Real Estate SEO

Archive for the ‘SEO Technology’ Category

I’m on a number of email lists. I get lots of newsletters. And I’m a member of a number of Google and Yahoo groups. Most of the time, I just skim. Every once in  a while, there’s a question posted to which I have an answer.

Yesterday, someone posted the question, “How much should I budget for SEO?” Here was my response:

That’s a very open ended question.

To bring this down to earth, you should look at SEO, or really your entire online marketing budget, as a percentage of your overall marketing spend.

For example:

For clients who have been using traditional media for some time, and are about to make their first investment into online marketing (including SEO), we recommend aiming to devote at least 25% of your marketing spend to online marketing. After some time, you’re likely to increase that percentage when SEO and online marketing prove to be the more efficient spend. So, if you’re grossing $2MM/year, for example, and your marketing budget is 10% of your revenue, then you should look to spend roughly $50k on online marketing. If that spend is all devoted to SEO, that’s about $4k/month, which is a realistic number.

If your business is all online, you’re probably going to want to allocate a larger percentage of your marketing budget to the web. Suffices to say, it’s important to start with your budget and not with a “what it is going to cost?”

I’m quite sure that whomever posted that question isn’t the only person pondering the same.  If you have other questions, send them to us and we’ll post answers. Thanks.

Let’s get something clear here. Joomla is not the right platform for building real estate websites.

For our readers who aren’t familiar with the system, Joomla is an open source content management platform. It was built to make building a generic website easier. It was not built for real estate offices or agents.

If you’re going to build a real estate website, you need to use something that was designed for the real estate industry.  At Boston Logic, we’ve developed the ONE System Real Estate Website Platform, but I’m not going to write about that today. Before we invested the thousands of hours that we’ve put into building this system, we did use Joomla to build some sites. So, I’m speaking (writing) from experience here. Let me tell you about some of what we learned:

1. Joomla is not built to integrate with an MLS. This is critical. Your real estate website should be built with an integrated MLS search. The search should not be on another website or in an iFrame. You should be building on a platform that has the search, search results, and property details pages right on your site. In addition the interactive user tools should be part of the site and so should your lead management system. Obviously, joomla doesn’t have a real estate lead management system for you to leverage.
2. Joomla’s content management system is overcomplicated for real estate. When you design software, you start with requirements. Joomla was built to do a lot of things. Most of these things, real estate agents and offices will never ever do. Advanced content management requires a lot of user access levels and controls. Realtors require a simple and easy to use interface for managing their content. Joomla, we found, confused our clients more than it enabled them.
3. Joomla is relatively laborious to style. Our team has worked with Joomla plenty of times. It’s still a bear to make the pages all look good. If you think you’re saving money, think again.
4. Customization is harder. When you get down to it, working with open source systems can get you a lot of functionality for no money. That said, going beyond what the system includes and/or what the plugins you find can do is a challenge. So, if Joomla will do 80% of what you want for your real estate website and then you think it’ll be easy or cheap to hire a developer or web development shop to take you the rest of the way home, think again. Customizing Joomla gets expensive quickly. As a point of reference the last Joomla site that we worked on required about $75,000 in work to get to what the client wanted.
5. Joomla is hard to turn into an effective real estate website. Great real estate websites have lots of features that are not part of the Joomla platform. I’ve already mentioned the MLS search above. Agent profiles linked to their listings. Pages on developments and/or buildings with available listings right on the pages. Live Chat. Lead distribution and management. Featured property pages. Maps. And many of the other features that make for a great real estate website are missing.

Here’s the all important conclusion. Joomla should not be used for real estate websites. It’s unlikely that the cost benefit will outweigh the poor end product that you’re going to see.

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.

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.

One of the best ways to get ahead of the content challenge is to find ways to use your time efficiently. Blog when you have the time. But who has the time?

I’m at Jiffy Lube right now. This means I’m sitting in a waiting room and I have some time to hop on my Blackberry 8830 and search for a way to blog. 1 google search and I found this app which allows me to link my blackberry up to WordPress, which is the system behind this blog.

Here’s a link to the app, click here using your blackberry and the device should begin to download for you.

http://blackberry.wordpress.org/install

There are also wordpress apps for the iphone and probably apps for most smart phones. Just do some searching and ye shall find.

So, in less time than it took to get the oil in my car changed, I’ve installed the Blackberry wordpress app and written a blog post. Just think of all the places where you could find yourself with a few minutes to spare which you could dedicate to you seo campaign.

Content!
As a real estate agent, you’re not alone if you are struggling to find the time to blog. Your real estate seo compaign depends on fresh content. We’ve been chanting the battle cry for years: content is king! Content takes time. This app will give you some time to write it!