Real Estate SEO

Posts Tagged ‘search engine optimization’

Yes, it’s a process.

If you want to SEO your real estate website, then you need to follow a process.

Here’s how our process works:

Stage 1
In the first stage of a real estate seo campaign, we don’t touch a website. We start with strategy. We pick keywords that the site ought to rank for in order to be successful. We take a look at competitors and their websites. We create a social media strategy and a linking strategy. We benchmark lead generation, traffic, and ranking for bell-weather terms. We also create a project management plan which includes a plan for the first 3 months of the campaign.

With all of this prep work done and approved by the client, we start the implementation.

Stage 2
This is the ongoing part of the campaign. We implement the tasks in the project management plan and report on their effects. Each month, we provide a report to our client on how the seo campaign is performing. We also show them what we’ve done and what we’re planning on doing next. If the client has input or wishes us to change priorities, we can alter our plan.

SEO elements

Now, this plan isn’t the same for every site. For some sites, we start by implementing a blog and then we start populating the blog with content. Other sites might have lots of content on them, but the technology isn’t allowing search engine bots to find and spider the content. So, we might first make these upgrades.

Often sites have pages of content that have value, but the content hasn’t been optimized. They could be missing title tags and description tags. The content might need to be more keyword rich or the site might need better internal linking structures. Augmenting, modifying, and optimizing content is usually a per of the plan.

Also, we implement off-site SEO including a linking strategy and a social media strategy. Monthly reports include inbound link counts and social media measures as well.

This stage can go on for as long as the client wishes to increase their traffic. After a year or more, or once we’ve reached top ranking for our bell-weather terms, we start focusing on new terms.

Why the SEO process is important
Following this adaptive, iterative process we consistently see results over time. The fact is that you can’t just make a plan, implement it and then walk away. If someone tries to sell you seo and then have a set procedure, even before they’ve looked at your website, then it’s unlikely you’ll see results at all. Good SEO must start with strategic planning and then include an evolutionary process. Planning, then implementation followed by reporting, analysis, and a revised plan, followed by more implementation. This is the only sure path to success in Real Estate SEO.

The other day, a fellow submitted the following to one of our websites:

My name is Phillip R***** and I am representing interested parties looking to unload some top-level real estate .com domains. Here are some examples of these domains available:

austintexasrealestateagent.com
desmoineshomerealestate.com
desmoinesrealestateagent.com
desmoinesrealestateagents.com
idahohomerealestate.com
newyorkcityrealestateagent.com
newyorkcityrealestateagents.com
newyorkhomerealestate.com
arkansasHomerealestate.com
batonrougelarealestateagent.com
berkeleyrealestateagent.com
bethesdarealestateagent.com
brooklynrealestateagents.com
coconutgroverealestateagent.com
costamesarealestateagents.com

These domains, because of their keyword rich nature, will surely send an optimized website to the top of Google, Yahoo, and Bing, which can save you a tremendous amount of time and money in the optimization process.

Should you or a client be interested in purchasing or leasing any of these domains – or would like to inquire about additional domains we have available to us, please contact me at 206.xxx.xxxx via email at his.name@gmail.com.

Wow, that’s just completely wrong! The fact is that your web address does not affect your Google ranking at all. Google Doesn’t really care if your URL is bostonlogic.com or Google.com or anything else. Google cares about the content on your site, how new it is, and how many other people think it’s great.

Now, a good URL can be helpful. If you were doing a search, would you click on a website with an unfamiliar name, or would you click on a website that has your search term in it? ex. if you were looking for Newport real estate, would you click on newportrealestate.com or realestateagentsRus.com?

So, there is some value in a good URL, but don’t get carried away. Having the right URL doesn’t vault you to the top of the search engine results pages.

One last note: A lot of folks think it’s just SO HARD to find a web address that’s not taken. They search sites like GKG.net for an available domain name in vain. Well, we help clients do this all the time. Most of the time, clients are just so frustrated that the names they come up with are taken. Well, in most markets, the marquis names are taken. You’re just going to have to get a little creative.

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.

SEO is about more than just a few marquis terms.

Month-over-month, a client of ours just saw a 22% increase in traffic to their site from search engines. Looking at their list of target terms, there wasn’t all that much improvement in placement. Of course, this is to be expected, SEO isn’t a game of ranking for just a handful of terms.

A popular business book came out a couple of years ago. It’s called the long tail. It’s principles apply to SEO in great ways. First let me give you some basics:

The concept of the long tail is pretty mind-blowing. We now live in a world of options. Volume is often the name of the game. We no longer live our lives in a 25 mile radius. We have access to so much.

For example, google returns millions of records for most of your searches. Content on blogs is being created every second. itunes offers millions of songs, just imagine trying to fit all of those on the racks of a music store. Just a few decades ago, you could only get 6 or 10 TV channels. Now, you can subscribe to hundreds!

Long Tail of SEO

The Long Tail principle tells us that many actions follow a graph like the one to the right. The numbers start high, but degrade rapidly at first, then much more slowly. Total user volume is calculated by taking the integral of the curve. sorry if I just scared you back to high school calculus.

Let me bring this back home. 75% of those millions of titles on itunes sell at least once a month. The top 20 or 50 get a lot of press, but Apple makes the vast majority of it’s revenue from the millions of other songs in its catalog.

SEO works the same way. If you think SEO is about ranking for a few terms, you’re dead wrong. If you think that users only type in a few terms to search for the property that you sell or rent, that’s false too.

Searchers type in all sorts of strings. For example, if you think they’re going to google for “Newport Real Estate” and only for that term, then you’ll miss out on everyone who searches for terms like “Newport real estate for sale,” “Newport vacation homes” and “newport houses.” Not to mention the folks who might be very specific and google for “newport real estate open houses” or “newport 2 bedroom house.”

The point is that you may think that there are 20 or 40 terms that will bring you traffic, when the reality is that strong traffic comes from leveraging hundred and thousands of terms. Lots of those terms may only bring you 1 or 2 visitors per year, but when you add them all up, you’ll see real, lasting traffic.

The book: The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More

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.