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

Does your website strategy compliment the recent changes to google's interface?

Google has updated their user interface this week, thats the bit you use, and a ton of stuff that you don’t see. You may have noticed a subtle change in the way it looks, (that always throws me, my first reaction is that i have some malware installed, which has redirected me to a scam site!).

Really, the update brings some of the features that were ‘snuck’ in last time to the fore.

Type in a search query and you get the same set of results in essentially the same format. This is google’s ‘everything’ set of data. What’s new is the left column.

At the top you have, ‘everything’, all normal so far. Below that, they have moved the Maps, Images, Videos, News, Blogs etc to a much more prominent position. This means that its going to be more likely that people are going to perform subsequent search variations, from their original entry search.

As a real estate agent, you should make sure that your online strategies try cover all of these bases. Make sure that your website and blogs are loaded with local images, town images, development images, videos of the above, (even quickies from your smart phone) and blog posts.

Below, the ‘everything’ navigation is another category, More Search Tools, this is where users can find the most up to date information posted to the web. You can sort your results by the time they were updated such as latest, past 24 hrs, past week, past month, past year. Latest may show your twitter tweets!

I’ll say it again, you have to be blogging!

To blog or not to blog...I think it's pretty clear, BLOG!

Still not blogging? Well, we’re not going to rest until you are. Are you blogging, but not really sure why?

Here’s yet another reason why it is such a good thing. It might get a little geeky here, but we’ll insulate you from the worst of it.

Ok, on a fundamental level websites and blogs are typically constructed using different frameworks. This is essentially because historically speaking they have been built of different purposes.

The Typical Website Model

Generally speaking websites, at worst, are rather like pretty fleshed out yellow pages ads. A series of pages who’s content seldom changes, (disclaimer: this is not the approach we approve of ), how many times does a Contact Us, or About Us page really have to change. So whenever a page changes or new pages are added, its wise to update your sitemap.

In short, a sitemap is a file that features all the links to pages on your website. When you have an updated site map, you notify the search engines that it’s updated and at some point they’ll pop over to take a look.

There is often a delay, of days if not weeks for search engines to come by and check out the changes. Frustratingly there’s not much that can be done to encourage them to by any sooner.

The Blog Model

Blogs are about being current, what’s happening now, or what’s just happened. Their MO is to get news out there.

The whole point of news is that it’s…that’s right, NEW.

When you write a new blog post and hit ‘publish’ something amazing (you might have to be a geek to use ‘amazing’ in this context) happens. Hitting publish, not only publishes your content to your blog but, importantly it sends out a ‘ping’ to the search engines to notify them that some news has just been reported.

Newness is what search engines crave.

By writing content on your blog you are giving search engines what they are looking for. Is it starting to become clear?

The Difference is Remarkable

Whereas it can be days if not weeks for search engines to find your new page on your website, you can get them to see (or index) your new blog post in minutes, which is frankly, astounding. Simply give search engines what they want and be rewarded.

See For Yourself

Click to enlarge

The blog post you are reading was published to the web at 9.15am this morning. It’s now 9.25am and google has already indexed or seen the post and this can only help our relevance in search results… That took 7 minutes.

Most Realtors call us to complain that they can’t be found at search engines. I think we both know what you can do to change that.

We can help you design and configure your real estate blog and coach you in your blog-craft.

Much like home ownership and the seemingly never ending list of projects, websites as well, are never really finished. There’s always another room to paint, something to tweak, or an addition to ponder.

Sure, at some point the initial build out of a website is completed but really that can just be the end of the beginning. Why, well search results are living, moving organism. There are always new sites coming along nipping at your toes.

This also makes your real estate website’s relative position within those results contextual.

What on earth does that mean? We’ll, the relevance of your website’s when matched against keywords typed into search engines is only part of the picture. Search engines also look at the other sites, and their respective contents to see where you site appears among them.

This means that things can change. Hopefully the changes are in the upward direction! Our feeling at limeyboy is to try and keep our agents ahead of these changes, rather than trying to respond to them after the fact.

One example of working with content to create improvement would be on Victor Dedvukaj’s site for Rye NY real estate. We were spending sometime doing our rounds of SEO, and saw that there was a trend of searches for waterfront homes.

We suggested to Victor that we cater for this demand on his website and now his site is on the first page of google for this niche market.

We at limeyboy are big BIG fans of the real estate agents we work with blogging. Why? Simple, search engines love them.

However we hear too often, and understand, that real estate agents simply don’t have the time to sit by their computer to write.

With a smart phone and a wordpress app installed you can now do it from anywhere. Like this is being done from my car now!

Real Estate Blogging Schedule.

Having been helping real estate agents with technology for the last 10 years, we know that if we suggest anything too time demanding it simply won’t get done. Actually this is something we are entirely in favor of. Your job is to sell real estate, not become a geek. That’s our job!

Therefore, our mantra to our blogging real estate agents is, write a little, and write often..

How little, look at this post. How long did it take. 5 minutes.

The simple answer is for their traffic driving power.

Facebook has passed search-engine giant Google to become the top source for traffic to major portals like Yahoo and MSN, and is among the leaders for other types of sites.
This trend is shifting the way Web site operators approach online marketing, even as Google takes steps to move into the social-media world.
Some experts say social media could become the Internet’s next search engine.

Astoundingly, Facebook not Google is the largest driver of traffic to major websites. This reminds us in a way of AOL, back in the early days of all this. AOL attempted to control the users online experience, from dialing up to the internet, (remember that?), to checking email, to surfing the web all within the AOL “experience”.

Stickiness.

Another great achievement of Facebook is the time people spend there. It has been said that currently people spend more time at Facebook than all other sites combined. This too is astounding.

If you have been putting this off today’s the day!

Facebook/Real Estate Action Plan

1. Get a facebook personal page.
2. Get a facebook business page. (Read our How to create a Facebook Business Page here).
3. Customize your Facebook business FBML. (Read See how a customized Facebook Business Page FBML looks here).
4. Get Leads

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.