Real Estate SEO

Archive for the ‘Local SEO’ Category

For those who missed today’s seminar -  The Intersection of Real Estate and Technology. More information on the next session.

If you have not registered your site and/or blog with Google Webmaster Tools, then do it now (well, preferably after you read this). The Google Webmaster Tool is available to you for FREE. It provides you with detailed reports about your pages’ visibility on Google, and registration is simple, just follow the steps. You’re one click away

I find this tool particularly helpful when starting SEO on new site. It shows you a lot about your site, which you otherwise would not be able to track and it helps troubleshoot. It’s like your very own personal web-assistant. Love it!

Truly, at some point you want to take the time to look at everything and familiarize yourself with what it has to offer, but for now here are my top 3 that you must review and use:

1. Content Analysis: This section is under “Diagnostics”. We all know that Meta tags are an important component of a well optimized site. The “content analysis” will give you an outline of any issues that Google may come across while crawling your site. You especially want to make sure that you have no duplicate information. If you have duplicate information (by choice?) then you might as well not have any.

2. What Google bot sees: This section is under “Statistics”. Another fundamental to SEO are “links”. Within the section of “external links to your site” you can track what text is being used within links to your site. If you have any control over the link building strategy I suggest that you ensure that your inbound link text includes your company name and/or mention of your targeted key terms rather than the old favorite “click here”. Depending on what you find within this section you may have do some additional clean up, but at least now you know.

3. Sitemaps: Your website should have a sitemap! A .xml sitemap and a public sitemap. This part of the tool allows you to submit your sitemap directly to Google and if necessary also resubmit it (whereby you give Google a polite nudge). Particularly for Real Estate SEO you want to make sure that you have a dynamically built sitemap which updates on a regular basis to include your most current property listings. Trust, this will tremendously help the number of pages that get indexed in Google.

Like I said, you want to take full advantage of everything Webmaster Tools has to offer, and when you get a chance also take a glance at their blog.

As always give us a shout if you have any questions or need help improving your SEO strategies.

For those who missed the first course. Here are my notes from the course presentation. Hope to see you at the next class.

Let’s break down some logic, shall we?

1. Real Estate Broker/owners are in the business of providing tools and services to their staff of real estate agents. The more productive agents a broker has working for him/her the more successful the company will be. The Broker/Owner’s client is the agent.

2. Therefore, Real Estate Broker/Owner’s main competition is other real estate office owners.

3. The Real Estate Broker/Owner will recruit and retain agents by giving them better tools and services than the competition and by helping his/her agents perform better (earn more money) by working with his/her company than with the competition.

So, if you want to retain and grow your staff of real estate agents, you have to out-provide the competition. You need to give your real estate agent customers better opportunities for success than the other agencies in the area.

Real Estate SEO is a perfect example of this.

First of all, if you employ good real estate seo, then you’ll achieve superior placement in the search engines for applicable terms. This high search engine ranking will bring visitors to your real estate office’s website and, assuming your site is a good one, will generate leads. These leads can then be distributed to your agents

Each lead is another opportunity that the broker/owner is providing to their agents. A well SEOed real estate website can generate thousands of leads per month. If you give each of your agents a portion of these leads and you give them the right tools to incubate these leads into buyer and seller clients, then you will be helping your agents succeed (make money). If this happens consistently, then you will retain your agents as they will know that the leads you are providing are bringing them business.

Next, search engine placement isn’t something that everyone can have. There are only so many terms and only 10 places on page 1. If you can achieve prominent search ranking for the right terms, then you’ll be getting a share of the online leads that others offices are not.

Put up a second site, invest in some additional real estate seo, and you’ll be taking a second share of the web leads. The search engine position that you achieve is yours and some other office cannot invest and gain the same advantage. No two sites can occupy the same spot in the search engine results. So, if you get to position #1 and maintain, you’ll have a competitive advantage in the recruiting market.

Lastly, when a real estate agent, new or experienced, goes looking for a job to to switch firms, where do you think they look? Yes, they search the web. Potential recruits will judge you based on your website and search engine placement. This is easy to understand, if you built the perfect search engine, wouldn’t you have the best real estate firm in town at the top of the results on page 1 for the search term “town name” real estate. I would.

Happy Holidays!

The vitals of success for inbound marketing are (1) well-written and relevant content, (2) in-bound links, and (3) fans, friends, and/or subscribers. The first two figures are largely covered by SEO, but once you throw blogging and social marketing networks into the mix you open up a whole new realm of possibilities. We already know that Google is looking more closely to see if your efforts incorporate all of these things, and so good marketing practices should incorporate all three.

We recommend using social networks like stumblepon.com, twitter.com, linkedin.com, facebook.com, etc. Stepping into the social media realm also means making yourself more public via the use of online videos, webinars (online video training or web seminar) and podcasts (like a radio broadcast), and don’t forget to go Mobile (stay tuned for more on this).

Social media really isn’t the next big thing anymore, but it’s not too late. Like with all good things it’s best to get started later in the game than not at all. What is new, however, is the way that it’s being used in conjunction with the tried and true search engine marketing practices.

Ever curious about what people are saying about your business? When you become part of these larger networking communities you’ll start to get more of a sense as to what is being said, and in the event that someone has a negative review about you (she said what?)… now you have a means by which you can counter and respectfully disagree. Of course you’ll also want to promote yourself in a more flattering way any chance that you get. And, don’t forget, all those fans and/or friends that you are gathering will help you promote your content as well.

Ultimately, you want to become more engaged with others, and in turn engage others in your community. Beside publishing good content you will want to monitor not only what people are saying about you but also what is being said about your field (hint: your key words). Sure you can use Google Alerts, but why not give Twitter a try. Hubspot recently published a good article on “how to use Twitter for marketing“… so use it. Through Twitter’s search application you can actually see what people are saying about things and/or you, and then you can subscribe to a feed for your query. It just might be your next lead!

As Twitter and other social media services evolve, they are becoming a key part of search engine optimization strategies. All of your efforts should work together; (1) SEO (plus PPC), (2) your blog, and (3) your social marketing network. These efforts, combined, help to increase the number of inbound links and spread your content through more and more channels … all of which makes for a highly efficient inbound marketing strategy as you head into the new year.