Real Estate SEO

Posts Tagged ‘SEO’

Are you proud of your ranking? Are you psyched that you’ve got so many Twitter followers? Do you have 1000 friends on Facebook?

Well, all of those are indeed reasons to celebrate, but not too much. It’s like the old saying goes: That, and a token, will get you a ride on the subway.

At the end of the day, there’s no revenue generated directly from being at the top of the SERPs. No one is paying you to be your Facebook friend and Twitter followers aren’t a revenue stream. These are all means to an end. The end goal, of course, is revenue.

Let’s examine this process. A user is out there on the web, they’re tweeting, let’s say, or they’re searching for a real estate agent on Google. The first goal is for them to find you and click to your site. Great. Step 1 is implete, you’ve generated traffic. users are clicking on your organic listings which rank high because of all that SEO you’ve invested in.

Now, the user arrives at your site. What do they find? Is your site engaging? Can they easily find what they’re looking for? Are they compelled to sign up and become a lead? We’ve written many times on this blog about the fact that SEO is a WASTE if your site isn’t any good. It’s true that we often have clients contact us for SEO services and we tell them that we’ll need to redesign their website before doing any SEO. Otherwise, they simply wouldn’t see any benefit from our SEO services. Some folks out there, some in real estate and some in other industries, think that SEO gets you clients. Well, it doesn’t.

SEO is a means, not an end.

So, let’s be optimistic. The user found you, they arrived at your site. They became engaged. They even signed up and converted from a user into a lead. What now? Does a lead = money in your pocket? No, a real estate buyer or seller lead is only worth cash when the deal closes.

That said, it’s easier to understand the value of a lead. The closer you get to the transaction and the smaller the numbers get, the easier it becomes to assign a dollar value to each unit. If in a 1 month period you generate 100 leads and sell even just 5 of them a home, and your monthly marketing budget is $2000 that means you’re spending $20/lead and your customer acquisition cost is $400/customer.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. We have search engine ranking producing website visitors. The visitors are converting into buyer and seller leads. Now we want deals. How do we maximize the conversion of those leads into deals. Here are two ways.

First, email marketing is essential. Lots of your leads will not come back to your site unless they’re prodded to do so. Send them nightly listing updates. Send them your newsletter. Email marketing is the best way to re-engage a lead. It’s also the best way to stay in touch with your past clients, a source of repeat business, referrals, and testimonials (which are great for SEO).

Second, your site needs to be a resource to the buyer. They’ll keep coming back, and therefore be more likely to convert into a deal, if they are engaged with the tools on your site. Your property search should be fully featured. A user should create an account and save favorite listings, save favorite searches, take notes, save and edit their listing update criteria, and communicate directly with you, right through the site.

To review:

1. The user finds you on Google or Twitter or where ever
2. They become engaged by your site’s design and functionality.
3. Conversion from a user into a lead
4. User returns to the site as their buying or selling resource.
5. Conversion into a client signaled by a deal closing.

Remember, steps 1 through 4 are all means to an end. It’s like my football coach used to say, “you can celebrate when you cross the goal line.”

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 post is going to address a couple of major SEO topics. Why am I tackling 2 in one blog post, because they jumped off my computer screen in rapid succession!

First, I’m going to call out another snake oil seo salesman. The first thing I saw was that their ad read “Good SEO = More Traffic.” This immediately screamed AMATEUR SEO. Then I clicked through to their website (yes, the PPC click probably cost them a couple of bucks) and I started reading. I immediately thought, this was not written by someone who speaks english as a first language.

I couldn’t believe it, I was reading what was supposed to be marketing copy and I could immediately tell that it was written by someone who wasn’t qualified to be writing it. So, I clicked on the contact page on the site. Sure enough, they gave an address in Mumbia, India.

The company is called Convonix. I’d never heard of them before, so that’s why I decided to click on their ad. It’s a bad sign when we’ve never heard of an SEO firm. We’re pretty well aware of who the players are in the industry. It’s not hard for us to suss out the riff raff. Like I said, I knew they were snake oils salesmen. Here are two major reasons why.

“Good SEO = More Traffic” is how their PPC ad read. THIS IS FALSE!!!

GOOD SEO = MORE CUSTOMERS

Results are what matter. I would shout this from the rooftops if I could. Any SEO firm that’s trying to sell you on placement is behind the times and should not be allowed to practice SEO. Who cares where you place and how many users come to your site if you don’t gain any customers as a result? Good SEO = Revenue. Good SEO = Business Growth. Good SEO = Speaking the language.

This brings me to my next point on SEO and really marketing in general. Years ago, one of the fathers of direct marketing described the practice of marketing as “salesmanship in print.” In the 21st century, we can expand this definition to say “salesmanship through another medium.” The medium could be a website, print, radio, you name it. The marketer’s job is to help promote and sell the offering.

Now, let me ask you bright people the following question. Is it wise to have someone who doesn’t have a good command over the language write your marketing copy? Do you want the content of your website to be written by someone in India? Will they understand idioms? Slang? Irony? Let’s remember, when we talk about SEO, content is King! The answer is simple. You need someone with a healthy command of the language to do the SEO work. SEO is not something that should be outsourced to Mumbia or Paris or Moscow. Marketing requires someone who knows your language and your market and SEO is marketing!

This is twice as true for the real estate industry. You need someone who speaks your “language.” I’m using the word language a little more loosely here. The language of real estate, which is required for good real estate seo, is specific to the industry, your geography, and to your market. The home buyer or seller, whom you want to click on your listing in the search engine results, is going to search using works and phrases particular to the real estate industry. They’re also going to use real estate terminology specific to your area and the current market condition.

This brings me to my last point. We’ve had clients in the real estate industry ask us how we can work with multiple real estate companies in the same market, which we do all the time. The answer is pretty simple. You can work with a real estate seo firm, like Boston Logic, who speaks the language, with domestic staff, who know the real estate vertical extremely well, or you can pay someone else to ride a learning curve on your dime. Also, it’s a big market out there. If we can help a few clients in each market gain more market share, then we’re doing our job.

That’s what good SEO equals…more market share. Not just more traffic.

Hey folks. For the local readers (we’re based in Boston) the 3rd installment of the course I’m giving for the North East Association of Realtors is happening this coming Monday. Here’s a link to the course outline. I’m looking forward to seeing you there.

The next session is going to be an in-depth look a the subject of this post. We’re going to be talking about traditional media as it compares to online media. Of course real estate seo is an online marketing medium. So, we’ll be touching on SEO and talking about how it stacks up against the other media.

Now, at Boston Logic, we’re on the side of those who proclaim the digital marketing mantra “Print is dead!” Well, maybe not yet, but it’s circling the drain.

The basic question is, why is this happening? Why is traditional media losing favor while online media is gaining a larger and larger share of the marketing dollar? From our perspective, there are two forces at work.

First of all, our lives are moving online. You need to market to the customers where they are. Your customers are online. Everyone quotes the fact that 80 or 90 percent of real estate buyers start their search online. But the reality is that we do a lot more than just search for property online. We spend hours each day online. We’re buying fewer newspapers, listening to less radio, and we use our TiVo to skip the commercials when we’re watching TV.

The result of this trend is that the number of impressions that each ad spot gets has come down. A TV spot used to be 25% more effective than it is today. And this is steadily declining. Newspaper circulations are falling off a cliff. The news is free online. The paper wastes trees. Pick your reason, we’re all just buying fewer newspapers at the news stand. All of this means that the value of these media is decreasing. So much so that lots of papers are cutting staff, closing their doors, or moving to a completely web-centric model. This means that they’re only going to offer their content online. Hallelujah.

The second reason that marketing dollars are going on line is accountability. Online marketing media, SEO, PPC, social media, banner placement, and email marketing, are all relatively easy to track. You can know how many visitors came from Google’s organic results to your site and how many of these users turned into leads or customers. This means you can calculate the cost of each lead based on the number of leads and your investment into SEO. Calculating ROI is even easier when you’re using Pay Per Click.

In stark contrast, it’s hard to know if a user came from a TV ad or just typed in your web address. Sure, you can print a promo code in the newspaper ad and use that to try and track effectiveness, but then you need to offer some kind of a discount and not everyone will use the promo code. So, you don’t know if your ad is a flop or if it’s actually performing better than your numbers are telling you, based on the number of folks who entered the promo code.

Most small and medium sized businesses don’t even try to track the effectiveness of their print campaign. To most business owners, marketing is a black box. You insert money on one end and hope that it produces business out of the other end. The black box provides little accountability and really doesn’t help you understand your ROI.

If you are one of the smart ones and you are working to understand the ROI on your many marketing media, then the results are probably quite clear. Most marketers know that they get better value out of online media than they do from traditional media. This is the nail in the coffin.

When the numbers tell you that SEO leads are costing you $5 and PPC is costing $7 but the newspaper produces leads at $35. Well, it doesn’t take an MBA to know that you should stop paying for newspaper ads and invest more of your marketing dollars into SEO and PPC. Everyone who runs the numbers is seeing this trend and they’re all moving online.

I could, very honestly, go on. This topic is quite broad. I’ll touch on it in another post soon. I’ll certainly be going into much greater detail on Monday. I hope to see you there! Thanks.

The vitals of success for inbound marketing are (1) well-written and relevant content, (2) in-bound links, and (3) fans, friends, and/or subscribers. The first two figures are largely covered by SEO, but once you throw blogging and social marketing networks into the mix you open up a whole new realm of possibilities. We already know that Google is looking more closely to see if your efforts incorporate all of these things, and so good marketing practices should incorporate all three.

We recommend using social networks like stumblepon.com, twitter.com, linkedin.com, facebook.com, etc. Stepping into the social media realm also means making yourself more public via the use of online videos, webinars (online video training or web seminar) and podcasts (like a radio broadcast), and don’t forget to go Mobile (stay tuned for more on this).

Social media really isn’t the next big thing anymore, but it’s not too late. Like with all good things it’s best to get started later in the game than not at all. What is new, however, is the way that it’s being used in conjunction with the tried and true search engine marketing practices.

Ever curious about what people are saying about your business? When you become part of these larger networking communities you’ll start to get more of a sense as to what is being said, and in the event that someone has a negative review about you (she said what?)… now you have a means by which you can counter and respectfully disagree. Of course you’ll also want to promote yourself in a more flattering way any chance that you get. And, don’t forget, all those fans and/or friends that you are gathering will help you promote your content as well.

Ultimately, you want to become more engaged with others, and in turn engage others in your community. Beside publishing good content you will want to monitor not only what people are saying about you but also what is being said about your field (hint: your key words). Sure you can use Google Alerts, but why not give Twitter a try. Hubspot recently published a good article on “how to use Twitter for marketing“… so use it. Through Twitter’s search application you can actually see what people are saying about things and/or you, and then you can subscribe to a feed for your query. It just might be your next lead!

As Twitter and other social media services evolve, they are becoming a key part of search engine optimization strategies. All of your efforts should work together; (1) SEO (plus PPC), (2) your blog, and (3) your social marketing network. These efforts, combined, help to increase the number of inbound links and spread your content through more and more channels … all of which makes for a highly efficient inbound marketing strategy as you head into the new year.