for Google.

It’s amazing what happens when a dynamic goes from three players to two. This is the crux of the result of what this deal will mean for Google and SEO.

First of all, SEOs everywhere will not need to work quite as hard. We used to have to worry about building pages that work with all 3 algorithms. Of course, Google has the most market share. So, most SEOs, whether they focus on real estate or not, are going to try to get you ranking in Google before worrying about the other search engines.

That said, Yahoo! always had about 25 percent of the market and Microsoft about 10 percent - these numbers fluctuate of course. So, when you’d done a lot in Google, you move on to Yahoo!, then MSN. Well, that’s going to change and the argument for splitting your time gets a little stronger. Google, with double the Yahoo searches was the obvious first choice, and Yahoo a distant second. Now, there’s an argument for splitting effort 2/3 to Google and 1/3 to the combined Yahoo!/Bing platform.

Of course, we won’t be changing our tactics just yet. Yahoo’s search technology isn’t integrated with Microsoft’s yet. It actually sounds, according to early news, like the Bing algorithms are going to replace Yahoo’s search formulas. So, when that’s put into place, SEOs will then change their techniques and their focus. You might see your rankings change at some point to look a lot like they do in the Bing results.

Alternatively, personalization of results is the new vogue. Ranking, while still important, means less and less. What really matters, as we’ve written about numerous times, are results. Search results for me might be different from search results for you.This might mean that results will still vary in MSN vs. Yahoo! depending on how well they know you and how much you use your Yahoo! account or your MSN account. In fact, I’d count on that.

OK, that’s about it for today. Rest assured, we’ll be talking about this more soon. Thanks.