Real Estate SEO

Archive for the ‘Real Estate Blogs’ Category

On Monday, we offered our first Logic Classroom. Realtors from all over the country dialed in. Local agents joined us in our offices!

Our next Logic Classroom will be on 12/8/09. Learn how to turn your blog into a lead generation machine!

If you missed the class here’s the slide deck:

Hi all,

In case you forgot, I wanted to remind everyone that we’ll be holding our first Logic Classroom this coming monday night, November 9th. Everyone is welcome to attend by Webinar. If you are a local, you can come and join us in our office. If you are interested, please email Katrina at ksierant@bostonlogic.com.

What will we cover in this session?

We’re going to cover how leads are sourced, incubated, and converted into sales via the web. We’re going to touch on search engines, SEO, social media, blogging, and how your website should be the foundation of it all. We’ll also go into effective website design based on our experience in the market.

I hope you will join us!

We received an inquiry through one of our websites last week. It read:

I want a site that generates buyers that want to communicate through email. I also want automatic email first contact.

We do receive inquiries like this all the time. I want to highlight a misconception that is evident in what the lead wrote to us.

Lots of new clients come to us thinking that a new site is going to be the answer to their prayers. A site that will generate leads. Now, websites do generate leads, but not on their own. If no one visits the site, then you’re never going to see any leads.

You can’t just build a new website and expect leads to just show up on your doorstep. You need to make sure that the site is part of an online marketing campaign. Thousands of realtors think that they need to have a site in order to do business these days. They spend little money on the site and they see almost no results.

You need to invest in marketing! Marketing should actually be the larger cost. i.e. your website should cost LESS than your marketing campaign!

Of course, we advocate investing in real estate SEO for the best long term bang for your buck. Building the right site will make your SEO dollars go farther.

As a final point, and one that we’ve made before, if you invest in SEO and your site isn’t built to convert users into leads, then your investment in SEO will really be a waste.

So, it’s crucial that you making both investments. Spend the money on a good real estate website design with great features and functionality and on a well implemented real estate seo campaign and the results will be extremely profitable returns.

Every year we notice a trend. Real Estate brokers and agents from back from their summer vacation with new knowledge. They’ve been reading, we say. They’ve been thinking, we say. The result is that we get score of you great folks asking us for the same things.

Almost without fail, it’s something that we’ve been telling you to invest in for at least a year or two. This year, what are people calling us about? You guessed it Real Estate SEO!

Now, this is not a great big ‘I told you so’ post. We’re not that kind of SEOs. I want to know why the real estate industry just woke up during the summer of 2009? Here are my theories.

Real Estate magazine published a cover story on Social Media. Yes, we got some calls about this, we’re even designing a class around it. But the ripple effect that this had was to send real estate professionals running to the web. There they noticed just how hard it was for consumers to find them. They reasoned that if they had better search engine placement, they’d sell more real estate. It’s not a tough conclusion to draw.

Here’s another theory: after a dismal spring, the real estate brokers realized that they needed to finally cut their print marketing budget and find a new horse to bet on. They’d heard of this thing called blogging and started to write. So, what do these realtors want to know? Why isn’t my blog ranking? Sometime we get, “My blog ranks, but my site doesn’t!?” Of course the answer to these folks is that their blog should be a part of their website. Blogging on blogger.com or WordPress.com is fine, but it’s going to bring the users to those sites and not to your website.

Here’s my final theory. Every fall, real estate brokers and agents realize that they didn’t take initiative in the spring. They were too busy selling homes. They woke up on the first of the year and said, “I’m going to invest in real estate seo this year.” But one thing led to another another and they didn’t get around to it. Now, it’s time to act.

That’s ok, 8 months isn’t so long…

But really, this means that the message got across a long time ago. You didn’t need us to remind you. You just needed to remember that you wanted more leads all along.

Last word: Stay tuned for the new BostonLogic.com launching soon! You heard it here first!

Overcoming blogger’s block.

I’ve been working at Boston Logic now for 2 months, 2 days, 16 hours, and 57 minutes.  As an online marketer, blogging is a part of my job. I know I need to do it.  I know I can do it…but what should I write? There are over 171,476 words in the English language (I Googled it), and it feels like there is  no original combination left.

I know I’m not alone out there. There are real estate professionals all over saying, “yeah yeah I know I should start a  blog”‘ or “yeah yeah I know I need to blog more”, but what’s stopping us? We’re busy, we’re unsure, and maybe we’re afraid. I’m not talking Robert DeNiro on your houseboat fear, but maybe just fear of commitment.  Fear of needing to write something every week.

We talk a lot about WHY blogging is important for real estate online marketing and what to do to optimize our existing real estate blog.

But what about HOW? How do we get over that fear. My suggestion—let go.

Write from your phone when you’re on the bus. Write from Starbucks. Write whenever you’re thinking about something. This morning on the bus with my coffee I thought—gees why haven’t I blogged yet? And look…a blog post.

Write after you show a listing and talk about the questions asked. Write after you read an industry article that gets you thinking.

Don’t spend 2 months, 2 days, 16 hours, and 57 minutes worrying about HOW. Just do. Your keywords and links will find there way in if you write about what you know—your neighborhood,  your business, your industry.

We’re in this together, so let go and let me know what you think.