Real Estate SEO

Posts Tagged ‘Twitter for Real Estate’

How many ways do you think Social Media can contribute to good real estate SEO? Jot down a list and then compare it to mine. If I left off any major ones, please let me know. Here goes:

1. Blogs are social media. Blogs only get read when there’s new content. New content helps your search engine placement.
2. You can syndicate your content (let’s say from your blog) to social media sites. You could even feed your real estate listings, by RSS to your twitter and Facebook profiles.
3. Many social media site pages are public. These pages are bound to have links back to your site. Linking will improve your SEO.
4. Social bookmarking links on your site will produce back links from those sites (Digg, Reddit, Stumble, etc.) to your site. Again, these links will improve your SEO, your rank, and bring you more traffic and more leads. Remember real estate buyer and seller leads are the goal, not just ranking!
5. Users spend a lot of time on Facebook, Twitter, and many other social media sites. The referral traffic will help you gain more visitors, more clients and sell more real estate.
6. Promotions have more power with social media. Post a promotion on your site, edit your PPC ads accordingly to drive clicks, broadcast the promotion to your Twitter followers, Facebook friends, and LinkedIn connections and watch your traffic spike.
7. Remember that real estate SEO is about leads and customers. What you care about isn’t always ranking but leads and real estate transactions that come from those leads. Use your analytics system, like Google analytics,  to look at the social media sites that are driving traffic and leads to your site. My money says that you’ll see a good conversion rate on this traffic.
8. Chatter on Facebook and Twitter can fuel your blog. Look at what the people are saying about your real estate market, your real estate business, even you as a real estate agent. You’re likely to get inspired and find a topic to blog about. Also, here’s another post about blogging inspiration that could be helpful.
9. Social media is all about linking and showing the world what you’re up to. As a result, your friends and followers are likely to check out the stuff that you’re pointing them to. So, engage your community, send them to your site – full of great resources and information – and they’ll convert into leads.

Ok, that about exhausts my list of how Social Media can improve your Real Estate SEO. I’m sure there are many others that I forgot, but I have to get back to SEOing a couple of sites today. I look forward to your additions to my list. Leave them as comments please. Thanks.

Real Estate offices are, all too often, made up of agents who are in competition with one another. The reason for this is quite basic really. The compensation structure of most offices doesn’t foster team work.

But, without changing the way your entire office works, I want to give you some suggestions on how each member of your team can put in a little work each month to help your office website rank better in the search engines. If you have the right systems setup, then you’ll see more leads for everyone.

1. Make sure there’s at least one link on your real estate agent site to your real estate office’s site.  Inbound linking is very helpful when you’re trying to SEO a site. The best links for your real estate seo will be from other real estate websites to your site.
   1. Make sure the link is HTML text and not an image.
   2. Compose the text of the link carefully. If you practice real estate in Newport, then the text of the link should read “Newport Real Estate” or “Newport Homes.” If you practice in Boston, then the link might read “Boston Real Estate”  or “Boston Condos.” Choose terms for which you’d like your office site to appear higher in the search engine results and make that the text in the link.
2. Start an office blog and divvy up the writing assignments. The average real estate office in the USA has 10 agents working in it. If each agent writes a post every other month, then your blog will be well populated before you know it and you’ll start to see reader traffic, comments, and leads. Here are some tips on how to make that blog engaging. Also, if you didn’t know that blogging was good for real estate SEO, there are plenty of posts on this blog that will explain why and how to do it better.
3. Each agent in your office should use social bookmarking websites to promote your site and each post to your blog. Every real estate agent and even the admins in your office should learn how to use StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, del.icio.us, and other social bookmarking sites. When a new post goes up, a few members of your staff should bookmark each post on each of these sites. This should take no more than a couple of minutes. Have a look at the bottom of this post and you’ll see links to lots of social bookmarking sites. Social bookmarking will bring referral traffic to your site and the backlinks will help your search engine ranking.
4. Make sure every agent in your office has accounts on Facebook, Twitter, and Linked In. Make sure the office has a page on these sites too and that you’re all fans of or connected to the office page. If you don’t know how that works or if the last sentence I wrote makes no sense to you, you need to learn more about social media sites. Call Boston Logic immediately. Social networking sites are a great source of referral traffic, don’t miss out on these visitors!
5. Aggregate email lists. Make sure the office is sending out a newsletter at least once a month. The content can be pulled from or at least reused on the blog you’re going to start.

Ok, these are all simple SEO tasks that just about any agent in your office should be able to do. If you’re reading this post and thinking how great it would be to get the whole office behind an effort like this, just remember that people love to follow leadership. Be the leader in your real estate office who starts the organic SEO effort. Your colleagues will thank you.

Have a great weekend.

Maybe you’re one of the lucky Real Estate agents? Maybe you’re the top producer in your office, the name on the sign outside, the envy of the rest of your peers. Well, and may not.

It’s a tough pill to swallow, but most of us are not the top producer in the office. There’s only one of those. In the US, there are 10 agents in the average real estate office. That means that 9 out of 10 agents aren’t the top producing agent. That’s OK. This post is for the 9 of you.

If you’ve been in the business for less than 3 years, if you’re having a slow winter, if you had a slow ’08, then you don’t spend your whole day selling real estate. In fact, in this market, you might spend very little of your time actually selling property or working with home buyers. Your job, for a large part of your day, is to find clients.

If you’re really new to the real estate biz, then your full time job is to find clients, generate leads, learn, and cultivate your own brand. Some day, if you do this diligently and well, you’ll spend very little time looking for your next client.

I want you to know that Real Estate SEO is a fantastic investment of your time and money during this period when you have some time on your hands. If you work at achieving search engine placement now, and you have a quality website, then the leads will come. To quote a classic, if you build it, they will come. It’s true in Real Estate SEO, and you never know, old baseball players may come and visit you.

Anyway, let’s assume you’re one of the 9 real estate agents in the office that is not the top producer and let’s assume that you spend less time with buyers and sellers these days than you used to. You’re looking for a way to spend your time which will ad value to your business and help find you clients. Here are some things you can do:

• Start a real estate blog and post several times a week about your local market
• Create market reports on a monthly basis, post these on your blog and send them to your past and potential clients
• Create pages on twitter, facebook, and Linked-In and link your blog to those pages
• Make a goal of having 500 people following your business on Twitter.
• When you get to 500, set a new goal at 2000.
• Set a goal of having 500 fans for your Facebook page about your business
• Make sure you write a monthly newsletter.
• Set a goal of having 1000 subscribers.
• Make sure there’s a link to subscribe to your your email newsletter on your Twitter page, Facebook page, website, Link-In profile, and everywhere else you can put one.
• Add social bookmarking links to the pages of your site and the pages of your blog.

These are just a start. There’s a lot more you can do, but let’s talk about the effects you will see:

Many of these tasks will boost your search engine placement. This will, of course, help you generate leads, grow your email list, and engage perspective buyers and sellers. As you grow your email list, each blog post, market report, and newsletter will require the same work, but be more effective since it will be received by more people. The folks who follow you on twitter will be notified when you post on your blog. This will generate traffic for your site.

The more folks who are your fans, follow you on twitter, or on other social sites, the more traffic your site will see. Many of these are link building tasks. They will help boost your referral traffic and your search engine placement. I could go on. Suffices to say that your real estate seo campaign and your overall online marketing campaign will improve. These are not hard tasks, they just take time.

But let’s be honest, right now, you might have some time on your hands.

If you need help with any of this, just let us know. We’re happy to provide guidance and assistance.