Real Estate SEO

Posts Tagged ‘SEO’

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.

Every year we notice a trend. Real Estate brokers and agents from back from their summer vacation with new knowledge. They’ve been reading, we say. They’ve been thinking, we say. The result is that we get score of you great folks asking us for the same things.

Almost without fail, it’s something that we’ve been telling you to invest in for at least a year or two. This year, what are people calling us about? You guessed it Real Estate SEO!

Now, this is not a great big ‘I told you so’ post. We’re not that kind of SEOs. I want to know why the real estate industry just woke up during the summer of 2009? Here are my theories.

Real Estate magazine published a cover story on Social Media. Yes, we got some calls about this, we’re even designing a class around it. But the ripple effect that this had was to send real estate professionals running to the web. There they noticed just how hard it was for consumers to find them. They reasoned that if they had better search engine placement, they’d sell more real estate. It’s not a tough conclusion to draw.

Here’s another theory: after a dismal spring, the real estate brokers realized that they needed to finally cut their print marketing budget and find a new horse to bet on. They’d heard of this thing called blogging and started to write. So, what do these realtors want to know? Why isn’t my blog ranking? Sometime we get, “My blog ranks, but my site doesn’t!?” Of course the answer to these folks is that their blog should be a part of their website. Blogging on blogger.com or WordPress.com is fine, but it’s going to bring the users to those sites and not to your website.

Here’s my final theory. Every fall, real estate brokers and agents realize that they didn’t take initiative in the spring. They were too busy selling homes. They woke up on the first of the year and said, “I’m going to invest in real estate seo this year.” But one thing led to another another and they didn’t get around to it. Now, it’s time to act.

That’s ok, 8 months isn’t so long…

But really, this means that the message got across a long time ago. You didn’t need us to remind you. You just needed to remember that you wanted more leads all along.

Last word: Stay tuned for the new BostonLogic.com launching soon! You heard it here first!

I’m on a number of email lists. I get lots of newsletters. And I’m a member of a number of Google and Yahoo groups. Most of the time, I just skim. Every once in  a while, there’s a question posted to which I have an answer.

Yesterday, someone posted the question, “How much should I budget for SEO?” Here was my response:

That’s a very open ended question.

To bring this down to earth, you should look at SEO, or really your entire online marketing budget, as a percentage of your overall marketing spend.

For example:

For clients who have been using traditional media for some time, and are about to make their first investment into online marketing (including SEO), we recommend aiming to devote at least 25% of your marketing spend to online marketing. After some time, you’re likely to increase that percentage when SEO and online marketing prove to be the more efficient spend. So, if you’re grossing $2MM/year, for example, and your marketing budget is 10% of your revenue, then you should look to spend roughly $50k on online marketing. If that spend is all devoted to SEO, that’s about $4k/month, which is a realistic number.

If your business is all online, you’re probably going to want to allocate a larger percentage of your marketing budget to the web. Suffices to say, it’s important to start with your budget and not with a “what it is going to cost?”

I’m quite sure that whomever posted that question isn’t the only person pondering the same.  If you have other questions, send them to us and we’ll post answers. Thanks.

Just a quick post to let you all know that we’re looking to find an online marketing associate to join our team here at Boston Logic.

http://www.bostonlogic.com/jobs.php

If you are an SEO superstar who is familiar with the real estate vertical, we’re really looking forward to hearing from you! Tell your friends!

A client sent this question to us. We’re not going any SEO for them right now, just PPC Management. This is a typical question that we get from new and potential SEO clients. It’s our constant goal to educate you. So, let’s learn from each other, eh?

We Googled some pretty narrow search terms, like “their term here” and some of our authors’ names, and our site doesn’t come up in the first three or four PAGES of organic Google results. We were pretty surprised by this, so thought we’d check with you whether this is typical when you stop spending money on PPC? I would think we have enough SEO words and content on the site that we would pop up in organic search results.

OK, let’s break this down, shall we.

First of all, if you didn’t know it, your PPC spend does not affect your organic placement. SEO and PPC are not directly related. You can’t buy your way to the top of the organic results by buying sponsored ads. I just wrote the same statement 3 ways. I hope I drove the point home!

Sometimes SEO feels like you're lost in the woods. Here are some answers.

This doesn’t mean that you should spam your content with keywords. Don’t do that! Instead, write good content and people will read it, link back to it, and your SEO campaign will flourish. This brings me to the next part of my answer to this client:

The search engines look at your site and other sites out there and they see how sites link to each other. They look at the text in those links and the pages those links are sitting on and judge the quality of the link. So, if other sites about real estate have links to your site that say “real estate” then you’re more likely to rank for the term “real estate.” The inbound links you have may or may not help you rank for a particular term.

There’s more I could write on this for sure. URL age, how new your content is, even the code of the site, all play a role. SEO answers are often complicated. I hope this sheds some light.

The client is mulling all of this over. I highly expect more question soon. If you have questions about real estate SEO, just drop us a note. Thanks.