In my other life I am a real estate agent running a six city real estate company generating virtually 100% of our business from the web. This year in 2008 our goal is to close $100 million in residential sales up from about $70 million in 2007 and $60 million in 2006. These are individual clients purchasing typically one property per individual client in the $300,000 - $600,000 price range. As a result of managing a number of real estate websites I receive emails on an almost daily basis and phone calls probably once every week or two about a company wanting to provide SEO services for our company. If I'm not in the middle of something I'll often take the call and listen to the pitch and I've even had a couple of companies make proposals. What I am continually amazed at is how little most of these companies know about SEO even though they are wanting to charge significant sums of money for the SEO Services that they provide. What they don't know is that as a former dot bomber and web developer when I got into real estate I used my skills to position a number of real estate websites for my own interests to the top of the Search Engines for the term "City Name" followed by "Real Estate" which is in 95% of real estate searches the top search term for a given community generating significant search traffic month after month.

What I've noticed however is that most of the SEO companies when asked to provide a proposal offer to optimize on some term that isn't searched very often. In Bellingham where I am based, the suggestion has been to position us for terms like, "Bellingham REALTOR", "Bellingham Real Estate Agent", "Bellingham Washington Lakefront Homes" and the like... Looking at Wordtracker and looking at how people search in our community if I was relying on those terms to drive my traffic it would be like starving of thirst in the middle of the desert with a mirage in the distant which ultimately never materializes into water.

I remember one SEO guy who was sending out emails who talked about his SEO abilities and to prove it he had optimized a site for "deep water dock st lucia fl" or some crazy term like that. It reminds me of the days of Google Whacking.

Bottom line is the search term you want to optimize around is quite simply, "Your City or Community" followed by the term "Real Estate". This one term will generate you the most consistent lead flow which will convert into actual business. Any other term which you optimize around will generate significantly less traffic and significantly less leads and ultimately significantly less business. So when you talk to an SEO company be sure that they will optimize on the most search phrase and for that matter back it up with a guarantee. If they won't then they really don't know what they are doing.

BTW: We actually thought about outsourcing our SEO to an external company for a while but even after interviewing these other SEO companies that we ultimately determined that we had better strategies and ultimately would get much better results from our internal staff. As we have grown we have found that the SEO community at large still doesn't have a good handle on rapidly moving clients up the search engines especially in the highly competitive real estate space. As a result obviously we started WTM (Working The Magic), because isn't that what you want, someone to work the magic for your site?

Labels: SEO Companies, SEO Strategies, Working The Magic