Real Estate Marketing SEO Blog

Universal Search and Real Estate

Real Estate SEO gets more complicated as the Natural Search results gets more crowded:

You may have missed it, but a few months back Google promised to start mixing their various other search results into their regular search. They call it....Drum Roll.........Universal Search.

Real Estate Video and You Tube, Blogs, News, Images, Local, and Google Base=Google Natural/Organic search results......

Page Rank is Dead

Page Rank

Well there has been a flurry of blog activity complaining of Google's draconian "slap" of prominent sites such as the SFGate, CopyBlogger, Washington Post, Forbes & many many more. As Page Rank levels have dropped 1 or in some cases 2 levels.

Now Page Rank is the relative importance of a Page and was really what launched Google. Link popularity was nothing new as it was a prime part of the Inktomi Technology that Yahoo owned, but Larry Page took it a step further.

How Do I....?

"How To" queries are up 17 1/2 % in 2007. This according to Hitwise.

Queries like "how to lose weight" or "how to levitate" are being used more and more to find out information.

These are great mind joggers for real estate articles:

• How to Buy a Home No Money Down
• How to Buy a Home
• How to Get Home Financing
• How to Ensure Proper Title on Your New Home

If done proper, these articles can be used to either point links, or act as Link Bait to get you inbound linkage and, most importantly traffic.

Internet Marketing News

• Paid Local Search Advertising
  The paid local search advertising market will nearly triple to $907 million in 2006, according to research firm Borrell Associates. In its annual study of the local online ad market, the company also found that spending on local search will far outpace spending on local online display ads. Local search advertising is expected to reach $4.07 billion by 2010, accounting for nearly half of all local online advertising.
• Competitive Pracices in Real Estate
  Using the excuse that consumers paid $61 billion in real estate brokerage fees in 2004 and that the Internet has failed to lower those fees, U.S. Rep. Mike Oxley asked the U.S. Government Accountability Office to look into the competitive practices of the real estate industry.

• Red States Best For Bloated Websites
  If you have a heavy website with lots of graphics and graphics, you are punishing your viewers that are on dialup. And if your area voted for Bush then more than likely they are on dialup.

  Yep, according to its updated broadband report, Leichtman Research Group found that at the beginning of 2005, broadband penetration of households in the U.S. stood at close to 29  percent nationwide, and that disparities in penetration are largely related to variations in household income across the states, which are strikingly similar to the state-by-state splits in the 2004 presidential election, The Center for Media Research reports.

Real Estate SEO

When Mike Kehoe of Birdview Technologies reported to the Inman Conference that one of his clients received over an 11% conversion rate, I smiled with pride. For the site mentioned was designed and optimized for traffic and conversion by Spider Juice Technologies. Years of testing and bucking the "common" knowledge had paid off.

You see, we have discovered that the most optimal way for an online Real Estate agent to succeed is thru rapid lead generation and follow up. And in order to escalate your leads, you must start off with an acceptance of your current traffic and lead conversion ratio.

Ask yourself "How many visitors does it take to get to a lead?"

In fact, when we initially interview a potential client often times the conversion is close to 200:1. Depending on design features, you should really get at the most 50:1. And probably 30:1 is more like it.

Conversion comes from on page conversion optimization & Keyword representation.

On Page Factors

Most people have heard of Search Engine Optimization. Few talk about on page conversion optimization.

First of all, this whole concept pre-supposes that you are starting off with a most wanted action (MWA). Sometimes your MWA is Branding, sometimes it is Leads. And many times it is both lead capture and branding that you are asking your website to do.

If Leads are your goal then your call to action is critical. Other features on your page can distract the viewer from your objectives.

On Page factors that may increase or decrease conversion are:

• Asking them to sign up (making your call to action clear)
• A Johnson Box (these are those tabled boxes that break up your body copy)
• Color can attract or distract
• Too many buttons
• Animation
• Offer Placement. Where are you placing your call to action?
• Variety of Call to Action
• Frequency of your call to action

These are just a few of the attributes that may help your lead count to go way up.

HappyVille Real Estate

There is a reason that studies have found that Pay per Click search engine results often render poor conversion rates. Specificity.

The reason is that you can only use high volume keywords with pay per click (PPC). These high volume keywords are by their nature generalized. They are also the most profitable for the engine. But what may profit the engine does not always profit you.  (Thats not to say that PPC doesn't have its place in a search marketing campaign)

9 times out 10, I am asked to "make my site #1 for "My City real estate". While this is a worthy objective, it is at best very short sighted. Words like "City real estate", "city homes", city condos", are all high volume in just about any city you research.

However, a successful marketing campaign must employ search engine click thrus that are made up of general & specific "streams of traffic". This is because traffic is a comprehensive endeavor. You wouldn't just rent out 1 or 2 of your penthouse units and leave the rest your 150 unit apartment complex empty? You couldn't expect profitability would you?

However, this is exactly what most agents do when they go after a few high volume words.

Traffic is made up of the combined visits that come from various inquiries into a search engine.
Each inquiry represents a finite amount of possible traffic determined by the placement in the engine, for a particular keyword phrase.

So long story short, a few keywords aren't going to make your business. You need a Universe of words in order to get monster traffic and lead conversion.

Additionally, not all keywords or traffic are created equal. Step out of real estate monetarily and imagine yourself as Jeff Bezos at Amazon.com. What would delite you more?

500 visitors that typed in "Books"? Or 500 visitors that typed in "Harry Potter"? Or better yet, "Harry Potter, Sorcerors Stone"? The more specific you get, conversion goes up and the closer you can get to that elusive 1:1 conversion.

The challenge however, is that the more specific you get with our keywords, the less traffic you get. So you need to represent a large amount of these specific keywords that produce low traffic by themselves. But combined, create a large stream of very convertable traffic.

By optimizing your on page factors and your keywords that drive people to your site, you will take your visitor to conversion ratio down to a respectable number.

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Tim O'Keefe is President of Spider Juice Technologies. His firm specializes in Search Engine Traffic and Lead Optimization strategies. An ex-Realtor himself, TIm has always started a project with the fastest path to profitability as his objective for his clients. You can consult with Tim personally, at 310-533-9145.

Real Estate News Paper Online Advertising

Or:Real Estate MLS gone.. again

Inman recently included a piece that alerted me to a new vortal that inlcudes newspapers' property listings. The site is called Homescape.com, a division of Classified Ventures. They have mirrored sites at HomeHunter.com and NewHomeNetwork.com.

Why isn't there alarm bells and prophesies of Armageddon going off in the Realtor world?

This site is aggregating "their" listings. We just talked about this at Real Estate MLS gone.

If you were to do a search for Sacramento homes, you would find the on line classifieds feed from the Sacramento Bee.

I did find that at least for Sacramento, the MLS listings that the newspaper-on line mls advertising was not included in the feed.

I guess if I were a Realtor, I could be upset for a few reasons.

One. Why don't they include the MLS listings? Two. And more disconcerning. Is this the beginning of the the big push to replace the MLS sharing that has been the mainstay and foundation of "Realty" Marketing as we know it. Three. Does the Realtor need another industry to compete for on line positioning? Especially when the Realtor community subsidizes many of these media outlets existence?

Real Estate MLS gone

According to recent reports by Borrell & Associates, real-estate brokers' and agents' websites are losing online market share of the real estate listings marketplace. They report that certain keyword real-estate searches have recently began to ignore most of the Realtor Websites in the search engines.

According to Borrell, real-estate agents' websites now populate Google's top 10 results only 9% of the time, vs. 29% only a year ago.

Newspaper real-estate sites now get in the top 10 about 12% of the time, vs. 16% a year ago.

To quote the popular song...."isn't it ironic"?

Realtor offices and agents pay their local and national Board of Realtors, Department of Real Estate and National Association of Realtors to protect them. Yet these lobbyists only serve to create the napster affect thru the IDX and VOW initiatives.

Yet, in many of the cases, the Newspaper sites that are beating the pants off the Realtor in search engine referrals, are getting the data from their friendly, local Realtor.

Does anyone in the Realtor community care that your "advocates" are giving your business away?

OK so here is the bad news. The above mentioned report is from a year ago (Dec, 2003). And the search engine environment has only gotten tougher as Google seems to have given way to relevancy and would rather you spend your money on their ADWords.

In September of this year Borrell released a report called:

2004 ANALYSIS:  ONLINE REAL ESTATE ADVERTISING COMES OF AGE. A superheated home-sales market has masked some subtle shifts in the $11.5 billion Real Estate advertising category.  Homes are selling faster than agents can advertise them, and a new, less expensive way of reaching home buyers has emerged in the form of MLS-based Web sites.  Meanwhile, an erosion of traditional media advertising -- particularly for newspapers --  has been occurring.  In 1997, newspapers received $755 per home sold in advertising revenues; today it's $605.   This report examines the shift and and provides additional insights from surveys with classified advertising, online managers, and MLS executives. 

Google Search Engine

Lots of Google News:

I recently installed Google's Desktop Search. Still not sure of the point.

However, lots of Privacy and Security guru's argue it gives Google and others too much access to our behavior. You be the judge. I chose to uninstall for another reason. It was dragging my system down.
More Conspiratorialish Google resources:
What Google Knows About You
Anonymize the Google Cookie
Gartner:Don't Use Google Desktop in Search 

In more Search Engine News:
IProspect-The "Original Search Engine Marketing Firm" sold to Isobar, the global full service digital network (an Aegis Company) for $50 million.

A November study shows that Internet Explorer's share dropped to less than 89 percent, 5 percentage points less than in May. FireFox now has almost 5 percent of the market, and it is growing. Other Cool Browser: Opera. So do web designers have to start compying with these browsers unique design standards?

Comment: The answer speaks to the power of Microsoft and certain marketing principles.Do you think as web surfers get more serious about their web viewing, that they will stop putting up with the MS barrage of security holes? My take is that the answer is no. Old habits are hard to brake.

Just like Macs are better computers, but we all use a Microsoft Operated machine. Sure Opera and Firefox browsers are better, faster, more secure. However, standard is Internet Explorer.

Real Estate Marketing and SEO

MSN is launching their new search engine Thursday. The Redmond, Wash. software maker on Thursday will open to the public its service for searching the Internet after eighteen months of development. The implications for the Online Realtor-Marketer is significant.

Up untitl now, the only game in town has been Google's and Yahoo's own engine and their "affiliate" feeds. In fact, MSN has licensed Yahoo's search data until the end of the year.

Now the online real estate marketer has another chance to capture high search positions for their real estate websites. Higher search positions across a large variety of keyword phrases can increase traffic significantly.

Google Yellow Pages

I recently posited that as the engines move to be more profitable, they are becoming more like the yellow pages than a legitimate search vehicle.

Interestingly Google just purchased Real Pages.com. More of the story here.

Why would Google purchase a yellow page type business directory? There is big dollars in local search. According to a recent mediapost email:

The Yellow Pages are a $26 billion global industry. According to The Kelsey Group, 22 million small- and medium-sized businesses spend 46 percent of their advertising budgets on Yellow Pages marketing, and put only 3 percent into search engine keywords. In addition, only 30 percent of small- and medium-sized businesses have a Web site. ...Verizon SuperPages.com, which has been selling online directory listings since 1996, this year redesigned its Web site and business model to include pay-per-click listings.

Resources
Yellow Pages are Dead