Real Estate SEO

Posts Tagged ‘Real Estate SEO’

Thank you to everyone who came to our latest LogicClassroom session on Maximizing Lead Conversion!

We learned about the importance of the consistency of the user experience from when they begin their online search to when then land on your website, and various ways to KEEP them on your site.  We also talked about  lead capture and management as well as how to leverage social media, email, and other marketing techniques to help convert your leads into clients.

Don’t worry if you missed this LogicClassroom session, you can view the slides below at your convenience. Enjoy!

Thank you to everyone who attended our LogicClassroom presentation last night. We discussed how and why to leverage different social media platforms for your business. Don’t worry if you missed this session – the slides are below for you to view!

Please join us for our next LogicClassroom session 2/9/10 on Search Engine Optimization 101. Please email Katrina to attend.

Making a big move and getting noticed can have lasting effects.

Lots of folks take the slow approach to real estate seo and seo in general and, well, this does work. In fact, it’s what we talk about most often on this blog. It’s no secret that with a well optimized site and by producing good, new, optimized content on a regular basis for months on end you will see better search engine placement and traffic. Some attention to strategy and detail is required, of course, but this is a pretty sure fire way to see good results over time.

But what about seeing superior results and sooner? What does that take? Clients ask all the time, how can I get to the top of the search engines without paying for every click?

Well, the answer is to make a splash. Provide something that everyone else does not. Give potential customers a reason to visit your site. Even better, give them a reason to talk about your site, to tell their friends about your site, to blog about your site and link to your site. In short, stand out from the crowd.

Now, the questions become:

1. How do you do this?
2. What effect with this have on my SEO campaign.

Well, I’m going to answer these questions in reverse order.

First, if you create something great, people will come and use/view it. Think about viral videos, Facebook, youtube, ebay, heck even google! If someone produces content or features and functionality that brings in the masses, there’s a lot to be gained from this. If you have the best information in town on your site, first time home buyers will tell eachother about your site. People will blog about it. They’ll tweet about it and include links on their facebook status update. They’ll do all sorts of promotion for you. You’ll get lots of inbound links and visitors and the leads will follow. But it has to really be something that sets you apart.

Now, to the tough question: How do you do this? How do you create something that gets noticed?

You have to either get very creative OR make a more significant investment in technology and functionality. Let’s look at these methods separately:

• Traffic through Creativity – People will consume awesome content. Great videos, good educational presentations, funny songs, well thought out lectures…we’ve all gotten an email to check out something cool, informative, even mind-blowing. You’ve probably even forwarded something like this on to a friend or family member. Put your energy into creating that and people will find you.
• Traffic from Innovation – Do you have the most innovative property search in your market? Is your website the most advanced? Does it have a design that puts it far above the crowd? If you’re hoping to take a $100/month site and make a splash, stop hoping, it just aint gonna happen. You’ll need to work with a skilled team of designers and technologists to produce something superior. Marquis examples of this are the guys at zillow and/or trulia. They made splashes 5 years ago and continue to ride the wave.

  But let me put this another way. If you have a $50,000 annual SEO budget, or even a $20,000 annual budget, consider setting aside a big piece of that budget to make a splash. Take $20k and build something that will be a huge leg up over the competition. Then, promote the heck out of it. This promotion will help drive and direct your content creation. People will take notice and they will come and use the tool you now own.

If this strikes home with you, if you’ve been looking for a way to have a coming out party, give us a call. We love doing these kinds of projects. Thanks.

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.

I almost can’t believe that I wrote that headline?

Yesterday, I spoke with a guy who told me he wanted to run a direct mail campaign to drive traffic to his website and capture leads to “farm” (his word) into clients.

Now, first let me say that farming a cache of leads is a great strategy. You can source your leads lots of ways. We recommend a strong online marketing campaign including strong real etstate seo efforts, ppc, email marketing, and a highly accountable reporting system.

So, this guy isn’t completely off the mark. Yes, your database of leads and customers is gold. You need to nourish this list and grow it. The more qualified users you can drive to your site, the more leads you will generate. If your site is well built to convert real estate buyers, sellers, and renters into leads, then the more traffic you have the more leads you should have.

As we’ve mentioned many times on this blog, you need to consider the cost of each lead. What did you pay to acquire the lead? If you paid $4000 for 8000 clicks (that’s $0.50 per click or site visitor) on Google Adwords and that generated 400 leads, then you paid $10 per lead. Got it?

Well, let’s think about this direct mail campaign that the guy on the phone wanted to deploy. He’s going to spend money sending those mail pieces upfront. Let’s say he sends our 10,000 pieces at $0.40 each. That’s $4000.

Now, he told me that these mailings were going to direct the users to his website. So, how many of the recipients will actually go to a website on a postcard? Here’s where the plan falls off the tracks.

It’s not likely that many of the recipients will actually go to the website. I don’t know about you, but I toss those mailers in the trash. I pick up my mail on the way into my building and the next thing I do is filter out the junk mail straight into the garbage.

So, if our friendly realtor is lucky, he’ll get maybe 5 or 10% of the recipients visiting his site. If the site was fantastic and converted leads at 10% (which is pretty high) he’d have 10000 x 0.1 x 0.1 = 100 leads. That’s $40/lead. Honestly, the cost would likely be even higher.

Bottom line – For real estate marketing campaigns, SEM, SEO and PPC are far better investments than direct mail. And please don’t be fooled and think that you can generate web traffic efficiently using traditional marketing like direct mail.

Hopefully, we just saved you some time and money.