Real Estate SEO

Posts Tagged ‘Marketing’

How to measure quality in a real estate  SEO campaign and in a SEO provider.

I’ve talked about similar topics before, but I wanted to lay it out succinctly for our readers since we get a lot of questions on this. The lists below are ways to judge and ways NOT to judge a SEO provider. They’re also metrics and methods for measuring the effectiveness of a real estate marketing campaign overall.

Indicators of good real estate SEO campaign performance:

• Leads generated
• Site traffic numbers
• Average number of pages visited by users to your site
• Average time visitors spend on your site
• Search engine ranking (placement) for a long list of terms

The most important things that a SEO campaign can do is to cause more visitors to arrive at your site and to generate more leads for your real estate business. Now, the number of leads that your site generates also has a lot to do with the design and architecture of your site. So, if the SEO provider has little control over these contributing factors, then the traffic numbers are the best indicator you have of quality.

I’d also be remiss if I didn’t touch on benchmarks for a moment. You must have benchmarks to measure against. If your site is seeing 150 visitors per month from Google when your SEO campaign starts and 1050 users part month 6 months in, this is strong performance. If your website was producing 1 lead per day before the campaign started and how it’s producing 10 leads per day, again, your SEO is doing a good job.

An indicator of a good SEO provider and of any real estate marketing firm is whether or not they provide these metrics to you. If they’re willing to be accountable to you, and they’re not hiding anything, then they have no choice but to show you good work. Otherwise, you’re liable to fire them when the contract is up.

Here are some ways NOT to measure performance of an SEO campaign or of an SEO provider:

• Whether or not you rank for 1 particular term
• Traffic numbers 3 months into a campaign
• The frequency with which reports are delivered to you.

Believe it or not, search engine ranking is NOT what makes for a good SEO campaign. Marketing campaigns MUST produce results. Results = revenue. Results and ranking don’t mean the same thing. As I’ve said before, ranking and a token will get you on the subway.

This same analysis must be applied to all real estate marketing campaigns, media, and ad buys. If the money aint producing the biz, then it’s not well spent. Ask the questions, do the math, get real numbers to judge performance.

Today was session 4 of my series with the North Eastern Association of  Realtors.  We further went over the benefits of social media and blogging in Real Estate SEO and lead generation. Take a look:

Here are some answers to everyday questions about blogging and managing your agents’ outside blogs:

How can I persuade my agents or other agents to blog? David recently wrote a great post about the SEO army. Put that army (aka your agents) to work. Learn how to by reading more in that post.

Is it ok to have multiple profiles or blogs out there? Yes, it’s a good thing to be visible in multiple places. They offer more means through which potential customers can find and reach you. You just want to make sure that those other sources (profiles, accounts, blogs etc) link back to your site in some manner.

What are some basic things I need to know before blogging? Blogging is basically an extension of your personality, so keep that in mind as you write. It will vary from author to author. If you have multiple authors you will want to divide some of the writing workload, which also helps maintain consistency in terms of volume and style. Also keep the basics in mind, meaning good grammar and spelling.

Shouldn’t all communication come from one source? It is my professional opinion that if your agents are already spending quality time writing good posts, then those posts (if relevant to your business) might as well go up on your site. However, that varies from business to business. You will want to establish a ground rule from the onset. But keep this in mind, it’s a great and inexpensive marketing medium for your agents.

I already have agents blogging. What can I do next?Assign someone to manage some of this communication. In all likelihood you have some kind of office assistant or manager who can surely spend a little time tracking some of this communication (really it can take as little as 15 minutes a day).  A quick and easy way to do this is to either follow up with agents directly or (if you are one of those saying, yeah right) sign up with Google Alerts and track what gets published through there. Obviously if your agents are all blogging at the same place then this won’t be much of a problem.

How do I SEO my blog posts and incorporate keywords? Read this great article about the basics of SEO and you will be well on your way to a successful blog.

How can I help promote my agents’ blogs? A great way to promote your agents’ blogs, personal site or other outside profiles is to link to them, whether from your broker blog, a dedicated page on your site or some sort of other profile page.

What else do you want to know? If there any questions that I’ve left unanswered please let us know by asking the question through the comment section.

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