Real Estate SEO

Posts Tagged ‘SEO Strategy’

I was speaking with a potential client about SEO just the other day. They’re in real estate and they offer residential real estate sales and rentals. They also offer investment sales and commercial leasing. Needless to say, there are a lot of stake holders to satisfy and lots of terms that could bring them leads.

The client also happens to own several real estate websites. They have a main website, an apartments website, one for commercial leasing, lofts, etc. This is a strategy that we’ve seen several real estate firms use. They opt to own several real estate sites rather than just one. It’s not a bad strategy, so long as you have the budget to build, maintain, and market each.

This particular real estate firm told us that they didn’t have the budget to spend on optimizing each of the firm’s sites. They want to invest a small real estate SEO budget into their main website. Now, the main site offers residential sales and commercial leasing searches, information, etc. The apartment leasing division has it’s own website.

When discussing a list of terms to focus on, the client was adamant that they needed to include “apartment” terms in their list. We advised against this. We told them that the SEO campaign would be hampered for several reasons:

1. The site doesn’t currently have any content related to apartments, apartment leasing, the apartment market, or anything else apartment related. So, we informed them that we’d be starting from a virtual SEO stand-still and that ranking for the apartment-related terms would take much longer than some of the other terms they were interested in.
2. The site doesn’t currently include an apartment search or even a tenant inquiry form. There’s no way to know when a rental lead is created or a rental goal (using the Google analytics notion of a goal) is reached. So, we’d probably want to ad a search form to the site. This is not an SEO task, so we told them that they should increase their budget to account for this expense.
3. Lastly, the if you’ve chosen a strategy where one of your sites includes LOTS of content for a set of users and the site has been designed to appeal to those users, then it makes much more sense to SEO that site for applicable terms. I’d liken this SEO strategy to the good old adage that talks about square pegs and round holes.

This all boils down to planning ahead. You can’t just pick a list of terms and start working. You need to think about your long term Real Estate SEO prospects. Choose terms that are achievable, who your site was built for, and those that the users who arrive will respond to. Make sure that your site has tools and content that are intended for that group of users who might search for those terms.

Not doing so will mean that you work harder or spend more money for less results. Real Estate brokers and agents can’t afford (really no one can these days) to be inefficient and wasteful. Listen to your SEO professionals. They probably do have your best interest at heart and they’re going to steer you towards best practices.

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.

Are you considering an investment into real estate SEO? How long have you been considering the investment? You need to be careful. Waiting can hurt you!

I’ve seen it many times. A client comes to us and considers an investment in SEO. They weigh the pros and cons for a while. They say, “Maybe in a few months,” and don’t make the investment. 6 months later, they come back to us again considering SEO for their real estate website. Only now, a few of their competitors have already invested in SEO and the client knows they’re behind in the game. They feel even more pressure to invest now and they make the move. What they don’t know is that they now have a tougher hill to climb. Here’s why:

1. URL age - What you may not know is that the age of your web address contributes to your search engine placement. So, if you’re trying to SEO your site and you’re up against folks with URLs that were registered 10 years before yours, you are at a disadvantage.
2. Don’t think for a minute that they other guys are standing still. For good terms, SEO is a constant competition. The other guys are adding content, links, and optimizing pages all the time. So, you need to catch up. It’s as though they’re collecting sea shells the entire time you’ve been waiting. If you want to have as many as they do, you’ll need to play catch up.
3. SEO takes time - Most of those procrastinating clients realize that if they had made the investment in SEO 6 months ago, they would be reaping the benefits now. When you start to SEO a site, you won’t see immediate results. It just doesn’t work that way. You have to give the search engines time to come back to your site and place your site into the search engine results pages(SERPs). In addition, there’s the actual effort that an SEO professional will have to put into your website. This all takes time. Not to mention, once you’re in the SERPs, and users come to your site and inquire, you’ll still have to take them through your entire sales cycle. This too takes time. So, you actually see the revenue which is a result of your SEO months later.

SEO is a long term investment. Smart investors know that starting an IRA early in life is a smart strategy. SEO is like the IRA of online marketing. Your investments today will pay off into the future and starting sooner means greater returns down the road.

If you’re considering making an investment in SEO and you’d like our honest advice, please don’t hesitate to contact us by phone or email.