When starting a new enterprise it usually a good idea to review the competition which I have now started to do... Maybe I'm just a high achiever, however it looks like the Real Estate SEO bar has been set very low. I took a bit of time to review sites which came up with the search term "Real Estate SEO" on Google and looked at those SEO Companies client lists (if they did in fact list any). I also looked through the PPC (Pay per click) as well to see what those companies were doing and their track record and it seems that most if not all of these companies have lackluster results for their clients. Now keep in mind that I have been doing SEO for my own sites for the last 6 years with tremendous results in the real estate space and I certainly recognize the top agents in the industry in their respective markets however it seems that most of the "SEO Companies" just don't deliver on the results that you would expect an SEO to deliver on.

One company promised to refund 50% of the money invested if 1/2 of the keyword phrases selected didn't show up on the front page of Google. This in my opinion is a bit of a scam. If you have enough obscure keyword phrases and you simply put the content on your site with enough keyword density it is almost impossible not to get listed on the front page for 1/2 of the terms. Again the only term that I really care about is "City Name" followed by the term "Real Estate". Since that one term will drive over 70% of the traffic to a site and the traffic on a well designed website with IDX and lead capture forms will convert at a reasonable rate.

I also looked at another site which had a bunch of testimonials from clients. Again I did a search based on the search terms suggested which were reasonably relevant and again I couldn't find the clients often on the front page and no where near to the top of the search rankings.

If you hire an SEO professional and they can't beat REALTOR.com or Homes.com in the organic listings on Google you probably should hire a different SEO professional. I'll probably post another post on why price is probably one of the worst ways of choosing an SEO professional. In the SEO world those who know what they are doing are not going to be cheap for two reasons. 1) If they are good at what they are doing they can likely optimize sites of their own and generate reasonably decent income from their other sites and 2) Good SEO professionals know the value of their proposition. SEO takes time, dedication and a proven strategy. If they can't get paid well for their work well there's always option #1.

Bottom line: Definitely review the results from the SEO companies that you are looking at. Call me direct if you would like to compare the results that you have found out there. If they can not show you how they will make you the dominant agent on the web for the terms you want then you owe it to your business to let me show you how we can in fact do just that.

Labels: Google, SEO Companies, SEO Strategies