Most excellent posting and shout-out thank you

I guess that you are correct in that my SOI does not care about my Google Juice.

Real estate business is all about establishing relationships!

Face-to-face Belly-to-belly good old-fashioned interaction and relationship building is the new (old) paradigm. Begin with the people closest to you. Rekindle authentic relationships . . . the ones you relegated to social media tags, mentions, likes, and clever memes.

Face to face belly belly doesn't work when the majority of your potential clients live out of state

In the end, we all have to do what works for us in our market. Listings are local and my buyers come from out of the area.  I have had more than one client come from Silicon Valley because they liked what they saw of my internet presence and website.  So, the right mix works for me.

I can't tell you how much money I waster in my early years on SEO. How'd that go for me? Cue cricket sound effects.

I was searching for some information the other day about a subdivision I recently wrote about. My post came back as the first response. Which wasn't helpful for what I was looking for, but was very helpful in making me think that maybe my community posts are a good idea! 

Great post! Winning on the internet will continue to get more and more difficult as the big players like Google and Facebook gobble up the competition and capture all the traffic. Now, it's a game of pay to play, and the only real winners are these few dominant internet giants who have managed to capture all the eyeballs...

Yes, you are right to a certain extent, Face-to-face Belly-to-belly good old-fashioned interaction and relationship building is the new (old) paradigm. But to those that blog, adding SEO to the mix still works.

I completely agree Barry. This is what my team is working towards.

Have been focusing on this for the last year, and it is good to sit down with people you know and just listen to each other and then they realize they know someone who wants to sell their home and connect you.

Hi Barry, yes, there is something smelly in Denmark...

The digital revolution is available, like any other media outlet, to those who pay the most.  As search gets confused with paid listings you wonder why you spend so much effort to get SEO right.

I used to spend at least two hours a day trying to get things right. Tweaking, redoing text, mixing things up, etc.  There is much more to this of course, but going the extra extra mile may not be worth it.  You should be organically set up and then go press the flesh.

Thx

You can only do so much for you have to actually be a person can go out there and sell! :)

Hi Barry:

The basics, like face to face interaction and staying in touch with clients, have always worked and continue to do so.

Jeff

Oh boy. So disheartening. I was in in the early days of the IDX and was on page one a lot. I could barely handle the number of calls coming in, many of many of them coming from agents and consumers complaining that I was "advertising" their listings on my site. Then Google starting changing its algorithms and now I can barely find myself. You can probably get yourself onto page one these days by pounding long tail keywords on a regular basis for your niche, and you might get one hit. You are right. Gotta back to the old-fashioned relathionship-building.

Terrific post. I try to have two face to face meetings each month with old clients. Google and Amazon seem to be taking over the world.

In my industry, my competitors are local one-person businesses.  They put up a basic website, with no blog and do not add any fresh or helpful content. They never learned about SEO and do not rank in search results.

I took the time to learn WordPress, built a website and blog, and learned SEO. I do research and write high-quality evergreen articles that attract organic backlinks from high-authority websites. I write content that is helpful, educational or interesting, not salesy. Many articles are long-tail or unique content at or near the top of Google SERP.

Google Page Quality (PQ) rating guidelines (167-page training manual) rate web pages based on the Expertise, Authority and Trustworthiness (EAT) of the page.  High expertise and authority are earned over time by writing quality content that requires time, effort, knowledge, skill, fact-checking, editing and quality control.

I don't pay Google any money for advertising but my website is near the top of page one search results for my keywords.               SEO works for me.

Hello Barry - experiments are exercises in learning.  Predictable results?  Hmm...I wonder.

For years and years before Google and the internet...that's how agents got business!  Getting face to face with people, referrals, etc. Still works!

Thanks for the insight Barry. I still think the key to this business is Sphere of Influence! I fear we have all focused too much on the next bright shiny object of tech