After starting this blog, I realized the significant drawbacks to WordPress hosting. I decided that a self-hosted blog would better serve the Realtors like myself, who I was trying to help. So I took what I started here, and continue to expand it on the SEO for Realtors Blog.
If you’re looking for how to optimize your real estate website to achieve more leads, I hope you’ll join me on the SEO for Realtors blog.
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Your objective with SEO should be to get to the first page of Google for the keywords (or search terms) you want to rank for. I’ve said elsewhere here that SEO involves some time & energy, and that people usually won’t go beyond page 1 of the search results. So if you don’t have a shot of getting to page 1, better to make some cold calls.
Don’t go away yet. It gets better. I promise.
The more competitive a keyword, the more difficult to rank for it. In other words, if an exact search on Google turns up a couple hundred thousand results, you might want to try a different keyword.
In the post “On-page SEO for Realtors” I gave a few examples of how to check various keywords for their level of competitiveness. I’ll re-state some of that here. Just cause I like ya, and don’t wanna have ya clickin all over the place. (Say “thankya”)
Type this into Google: “your city real estate”. Make sure you use the quotes. (That’s called an exact search. More about search types later.) Check it out:
What other kinds of keywords might I use? “cincinnati investment properties” yielded only 1,920 results. “cincinnati homes for sale” only 37,900. “cincinnati mls” – 7,610. What other search phrases might you try? What if you use a suburb that you farm, rather than the big city name? What happens then? Better chance of ranking there?
So, the purpose of keyword research is this: find maybe 3-5 keyword phrases where we know there’s traffic, and there’s not a lot of competition. By “not a lot”, I’m talking generally under 10,000 results. The lower the number, the greater your chances of making it to Page 1.
Another point – if the page 1 results for your keywords are already occupied by big sites – say, lead aggregators (grrrrr…..), and NAR and Yahoo homes and such – you’re usually gonna have to work real hard to unseat them. I say usually here, because if you’ve found keywords with low volume results, they may not have worked that hard to get their position. In another post I’ll show you some tools that let you evaluate those sites.
Our friendly Googlers have another free tool that’ll help with keyword research. It’s called the AdWords Keyword Tool. Just go there, type in a keyword you like, and it’ll give you more information than you can probably digest in one meal. NOT YET THOUGH. Your ADD is showing. Keep reading here for now.
There are actually two ways to use this tool – to suggest alternative, closely related keywords based on keywords you enter; and to suggest keywords based on a look at your website. (Actually, I don’t think it’s that good at the second… but see what you think!)
Oh yeah, there’s another way to use the tool, too. If you have a particular competitor who seems to rank better than you in the search engines, check out what keywords Google suggests for that site… vs. what it suggests for your site. That site vs. your site = insight. Get it? (I just made that up… might be a pretty catchy tag line for one of these tools!)
So let’s have a look.
Google Keyword Tool Results
I put in “cincinnati real estate”, and selected “Exact match”. Google told me about the search volume for my selected keyword; and returned about 100-150 alternative, but related keywords. And their rough monthly search volume, and level of paid advertiser competition.
OK. This is such a cool tool, I want you to play with it a bit before we go any further. Check it out and then come back.
Are you back now? Good. Wasn’t that fun? Did you try the little bit I mentioned earlier about trying a suburb rather than the big city name? (If not, don’t worry. You’ll go back. I just know you’re gonna go back to that tool. Probably over and over again.)
So did it give you some good ideas about keywords you might rank for? Did you write them down? (I’m imagining your head is shaking up and down right now, and there’s a big smile on your face, and you can’t wait to give me a big fat kiss. Save it. You’re not my type.)
Now, let’s do what we did earlier. Type each of those search terms into the Google search engine, and see how many results it gives you. Don’t forget to surround your keyword with quotes.
Again, what we’re looking for here is how much competition there is on the keyword. In particular, we’re looking for keywords that have 10,000 or fewer results. And, we’re looking for not too much “big name” competition showing up on the first page of the search results.
Now, we have to take a sanity check. If one of your keywords is “Podunk fixer-uppers” you might find very low search engine results. (Hopefully none). Which means you could rank for that search term in a jiffy! But now, going back to the Keyword Tool again, you want to see that there’s some people searching on that keyword. Upwards of a couple hundred a month. The higher, the better.
If you find a keyword that has decent search volume, and not much competition, you just got three cherries on the slot machine! Save that keyword, go to jail, go directly to jail, do not pass GO, do not collect $200. YET.
Ideally, you’ll find maybe 3-5 keywords that look like reasonable prospects. If not, take another run at the Keyword Tool and try some more variations on your keywords. This is a DO-LOOP… until you get to 3-5 good keywords that 1) are relevant to your website; 2) have decent monthly search volume; and 3) have low to moderate competition.
Write those keywords down somewhere where you won’t lose them. No, not a sticky note. These are your ticket to more leads. We’ll punch the ticket later. With some good old-fashioned SEO.
To your wealth!
Filed under: Keyword Research, Optimizing your website, SEO Tools | Leave a Comment »
OK I’m gonna get to that meaty on-page SEO for Realtors stuff in a couple minutes. First, you gotta let me rant about making a website compelling. OK let’s call it philosophy rather than ranting.
Why do you have a website? Is it to show off? Beat your chest about how great your service is, and how high your integrity, or how long you’ve been in business, or how many listings you have?
If that’s your objective, bucko, you’re pissing away money just as surely as advertising your listings in the newspaper. Your visitors just don’t care. Yet. There’s only one good reason you should be willing to shell out your hard-earned commission bucks for a website – for lead capture.
Say a visitor finds your website. Why is he there? (Please excuse the masculine references, I’ll try to mix it up a little bit).
I think I read an article on RISMedia or the NAR website or somewhere that said that 70% of real estate website visitors want to search the MLS. I don’t know if that’s true, but let’s assume that’s the case.
There’s about 4000 other Realtors in Cincinnati. I assume that most of them have websites – if only a page off their broker’s site. I assume a visitor to my site can search the Cincinnati MLS on any one of 4,000 sites. So, if all I offer the visitor is a MLS search, my website’s a commodity. There’s no good reason for her to be there instead of somewhere else.
So if I’m gonna go thru all the time & energy of SEO’ing my site to get them there, I want to offer them several offers – not just one. Something that is more compelling than those other sites.
Why? Because I want her to give up her contact information! If not with an MLS search, then with an eBook about how to save money on buying a home, or how to make big bucks investing in real estate. Or a free list of foreclosure homes by email. Or a free CMA. Or anything else that I can think of, that will be a seductive enough offer to entice a little information out of her/him/it.
But not much on my site is “free”. If they don’t cough up some contact information, they can go somewhere else. Plenty of other Realtors are giving that information away without asking for anything in return.
OK back to where I was going. If I want to keep them there, I have to have a site that’s visually compelling. Easy to navigate. Rich with information. And stories. People love stories. So I turn my client references into compelling headlines that link to the stories.
Put yourself in a visitor’s shoes. Why’s he there? What could you possibly do to keep him there? To compel him to look around? And eventually give you her information? (I’m really open to ideas on this, so suggestions or comments are really welcome here!)
The point is: Make your website compelling. Do everything you can think of to make them comfortable there. And then ask ‘em for their phone number.
OK now I’m ready to write about the main topic of this post. Forgive me, I’m a little ADD 
This refers to any and all the things you do on your website to attract the attention of the search engines. Particularly Google, because they have the largest share of the search market now. Bing just came out last week, and I’m reading some good things about it. Same with Wolfram|Alpha. But Google’s king today, and whatever we do SEO-wise for Google will work well for the others as well.
Before we start any SEO activities, we gotta know what keyword phrases we’re optimizing for. I got a response to one of my ActiveRain posts, that said just use city name and “real estate”. Maybe. One way to find out. Type this into Google: “your city real estate”. Make sure you use the quotes. (That’s called an exact search. More about search types later.) Check it out:
Google results - "cincinnati real estate"
Wow! Only 4,000 other Realtors in town, and 148,000 results! And if I look at the first page, there’s only 3 single-Realtor sites. The “big boy brokerages” in town take up a few, and then the lead aggregators have a few (grrrrr…..), realtor.com, Yahoo real estate, etc. Making it to the first page (only 10 results) is gonna require a lot of SEO.
What other kinds of keywords might I use? “cincinnati investment properties” yielded only 1,920 results. “cincinnati homes for sale” only 37,900. “cincinnati mls” – 7,610. Try this in your area. What other search phrases might you try? What if you use a suburb that you farm, rather than the big city name? What happens then? Better chance of ranking there?
Here’s the point. I could spend months optimizing for “cincinnati real estate”. But if I don’t make it to page 1, it’s all for nothing. Very few searchers will click to page 2 of search results. (Actually, many won’t even scroll down page 1!) And – like we said earlier – real estate websites are a commodity. The search engines will never provide enough information in their results to allow someone to discern which site’s more useful than the others.
When we’re doing SEO, we want to see some progress. So we start with the low-hanging fruit. Search terms where we stand a chance of getting on page 1. Capiche?
We’ll go into more detail about keyword research in another post. Suffice it for this post to say that you gotta know what terms you’re optimizing for before you start any SEO… or you’re wasting your time. So let’s say you know what keywords you’re optimizing for.
Ahhhh…. pardon me, one more digression first.
Google is in the business of providing the most relevant results for its searchers. So all that we do in SEO is to make our site look most relevant for the search terms we’re optimizing for. (Probably goes without saying. But I said it anyway. Sue me.)
You’ll want to SEO all your pages… but most important is your home page. So we’ll start there… and most of what’s here will apply to other pages as well. Note: these are (roughly) in order of search engine importance!
*note* grrr… I tried and tried to embed that video but wordpress wouldn’t let me do it. I’ll find out later how to brute-force it.
So that’s my little primer about On-page SEO for Realtors. As with all the posts here, feedback is not only welcome – it’s solicited. Does it make sense? Is it clearly written? Is my ADD showing up? What am I missing?
To your wealth!
Filed under: On-page SEO, Optimizing your website | Leave a Comment »
Before we get started with any kind of SEO, we want to establish benchmarks for your website. Without benchmarks, there’s no way of knowing if our SEO work is doing us any good. So in this post I’ll introduce you to some important questions, and a couple of tools you’re gonna love.
You need to find these things out now. So here’s the plan. In order to do this, you’re gonna need to have access to your website, because we’re gonna upload some stuff up there. It’s OK if you have a Webmaster, he can do this for you.
Google has a wonderful tool that’s absolutely free, that will answer most of these questions for you. It’s called Google Analytics. Once you setup Google Analytics, you can track all these metrics for your site day-to-day, and over time.
I’m gonna give you a little instruction about how to find & setup this tool, then give you the link and let you play around with it. Questions? Post them here and I’ll respond.
In order to use Google Analytics you’ll need a Google account. If you have one already, great. If not, just go to www.gmail.com and setup a free email account. Use the email account – or not – doesn’t matter. This will be the email and password you’ll use for ALL of Google’s outstanding services. Isn’t that cool?
Once you have your gmail account, you’ll want to go to Google Analytics. Hang on, not yet! I gotta type some more first.
You will signup for an account, then tell Google what website(s) you want to monitor. That’s right, I said sites. Set one up for your website. Another for your blog. Another for any other site you want. You’ll find this functionality under “Create New Website Profile”. Here’s what it looks like:
Setting up a new domain
When you click “Finish” you’ll get a page that looks like this:
Google Gobblygook
Presto! Google generates some Javascript code for you! Don’t even THINK that you need to understand this crap. But what you DO need to do is copy it and paste it into each page of your website. No doubt you have no idea how to do that. Neither did I. That’s where you’ll find the “Common Questions” column on the right of this Googlepage helpful.
Before you click on any of that, though, you’ll want to save that code! Copy it and paste it into Windows Notebook, and save it off someplace where you can find it later.
If you don’t feel comfortable doing this, have your Webmaster or somebody do it for you.
Once you have the GoogleGobbleyGook Javascript yaya running on your site, you can go back to Analytics and start getting some KILLER stats on your site that answer most of the questions we started with above. Go back there after a couple days and just poke around. You’ll be amazed at how much information it gives you.
Most common blogging platforms (blogspot, wordpress) are able to handle Google Analytics pretty easily. You might have to do some searching around on the web to find out how to do it.
So, here’s the link to Google Analytics. Go get ‘em, cowboy!
Linking to your site is called off-page SEO. Think of this as a Miss America contest for search engines. The more links you have inbound to your site, the more popular they think you are with the judges. So they move your site right up the runway toward getting the crown! (I know, corny analogy….)
Remember we were talking about Page Rank earlier? The higher the page rank of sites linking to you, the more authority they carry… and that leads to higher Google Juice. So, a PR4 site gives you way more juice than a PR0 site. (Oh yeah, I forgot to mention. Google Pagerank goes from 0 to 9. We’ll go over how to find pagerank for any page later.) So later on, we’ll find some high-ranking sites to build links back to yours.
For now, though, we’re concerned with benchmarking where you are today… so that when we start building links, we can track how we’re doing.
Yahoo has a great little tool for discovering your links – both within your site and from outside. This is a lot simpler than the other one. Easy to get to, easy to use.
Simply go to Yahoo!, and type this in the search box:
linkdomain:www.yoursitename.com
Here’s the superslick report you’ll get back:
Yahoo LinkDomain
Here’s all your links – within and external to your site. Click the little dropdown at the top left to select “Except from this domain”, to see all the external links to your site.
This is very important for benchmarking! Print the page and put it in a folder somewhere. We’ll be building links later, and the “before” picture will allow us to measure our progress.
Try this little linkdomain thingy out on your competition. Who’s eating your lunch? Who’s the big boy in town you’d like to compete with for Internet leads? How many inlinks do they have?
I hope I haven’t freaked you out here. If I did, maybe SEO isn’t for you after all. Go back to the phone and make some cold calls. The rest of us will chase some more warm leads.
These are only two of a bunch of tools you’re gonna want to use, moving forward. More later.
To your wealth!
Filed under: Benchmarking, SEO Tools, The Basics | Leave a Comment »
Let’s clear up something right up front.
If you want to learn SEO to get more leads from your real estate website, it’s gonna take some effort on your part.
SEO isn’t some magical wand you can wave over your website and *poof* suddenly it’s a hotbed of Internet activity.
It takes time. Time to learn, and time to do.
How much time? If you can devote 4-6 hours a week to SEO, you’ll start seeing greater website activity within a month or two. More time, more results. Less time, less results. Get it?
So if you’re a busy busy Realtor already working 60-80 hours a week, you’re better off paying someone to do it for you. Like me, for instance.
Or, spend some big bucks on pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. (It most certainly WILL be big bucks if you don’t optimize your website for PPC).
I’m gonna try to keep this stuff understandable for the average Realtor who’s got some tech savvy. If you maintain your website (uploading new listings, changing content periodically) and write a blog, I’m hoping this will be simple enough for you to understand.
And I’ll try to be responsive to questions or problems as you post them here.
I’m gonna use the terms “SEO” and “SEO for Realtors” a lot here. Often in bold. First of all because it’ll help get this blog to the top 5 on the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). But let’s agree that our use of the term “SEO” is a catch-all for all the things that lead to a higher rate of leads from your website and/or blog.
That includes things like these:
And whatever else comes to me. So let’s all agree that we’re using that term “SEO” generically, OK? SEO purists will hate that. Tough. Go search on some other term. ‘Nuff said.
Filed under: The Basics | Leave a Comment »
