Real Estate SEO

Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

How much should I be spending? We get asked this question all of the time, in one way or another.

• How much do I need to spend in order to be successful?
• What budget do I need to allocate for SEO?
• How much should I spend per day on PPC?
• What does it cost to get onto page 1?

It all boils down to the same question: What does it cost to run a successful search engine marketing campaign?

I’m sure that you won’t be surprised to know that there isn’t just one answer to this question. First of all, it depends on who is asking the question. Next, you need to understand the marketing you’re in. Then, you need to do a little math.

Let’s examine one case:

If you’re a broker and you’re looking to invest in real estate seo in order to provide your office with leads (Real Estate brokers asks us this question most often) then the answer starts with another question: How many leads/week do you want to give to each of your agents? 7 leads? 10 leads? 20? These are all fine answers. If you said 3, then I don’t think I want to work for you and your agents are about to leave you for the broker across the street or across town who actually tries to help his agents succeed by leveraging the web. If that sounded a little harsh, well, I’ve seen it happen a number of times and I’m watching it happen in our clients’ favor every day.

Anyway, I digress.

If you know how many leads you want to give each agent/week or per month, then you have the first number you need in determining your SEM budget. Let’s assume that you have 10 real estate agents working for you (this is the average size of a real estate office in the US).

Now, it’s time to think about your market. How much does it cost to source a real estate buyer or seller lead online in your market? Well, this is where guys like us SEO consultants come in. We can help answer questions like this. A mature real estate SEO campaign in a market of medium competition will generate leads at approximately $4 - $7/lead. If you’ve been SEOing for a while, then you can do even better than that. If you’re in a metropolitan real estate market and there are lots of firms competing for search engine placement, then this cost can climb significantly. For the purposes of this example, let’s use $5 per lead.

So, if you have 10 real estate agents working for you and you want to give them each 7 leads/week that’s 300 leads per month. At $5/lead, you should allocate a budget of  at least $1500/month.

Ok, now, if you go looking for a real estate seo provider out there and someone tells you that they can provide seo services and they don’t talk to you about your business goals in a way similar to how I just did, then you know that they don’t understand the business that you are in. They don’t know the real estate market and they don’t know how to generate real estate buyer and seller leads.

One last point here. Frequest readers of this blog know that we talk about the fact that SEO is an investment. You’ll notice that earlier in this post I referred to “Mature” SEO campaigns. If you’re asking how much to invest, you should remember that investing in real estate SEO, like investing in real estate, is not going to bring you returns over night. Superior performance takes time and consistent investment. Proper planning, strategy, and implementation will maximize your investment in real estate seo. Just don’t expect it to make you a millionaire tomorrow.

That’ll take at least a week.  :o)  Thanks for reading.

This is an ongoing debate among real estate brokers and agents.

Here’s the situation, you’re marketing your real estate website online, you’re investing in SEO, maybe you’re working with PPC, maybe your office site is getting hundreds of visitors every day. The question is this: When do you ask the user to sign up? How do you acquire the most leads and, more importantly, customers? Which is your priority, quantity or quality? Let’s explore:

When a buyer is looking for a new home, they’re going to be looking for information. Most often, they’re going to want to search for real estate that’s on the market. Maybe they want market data or some other kind of information beyond simply listing search results. At any rate, they want to visit a site and get some information. Knowledge is power and they want to feel empowered.

Now, there are some horrible website vendors out there who sell websites that require the user to sign up to access just about every part of the site other than the home page. You make the user sign up to search, to get a report, to get a home valuation, to do just about anything. These sites will kill your prospects of achieving good search engine placement. Remember, the search engines will not fill out forms. They will not hit the submit button. In short, they won’t know about the majority of your content. If you want to optimize your site for SEO purposes, make sure the search engine robots can get to the information using regular html hyperlinks.

Now, when we build sites, we usually put the sign up in one of a few places:

1. Sign up before the user can see search results. Yes, most visitors to your site will want to use the property search. So, it makes some sense to have them sign up in order to search or to see the results of their search. There are two major objections to this method
   1. Plenty of other sites don’t make the user sign up to see their search results and lots of users don’t want to sign up for anything. They prefer to remain anonymous. So, you risk loosing the possibility of converting this user into a lead and sending them to your competitors’ sites.
   2. If you make a user sign up just to browse, they’re somewhat likely to give you fake contact information. This is a risk. Our experience shows that when a site forces a sign up earlier in the search process, then they see more fake leads who are tossing bogus information into the sign up form just to get to the good stuff. Now, you may be willing, as many folks are, to sift through these fakers in order to get to find the real leads. There’s nothing wrong with this tactic.
2. Allow the user to browse and only ask them to sign up to use advanced features
   If your site is built well, then it should provide the user with many different interactive features. This might include the opportunity to register for an account, save favorite listings, save searches, sign up for nightly listing updates by email, schedule a showing, inquire about a listing, etc. Lots of sites allow the user to browse the search results without registering. In other words, the user doesn’t convert into a lead until they’re ready. The argument in favor of this strategy is that the user who inquires or requests a showing is a better lead. The argument against is that you’ll see fewer leads.  Indeed, when someone requests a showing or more information or signs up for nightly email listing updates then they are indeed a more qualified lead. That said, there are lots of folks who don’t want to sign up until they’re ready to buy and using strategy #1 above may turn these folks away.
3. Hybrid approaches to lead gathering
   
   1. You can give away some information and require the user to sign in for more. Lots of sites don’t give away property addresses, for example, until the user has signed in.
   2. Another approach is to allow the user to use the site for a while - say giving them access to 2 searches or 4 listing details pages - before requiring them to sign up. This is sort of like tempting the user. You show them that there’s a lot of inventory and features for them to use and entice them to sign up in order to stay inside the promised land.
   3. One of our favorites is to show the user the search results, but to then use something called a Lightbox in order to ask them to sign up. That’s when the screen goes dark/opaque and the user is presented with a sign up box.  They can still see that search results are behind the sign up and they’re more compelled to sign up to see what’s just beyond. Again, some users may just click the back button and go back to the search engines to find another site where they don’t have to sign up at all.

Customers come to us all of the time and ask about the best ways to implement lead acquisition within their site. It’s not a simple question to answer. If you have a lot of agents to satisfy, we recommend going for quantity. Make the user sign up early in the search process. If you have a lot of traffic and you want to get the best quality leads farther down the search road, then ask them to sign up later in the process.

Overall, your site must be engaging and the user needs to want to stick around and come back again. If you’re not designing for a superior user experience, then you’re just not going to get the leads that you need out of your real estate website.

This blog is about more than simply Real Estate SEO. Our regular readers know that. SEO affects so many parts of your marketing campaign. Also, to get the most out of your investment in SEO, you’re going to need to need to make some other marketing and technology investments. Email Marketing is just such an investment.

For a long time now, we’ve been partnered with Constant Contact. We’ve done work with iContact, and we use Campaign Monitor regularly too. We’ve been designing email campaigns for years. Every one of these campaigns is designed to help our clients maximize the value of each contact in the email list. This is the reason email marketing is so important. It’s going to help you get the most out of your other investments.

In Real Estate, as in many industries, your SEO efforts are focused on finding leads and customers. Often we judge the effectiveness of a marketing media - be it SEO, PPC, or any other - based on the cost per lead. Now that you’ve paid that money for each lead, you want to maximize the conversion of those leads into customers. Email marketing plays a key role in doing so.

Every lead you get needs to be added to your email list. When they sign up on your site, they should be automatically imported into your contact list and be saved in your CRM system. If you’re using the ONE System by Boston Logic, this is already happening for you automatically.

Now that your leads are in the list, you need to communicate with them. Send them a newsletter. Send them nightly property updates. Add them to your drip campaign. Our clients with email campaigns are far more likely to convert their leads into clients. Alert! this is the conversion rate that really matters. Now we’re talking about client acquisition cost and this is really where the dollars and cents get counted…

A small example:

Let’s say you’re spending $10,000 per month on your online marketing campaign and this is generating 1000 leads per month. This means you’re paying $10/lead. Now, if you’re not emailing them, you might be converting your leads at 2%. So, for those 1000 leads you’re generating, you’re doing 20 deals. Your customer acquisition cost is $500.

Now, you implement an email marketing campaign. Say each month your list grows by 1000 email addresses. Remember, it costs very little to email each person. So, the incremental cost of adding each email address may as well be ignored for the math in this example. So, you’re collecting these email addresses and you send them a message on a regular basis. Over time, you see your conversion rate go up to 3%. Now, your cost per lead has stayed the same and you’re only paying a $333 customer acquisition cost and you’re doing 30 deals per month instead of only 20.

In this example, you can see that your marketing expenses don’t change all that much, but you do 50% more deals! And these numbers are realistic. These kinds of results don’t happen overnight, but they do happen. Your list is gold. You’re investing in SEO in order to get leads, but that’s not the end of the end goal, of course.

When you’re making your strategic SEO plan, think about how you’re going to maximize the conversion of those loads into sales. When you do, remember that email marketing is an important link in that chain.

Thanks for reading.

When it comes to managing and optimizing your blog there are some key factors that can help improve the performance of your blog tremendously. As you know by now, Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of making a site and its content highly relevant for both search engines and searchers. SEO includes technical tasks to make it easier for search engines to find and index a site for the appropriate keywords, as well as making a site more appealing to visitors. Successful search marketing helps a site gain top positioning for relevant words and phrases. When a website appears near the top of the search results for relevant search queries, traffic to that website increases dramatically. As a real estate business, Real Estate SEO can help you can acquire a great deal of leads by appearing high on the search results pages. Blogs in particular allow you to add new content on a regular basis and establish territory for your particular niche or market.

How do I SEO my blog?

Keywords: Do your research (search-trends and keyword competition/difficulty analysis) and use your keywords throughout your blog. We suggest, when appropriate, using some form of your keywords in your URL, title, content, links and tags for your post. An important thing to keep in mind is to make the incorporation of your keywords reader friendly. Don’t just cram the words in there, but use them in a way that will still make reading enjoyable.

URL: You know, that funny text that appears in your browser window, Http://www.such-and-such.com … Well most blog platforms like Wordpress and Typepad actually let your edit what the URL structure or Permalink (as it’s sometime called) will be. URL naming is important because that is one of the pieces that search engines query as they gather relevant information based on a user’s search.

Basically it is much more powerful to have a URL be http://www.domain.com/blog/fascinating-topic or http://www.domainname.com/fascinating-topic (if your blog is in a separate domain from your website) rather than http://www.domain.blogspot.com/querystring…

There is also a whole issue of canonical URLs - setting a primary URL structure - that I won’t go into now.

Eye Catching Title: The old adage that you only have a few seconds to grab someones attention with what you have to say still counts. Express what you are offering in your post to your reader upfront. Key things to remember, keep it brief, and keep it relevant and if appropriate use keywords. I’d suggest forgetting about being clever, we all know you can channel Johnny Carson, and instead focus on giving your readers something they are looking for (especially given market trends) like the “Top 10 mistakes home buyers make”, or “How to buy a house and close within x Days” …

Keep in mind also that most blogging platforms take your title and use that as a base for your URL, so unless you have the ability to edit your URL directly, you are stuck with your title as part of your URL.

Content: Foremost you want quality and relevant things to write about. Write about neighborhood news, celebrity sightings (trust, this brings in lots of traffic), housing market updates, featured properties etc.

Finding something to write about isn’t always easy. Be prepared for those days that you are too busy or honestly may just not feel like it. On those days that you do have time and inspiration and could write an entire anthology, write down extra ideas or thoughts for that rainy day. And look for inspiration where ever you can find it.

Last but not least, remember to review all content prior to making it public. It’s important to communicate your subject matter with authority, and nothing says authority like well thought out and grammatically correct posts.

Links: For usability and SEO purposes you want to link your article to other posts within your blog and also to other sites. As a rule of thumb, if you write about a site that is less familiar to the general public you should, as courtesy, provide a link to that site.

Gathering inbound links is equally important. You should have a plan in place for your blogs linking and submission. One place that I highly suggest you submit your blog to is Google’s Blog Search.

Social Media/Community: There is a saying in SEO that “content is king”, well … content is only a lonely King if there are no people to follow. Have some kind of “share this” or “add this” function available for a each post. If you are already part of the social networking community you can share your posts online and have others who follow you do the same. I recommend that each post you write you distribute it to other social media venues. Statistics show that about 1 in 20 posts that you publicize will actually go viral.

While blogging may seem like a lot, it is truly worth the investment. If you cannot or do not want to invest the time yourself, then invest in a service like our Real Estate SEO. The long term results are worth every penny…but I don’t need to tell you that just give it a try and see for yourself.

It’s amazing what some people will tell you.

We’ve been working on signing a new client for our SEO practice. They really are nice folks. They own a real estate office, surprise surprise, and I’ve spent my time in touch with a couple of the members of their marketing department. After telling them what we offter, sending a document on what to expect from our SEO services, I then sent along a service agreement. Pretty much, this is our standard sales process when someone signs up with us for SEO work.

This client wrote back asking us to write into the agreement that we would create 150 “backlinks” each month during the SEO campaign. This set off an alarm right away.  First of all, it was obvious that some SEO provider had told the client that this was an SEO best practice. Well, it’s not. So, we took the time to explain to them that when it comes to inbound linking, you want quality links, not just a high quantity of links.

When you’re trying to increase your inbound link count, you need to increase the number of quality links. This is just one of the elements of good SEO. Here’s how you judge whether it’s a good link.

1. Google assigns every page with a PageRank. They don’t make these page rankings public, but you can see a version of your PageRank by downloading and installing the Google toolbar. If your links are from pages with PR (PageRank) 1, then they’re pretty much worthless. If you can get inbound links from pages with PRs of 5, 6, 7, and higher, then you’ll really be doing more for your SEO.
2. Links to your site should be from pages with similar content. So, if your website is about Boston Real Estate and you’re trying to increase your ranking for the term “Boston Real Estate” then the inbound links to your site should be from other pages about Boston Real Estate. Also, ideally, the sites that those pages are a part of are sites about Boston Real Estate. The search engines look at this like the site is an authority on the subject. So, another example would be: a link from this website to a site about Real Estate SEO would be of high value to that other site; whereas a link from this website to a site about plumbing would be of far less value to that site.
3. Link farms are bad. If the link to your website is from a page or website with many other outbound links on it, then this is not going to help your placement all that much. Google and Yahoo! can tell when a site is a link farm. All they have to do is count the number of outbound links on a page and on the site. So, if you’re just one of 100 outbound links on a page, then that link isn’t going to be looked upon very favorably and this will not help your SEO.

OK, now that we understand what makes for a good link and that many links aren’t worth much at all, let’s remember the following: Good SEO links are about quality and not quantity. If you can remember this mantra, then your SEO campaign will have a much better chance of performing well.

OK, that’s about it for now. If you have any questions about this topic, drop us a note and well get back to you. Thanks.