Archive for the ‘SEO, Google & real estate’ Category

Bernice Ross, CEP of Real Estate Coach said it perfectly today in her article at Inman:

People who visit your Web site are searching for three primary categories of information. They want to know what is for sale, how much their home is worth, and what’s happening in their local market. Make sure these links are prominently displayed on your home page. You can add other data, but avoid cluttering your home page with too much irrelevant content.

We couldn’t agree more. We see many attempts to create real estate websites online, and the ‘everything but the kitchen sink’ method seldom creates an effect lead conversion tool.

We look at countless pages of real estate search results. As soon as we speak with a new real estate agent about a website for their real estate business, we go straight to google. Once there, we type in the key search terms that the agent has expressed interest in being among, and see who’s showing up.

Normally, we see very few single agent websites on the first page of google. More common is page filled with 10 broker sites: trulia, zillow, homes.com, realtor.com, weichert etc etc.

However, we occasionally see what we would term as the “ubiquitous agent”…the agent that seems to show up endlessly, across many town based real estate searches. Interestingly we feedback our results to the agents we are working with in a particular town, and share the name of the ubiquitous agent, we invariably hear, “that agent sells nothing”, or “he hasn’t sold a home all year”.

Firstly, we would commend any agent who has independently got to the first page of google. We know, it’s a great achievement. However the truth of the matter is that they have become web-developers or addicted bloggers themselves. They generate huge amount of relevant local content that the search engines eat up. What they have forgotten to do, is sell real estate.

It’s certainly an easy trap to fall into…

Blogging about real estate, looks like work, feels like work, but doesn’t pay the bills.

As every successful real estate agent knows, you have to meet with people face to face, get them in your car and close them to make money.

Our real estate agent websites enable agents to get to the first page of the major search engines with minimal demands on their time. This means you can spend your time making money, and we’ll keep you up on the first page of google!

We seem to be spending a lot of time talking to Realtors in Starbucks about real estate websites. It certainly works for us, we get there early, fire up the Mac book Air, sign into our google docs and work away productively until our appointment arrives.

The agents we meet with have typically either found our sites online, or have been referred to us by our other clients, usually, but not always in a non competing town! It seems that results speak for themselves.

We start by explaining that showing up in search engines is something that was predetermined from the start.

You have to know where you want show up specifically, in order to get to achieve it. You also have to be realistic about which searches you have a likelihood of showing up in.

Being realistic at the beginning of a project is much more likely to yield positive results at the end of a project. An individual agent website can only realistically show up well in a limited geographical area. Deciding on that core geographical area at the start is key to showing up well in those search results.

We spend a lot of time talking to real estate agents about either the website they want to build, or improving the website they have already. We expect that when we are having these conversations they will be cross referencing what we are say with what they have heard from other companies.

With an ever growing array of tools and gizmos available for inclusion in their real estate website we see that its tough for the agents to keep goal focussed during this period.

Our advice, which superceeds all other factors is that your website will show up in the search results you want it to show up in. Simple.

We see far too many ‘beautiful’ websites that can’t be found. We believe that being found is the most critical factor to a successful website. If your site, cannot be found, it doesnt matter how good it is, when you’re visitor are there… because they wont be!

When choosing a real estate website design company tell them, that at the top of your list is being found in which particular searches. You want to see examples of their work that have got their clients to the top of the search engines. You want to speak to those clients to hear that it is indeed happening.