While SEO is the hot topic these days when agents and brokers talk about succeeding on the Internet, there is one thing you absolutely must know: you need to know that without SEO, you stand two chances at success when it comes to attracting Internet buyers: 'slim' and 'none.'
Every agent and broker needs an organic search strategy in order to tap the power of the Internet. With over 80+% of all real estate transactions being started online, and with 66% of all Internet home-buyers finding their agents through a major search engine, there are few things that are more obvious. It is about a whole lot more than SEO, however; it's about SEO that
1) helps you and your website be found by Internet buyers;
2) helps you raise your conversion level from simply "Visitors" to "leads";
3) helps coach you as to how to convert the Internet leads to sales;
4) helps you keep up with content updates, search engine algorithm changes, and that makes them non-events for you because they handle them for you, automatically.
Furthermore, two additional points must be made here at the outset:
(5) Good SEO will not overcome poor marketing practices. Getting people to your site is step one in a three step process; once there, you must handle them properly and respond to their inquiry within four hours, maximum. Enable your web-site's notification system to text message all Internet leads directly to your cell phone so that you can make this requirement happen. The best SEO will not overcome bad business practices and lackadaisical lead follow up. (Just this week, a client complained that he 'wasn't getting many leads this week'. We had him check his cell phone and he found that one of his clients had been feverishly text messaging him from London saying "I am ready to buy today!" Seven others were trying to reach him to look at specific properties. No product can overcome lack of immediate follow-up.)
(6) Individual pages on REALTOR.com and other "Mothership' sites can not be optimized or even found by search engines. In order to avail yourself of the benefits of SEO, you must have your own website-agent or broker.
Here, then, are a few things that may not be so obvious to the hardworking agent or broker trying to make some sense out of the whole topic of SEO and Internet Marketing Services for REALTORS® and real estate professionals:
1. Your webmaster or site designer is probably not a leader in effective SEO.The software, knowledge and experience required to place more than 90% of clients' real estate websites on the first pages of the major search engines resides in a few specialists' hands and minds. SEO is not a part time job, or something anyone can dabble in. It's a full-time job.
2. A good template website is often more search engine friendly than a custom site.For a very long time, website designers have held out the concept that unless you spend lots of money on a custom website, that site will not bring you meaningful business. That is just flat wrong. There is no need to spend $5000+ on your web design when you can get a fabulous feature-loaded platform for about $50 a month. Drip email systems, prospect management, syndication and even predictive marketing are not standard on some template websites and there is no need to try to deny that those features are more important than simple pretty designs. Template websites also can be updated, changed, and expanded by you or any reasonably competent person whenever they should be. Custom sites mean you pay for every single thing you ever want to add, change, or subtract. If you want a different "look and feel" than may be shown on a template catalog, there are plenty of capable virtual assistants who will work with you to customize such a site to what you wish for it to look like for between $500 and $3000. At last count, our customers have employed 87 different website providing firms that we have optimized. Some are marginal in their friendliness, others are outstanding. One key factor is your ability to change copy, headings, html tags and more with ease: DO NOT sign up for ANY website-custom or template-that does not give you full authority and ability to change any feature on your pages. Don't lock your asset (your site) into anyone else's permanent control, ever.
3. Your website is not finished until the html tags are properly written. I occasionally see things like "Home" appearing in the html <title> tag. This is more frequent than you can imagine. Equally bad is the site where there are no <title> or <meta> description or keywords tags; or where long flowery sentences are inserted into the html tags. A website with improper html tags is like a filing cabinet full of files with no tabs on them: just as you cannot know where any particular file is in such a filing cabinet, neither can a search engine tell where any particular website is with improper html tags. While most template sites "leave the factory" with computer generated html tags, custom or customized sites often are put live without any tags at all. Think of a filing cabinet without file tabs where all files are lumped in without being arranged alphabetically; how hard it would be to find any particular file? Without proper html tags and proper attention paid to them, your website is incapable of being found by Albert Einstein's intellectual equal, let alone an internet buyer.
4. Some SEO is better than no SEO. That will leave you far better off than if you do nothing. You won't be on the first pages of the top search engines, but you might get up to page five or so, which is better than being on page 1000, although all the market data says that hardly any searcher goes further than page three, unless they are looking for something really specific that is usually technical.
5. Don't cheat-it could really hurt you.The search engines do not take kindly to folks who try to cheat. They can actually ban your site. A good way to get banned is to engage in reciprocal linking with other sites who are hosted at the same host; (Advanced Access used to offer a reciprocal linking program to their clients for a healthy fee. They don't offer that program any more. Even people with great Internet expertise are not always current in SEO and its governing rules. It is a specialty.) Reciprocal linking is specifically prohibited by most search engine guidelines or algorithms. If you try too much of it, you will be caught and all your hard work goes right out the window. Most search engines today deduct outbound reciprocal links from their algorithm's evaluation of your authority, anyway.
6. The only kinds of links that have value in SEO are INBOUND relevant links from sites with good page rank.Every time I see "experts" holding forth online in various blogs strongly asserting that reciprocal linking or any other kind of linking but the right kind is of value, I am reminded of how many false turns so many take due to bad advice; look folks; some real estate agents know a good bit about SEO but the vast majority simply repeat "advice" that they have heard from 'urban legend' kinds of stories. Before you seriously consider advice from a real estate agent holding forth on a blog somewhere, check out their standing as successful agent in your local stats: if they are not in the top ten in local market sales, ignore what they tell you.
7. You need to appear on more search engines than just Google. Google may have (latest reports) 56% of all searches, but you aren't supposed to worry about all searches, just real estate related searches. Yahoo, MSN, AOL and ASK are important, because lots of people who are your target buyers use those engines. Do you have an email address with one of those engines (jsmith@yahoo.com, for example)? If so, you probably search for most important things off of your homepage browser's search engine. So do folks who are looking for houses, too. With organic search, your site appears across all seven major search engines. Additionally on this topic, study after study shows that consumers trust organic search and prefer it over paid search results. Like all fundamental truths, this is easily demonstrable: when you search for something, do you click on the paid search, or do you prefer the organic search result?
8. SEO is never "done," it is a continuing work in process. The two major reasons that this is so are because the search engines often change the algorithms (formulas) that help them decide how to place websites on search results and because others are continuously attempting to knock those on the first pages off them. Just think of all the competition in your town. It's even bigger on the Internet as people from outside your town are hunting for the buyers and sellers in your town from their perch far away. With so much at stake in the Internet real estate business, getting on top and staying there is a continuing effort.
9. Content alone will not get you top placement."Content is King" is the mantra of every web designer and SEO guru around. Folks, you can have the world's best content and your site still may not be found. Optimization is half the battle and that includes content; the other half is off-page criteria (The SEO Secrets booklet explains these things: what they are and how relatively important each criteria is). Most agents and brokers-no matter how savvy-cannot compete against a top firm in the off page arena at anything approaching the economic efficiency that the full time SEO firm brings to the task. Moreover, pictures are not content from a search engine perspective: they cannot read pictures; they only read words and html code. While pictures are good, too many is bad. Resist the temptation to "go pretty" and go search engine friendly, instead. It is possible to have a very welcoming and attractive site that is both friendly to the Internet buyer and to the search engine that will bring her there.
10. SEO will be the factor that determines which agents and brokers become Internet Real Estate Agents and sell homes to Internet buyers and lack of SEO is literally something that threatens your continued success as a real estate agent.If they can't find you or your website when they enter that search for what they are looking for, you don't get the shot to sell to them or to list for them. With 11 billion different pages to search on the Internet today, yours will not be found unless it is properly optimized and properly promoted to the search engines on a continuing basis. 66% of Internet buyers find their agent with a search engine! If you can't be found, the agent who can be is going to qualify for the 66% of all Internet buyers looking for homes in their town.
Once you fully understand that --as a real estate professional-- SEO is second only in importance to having your own website for online marketing; you'll do what you should do: you'll pay attention and get yourself in a position to win at the battle for buyers that takes place online every day. It's a battle you must win.
As a closing thought, to many people this whole business of SEO is a sort of magical thing; hard to comprehend and cloaked in mystery. It may not be a coincidence that the letters in "engine" can be rearranged to spell "genie", but in any event, the magic of the power of the Internet will not be experienced by those who fail to invest in SEO. There is no mystery about that.
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