For me it's very simple. SEO gives the real estate agent or firm a truly unfair advantage over other agents or offices in their marketplace. Over the last six years as a real estate professional I have had a very profitable career in real estate and that is for one very simple reason: I know how to rank my real estate websites to the top of the search engines for the terms that consumers use for search. If you are in residential real estate the term that consumers use more often then not is "Your City" followed by the term "real estate" or to a lesser extent "homes for sale". These are the trump cards of real estate search for a given city period, end of report...

Sure Social Networking on ActiveRain, Localism and even your own personal real estate blog will generate you some traffic and may get you a few leads, but that will not even come close to the lead flow that you will get from dominating your search engine rankings for your city.

In an earlier post I talked about my real estate career to date and so far its been a very financially fulfilling ride. I have been profitable into the low to mid six figures my last five years in real estate. I've exited the day-to-day management of the real estate business and turned over the business to our team leaders, brokers and support staff. I do however keep my hand in the SEO side of the business which is essentially the marketing side of the business.

Getting back to the "Unfair advantage". I truly believe that many agents in the marketplace do see our positioning as an "Unfair advantage". What does that mean?

In a traditional real estate business, business is normally a function of advertising and getting your agents to spend their money to ultimately generate them (the agents) and you (the firm) income. The playing field is relatively level in that everyone can run the same ads, market in the same magazines, mail the same postcards and if anyone comes up with a better ad, a better magazine, or a better postcard anyone in the marketplace can essentially implement a similar plan. Any competitive advantage is soon lost due to agents copying or improving on an existing plan. Marketshare in the offline world is typically a function of spend and ego. Meaning the more you spend and the more outgoing your are the more marketshare that you have. Big firms have figured out that one of the best ways to grow is simply to recruit those agents who simply spend more and have bigger egos then agents at other firms which ultimately means more listings and more sides. Of course that was pre-internet.

Now that 84% of consumers use the web as their primary search vehicle agents who are offline are having to spend more and in many cases are losing marketshare to their online counterparts. Spend and ego are no longer the differentiators between agents. The true differentiator now is web positioning. Meaning where do you rank on the search engines. As much as Trulia, REALTOR.com, ActiveRain, Localism, HouseValues and HomeGain would like to get you to think that what is going to generate you business is using their platforms, the reality again is that the business generated from any one of these or all of them combined pales in comparison to search engine rankings.

So what again does an "Unfair Advantage" mean? It essentially means that you are able to generate significantly more leads, significantly better leads, and spend significantly less on generating those leads then your competition can. It means that because of the plethora of leads generated and your lead aquisition cost you can actually grow a business rather then be an independent contractor trying to figure out where the next deal is coming from. It means you have the ability to own a business rather then having a business own you.

How much of traditional real estate agents business is about networking and asking for repeat and referral business? I don't want to say that is a bad idea, but I'll be honest, In six years I have probably only asked that question five or six times and that was when I was still relatively new in the business and that is what I was told I needed to do.

SEO has driven my lead cost into the ground and given me such a competitive advantage that without taking out any loans or liquidating any assets and only using the cashflow from our real estate business we have been able to grow to three real estate offices, three affiliated teams and a couple of incubating teams. As mentioned in an earlier post if we hit our numbers this year we will grow from approximately $73 million in sales in 2007 to somewhere close to $100 million in sales in 2008 with very little overhead and very little risk.

Of course my real passion has been and continues to be web marketing so as a result starting our Real Estate SEO company allows me to really work in the industry that I really enjoy and that is online marketing for independent business people and to help those who want to own a real estate business rather then having the real estate business own them achieve their dreams through web positioning and online marketing.

Bottom line: If you do want to have a truly unfair advantage in your market then please give us a call. We'll either coach you on how to dominate your market through our coaching program or partner with you and do the work we know how to do internally and achieve the same result of getting you your unfair share of leads with which you can grow a business worth owning rather then being owned by your business.

Labels: Business Development, Google, SEO Strategies

We've been in discussions this last week with a client who is in a major metro who wants to dominate this major metro and the main metro term. It turns out there is some significant competition in this metro so we have been looking at what strategies it takes to go after a major metro.

Almost every major city in the country has many sub cities. Many of these sub cities and neighborhoods are not defended very well by the incumbent agents or brokerages which are being found under those search terms. Often who ranks there is a Homes.com, Trulia or REALTOR.com site. This makes these sub-markets great places to start when looking to go after a major metro. By building individual sites for these sub-markets and positioning them to #1 on Google it provides you with a great source of leads and assuming you are good at converting these leads into closed transactions it also provides you the ammunition to continue to build out additional sub cities / communities while positioning these to ultimately go after the major metro. Even though Trulia is competitive in a lot of markets so far we have found that getting above Trulia is pretty straight forward with the right methodology. Trulia is competing with a long tail approach meaning that even though there are some incoming links to their local pages the majority of the link juice has been diluted from the core site itself. Considering all of the drill down to most neighborhoods to compete against Trulia is again pretty straight forward. They don't have time to defend every small city. They are happy with getting the rankings where they get them and continuing to work on their overall strategies which trickle down to the local markets.

Of course if you have deep pockets and/or you really enjoy the web side of the business (and willing to spend significant time on the development and promotion of multiple sites at once) you may be able to capture a major competitive metro... You'll really need to have a well rounded plan to go after a major metro. A little bit of work on a lot of sites is a great way to get very little traffic to any site which ultimately means very few leads and very few if any closings.

So the methods that we would suggest for a major metro is sub-city real estate sites which ultimately link up to the major metro with SEO campaigns for all of the above to capture the major metro. Make sense?

Labels: Business Development, SEO Strategies

Since around March 2004 Google has placed newly hosted "real estate" websites in what is commonly referred to as a Sandbox. Essentially if your keywords include a significant number of references to real estate including your title tags and description tags it is likely that your site will not rank for a few months via Google. This is one of the reasons why when you do trade links with other sites you may rank on MSN and Yahoo however it seems that for a significant number of months you aren't even searchable on Google.

So how do you plan for such a contingency?

I recommend a longer term view of your overall SEO strategy. Plan on building a few links from the highest ranking sites that will give you a link almost immediately. I would suggest trying to find about 10 - 20 sites that will give you a link on a PageRank 3 page or higher if you can talk them into doing it. It might be a challenge since you will likely be trading a PageRank 0 or if you are lucky a PageRank 1 page for a link back from their PageRank 3 page. PageRank is currency in the link trading arena and if you can't trade like for like its sometimes hard getting in the game.

Anyway if you can get those links then let the site incubate for a few months before really starting a significant SEO push on the site. Once your site has been accepted by Google and isn't in the Sandbox anymore it becomes significantly easier to move up the rankings on the Search Engines. It still takes work and probably takes about 10 times the amount of work that you might expect (especially if you are requesting the links one by one without some sort of automation to the process).

Remember SEO is a long term strategy. Once your SEO strategy starts to produce results and you are able to monetize your strategy (get it to pay for itself) you have a business which will grow as long as you continue to reinvest in growing your business.
It starts with one site and then one lead and then one closing. Eventually you should have multiple sites, more leads then you and your team can handle and multiple closings per month, month after month.

Ironically this site is a brand new site and is still in the Google Sandbox :D

Labels: SEO Companies, SEO Strategies

Adobe Flash is one way to add media and rich Internet applications to a website. Done right flash is visually appealing and encourages a high level of interactivity with visitors making a website "sticky".

The problem with flash is that search engines like Google and Yahoo choke on understanding what content and links are contained within it. Because of this limitation, when incorporating flash into a design my recommendation is to do so sparingly to enhance an already search engine friendly website. Websites designed entirely of flash and not optimized correctly are completely invisible to the search engine robots whose job it is to determine what a website is about (To get a better idea of how search engine robots "see" a page try the Search Engine Robot Simulator). Being invisible to search engine robots will have a negative impact on a websites search rankings.

Optimizing Flash Websites
So we know that search engines cannot easily understand website content and links contained in flash. To optimize around this problem, code specifically for search engines to read must be embedded on all pages containing flash. This requires a bit more work and some technical skill or a designer/SEO professional with some JavaScript knowledge. Embedded content should contain identical information to what is already contained - hidden - in the flash. I won't get too specific on the technical details of doing this but more information can be found on the Google Code website under SWFObject as a standards-friendly method to embed and optimize Flash content.

Labels: Google, SEO Strategies, Website Design

A couple of days ago I mentioned SeoDigger as a way to evaluate what keywords your competition is ranked for, the amount of traffic those keywords are driving to their website and the ranking of those keywords on Google.

Labels: Content, SEO Strategies, SEO Tools

Having worked with a number of blogging platforms over the years including Wordpress, ActiveRain (for Real Estate Blogging), and Blogger which is the back end for the blog here on Working The Magic I am blown away at the difference between using Blogger vs. ActiveRain.

Now ActiveRain is awesome for the amount of actual readership and commentary on posts in relatively short order so as a social network its very powerful and very targeted, but in terms of the blog posts in AR getting cached by Google I've found it to be very unsatisfactory. There are probably a number of reasons for this, not the least is the shear volume of posts taking place on AR. Google will only dig so deep into a site before it moves on to another site, so unless you are a featured agent or have a featured post I suspect that Google will not have a good way of getting to your post to cache it in the first place.

I've blogged a bit on ActiveRain for a couple of years and most recently this past week as part of an overall PR campaign to launch our Real Estate SEO Company and have received some great responses from AR participants on our business, so that part has been a success, but looking back at the posts that I've put on since I started blogging on AR I noticed that none of the blog posts have been cached by Google in the conventional way. Meaning I normally can't go to the post and then pull the cache from my Google Toolbar. What that ultimately means is that AR is not as effective in getting my keywords into Google and for my SEM (Search Engine Marketing) efforts.

Now if you contrast that to the blog on Working The Magic, what is quite interesting is that using Blogger we are getting our posts to show up in the Google cache within a few hours to a couple of days. Even though the blog itself is hosted on our own website, we use Blogger to ultimately generate the blog and ftp the blog with all the navigation up to our website. Since Blogger is a Google company the blog posts go immediately into the Google cache or in relatively short order which is what we ultimately want since many of the long tail searches that result from the blog post will bring potential clients back to our blog and hopefully learn about how we can help them achieve top rankings in the search engines.

If you check out the post prior to this one which is CMS for Real Estate... Blog for Opinions... and then look at the Google cache for that post you'll notice that it has already been spidered by Google. This is way cool since as a brand new site (less then 40 days old) much of the rest of the site has not been cached by Google however by using Blogger we are able to get a lot of keyword rich content into the Google cache which means when Google chews it all up and is searching for somewhere to send their visitors we have a reach chance of getting that traffic.

Obviously once we have done a lot of our SEO activities on the site this content will be valued even more highly in Google and then watch out traffic.

Labels: Blogging, Content, Google, SEO Strategies, Website Design

CMS - Content Management System vs. Blogging for Real Estate

Okay... I'll let you in a little secret... It's much easier to blog on SEO then it is to blog on Real Estate. First of all blogging is about having an opinion, making an argument and backing it up with content. It's hard to take a controversial position on real estate. I know. I've tried. Now that's not to say there aren't agents who have a particular bent and can find something worthwhile to blog about in real estate however generally speaking when you blog about about a home you don't want to alienate potential clients in your marketplace. No matter how much of a dog a property might be or how overpriced it might be its hard to put that into a blog online. It's not that it isn't true, its that the seller might get bent out of shape and to some extent go after you and/or your office. Who wants to justify with their broker their opinions especially if the broker was hoping to get that listing in house with another agent? I know I don't and I didn't.

So blogging is a bit difficult for real estate other then stating the facts... That's where a CMS comes in. Instead of taking an opinion why not simply build out a site which essentially acts as an alternative to the Chamber of Commerce website. Publish photos, events and activities, polls about stuff going on in the area and generally be a ambassador to the world for your community. If you take a look at our Birch Bay Washington Community portal website you'll see a lot of content relating to the community at large. In fact we have been so successful with the portal that if you search Google for "Birch Bay" you'll find that our site ranks #1 above the chamber of commerce... Believe me the Chamber wasn't happy about this and probably still isn't, but quite honestly I'm just better at internet marketing then the volunteers at the Chamber. Though not ranked quite as high our Blaine Washington portal is also ranked above the local chamber in Google as well. I remember a few years ago the Blaine Chamber actually called me in and they tried to strong arm me into giving up my domain name Blaine.net to the Chamber.

Back on topic though, a community portal that is well designed will give you an authority site which can then link to your real estate website. In addition its much easier to post on local events and activities then it is to blog on real estate topics generally speaking... Blogging in real estate can sometimes feel like cutting off the hand that feeds you, so in lieu of blogging building out a community portal with a CMS makes more sense. You might even be able to sell some advertising on your CMS as well... It's small money compared to the real estate you will sell, but it may offset or pay for someone to write content for your site.

We've tried a lot of CMS platforms. I've used Joomla, phpNuke, phpWiki, phpWebsite, Wordpress (technically a blogging platform), Xoops, and what we are using here (Blogger). Ultimately phpWebsite has really been the platform which we like the best. Out of the box it does most of the functions that you would expect a CMS to do including events calendar, photo albums, content pages, sub-pages, search, registration etc... What it doesn't do well that some other platforms do better is SEO friendly URLs, however the search engines have cached the results of many of the pages just the same...

The portal that we have done the most work on is for Bellingham Washington and that is http://www.bellingham.net/ . Check it out... I hope this gives you some ideas... Back to work!

Labels: Content, SEO Strategies, SEO Tools, Website Design

So you want to do SEO for a real estate website? What do you need?

Well generally speaking your going to need to be a bit of web designer, content developer, blogger, researcher, link builder and have a techie bent to name a few of the general job functions. You should enjoy getting under the hood of your website like your Dad used to like to get under the hood of the family car. If you don't like to do those things then obviously just like you would hire a mechanic to fix your car you are going to want to hire an SEO Company to work on your site.

Beyond that you are going to need some tools. Assuming the basics: Decent computer and internet connection, you are going to want to see what to see how consumers search in your marketplace. For that I recommend the budding SEO specialist to use the Free Wordtracker Service. You can enter in your city name or community and see what types of keywords are put into the search engines.

In addition you'll want to have the Google Toolbar installed in your browser with the PageRank feature enabled. When looking at your competition you'll be able to do a rough estimate of their competitiveness in your marketplace by looking at their PageRank. Typically the higher the PageRank the better they are at competing online. It doesn't mean they are optimized however Google rates content on sites with higher PR as more authoritative then sites with lower PR. You'll also be able to review who links to their site by checking backlinks with the toolbar as well.

As you review your competitions website you can put their site into http://www.alexa.com/ and check how much traffic they are generating. Most real estate website will have alexa traffic ranks in the millions however from time to time you'll find a site that is 500,000 or less which means they are generating a significant amount of traffic on the site and ultimately if the site is built properly generating a significant number of leads as well.

Want to see what your competition is ranked well on? Check out http://www.seodigger.com/ . This site will let you know what terms your competition is ranked under as well as the traffic from those terms and where they rank in their search engine positions.

Ever wonder what Google is looking for relating to the terms you are optimizing around? Try out Google Sets. Even though it is in the Google Labs it will give you an idea of what Google is expecting to find when you put a couple of the cities you are optimizing for in sets. Ussually go with a small set since the larger the set the less targeted the key phrases that Google will provide via sets. I've used Google Sets for a number of years. It also gives me a good idea of who I might want to try to get a link from. If Google is expecting some content relating to another neighbor city then I should pursue a link from agents in that city as well.

I know the guys, Gabe and Kirk, use a number of other tools to quickly evaluate competition for a given market, however the above are ones that I use for my quick research and site buildouts.

Using the Mechanic example above... We are Real Estate SEO experts. Just like you wouldn't want a jack of all trades mechanic to work on your Porche, you don't want just anyone who claims to do SEO doing your Real Estate SEO. That's what we do... Real Estate SEO!

Labels: SEO Strategies, SEO Tools

Despite spending the majority (An understatement) of my time working SEO, Search Engine Optimization, to achieve top organic results in Google and other search engines I enjoy experimenting with online advertising campaigns.

Online advertising campaigns work well in the early stages of launching a website to drive traffic and begin converting leads from day 1. The downfall of this type of advertising campaign is that visits to a website will be determined by the amount of continued daily or monthly spend, but that is the subject of another post on the Return of Investment of SEO vs Pay-Per-Click. That said, to manage a successful online advertising campaign one must have the ability to monitor the generated traffic and conversion of leads for specific campaigns.

The best way I have found to track the results of individual campaigns is to "Tag" links. Tagging links involves creating unique link ID's with embedded information for each online campaign you have. This will allow Google Analytics the ability to track of the success of referring campaigns (If you are not familiar with Google's web analytic system you may want to read Who Visits Your Website? Use Google Analytics).

Specific instructions are found within Google's help archives titled How Do I Tag My Links? where you will find access to the URL Builder that makes monitoring and managing your online advertising campaigns possible.

To discuss long term online marketing and SEO strategies call 888-442-5115.

Labels: Google, SEO Strategies

It's a bit of an adrenalin rush to think about dominating a major search term like "Seattle Real Estate" vs a smaller market like "Bellingham WA Real Estate". Having dominated both terms for about five years I can tell you that as a REALTOR being dominant for Bellingham Washington is a much more fulfilling experience then dominating Seattle. The simple reason is that as an agent and now company owner it's hard to get motivated to drive an hour or more to preview and/or show property in a big city while being in a smaller community like Bellingham it usually takes less then 20 minutes to get most anywhere. It's really a function of efficiency and ultimately profitability.

Obviously the bragging rights of being dominant in Seattle is more significant since everyone who has been in North America (and for that matter the world at large) will likely know Seattle and assume (rightly) that Seattle is a competitive market and that the search term "Seattle Real Estate" is quite a feather in the cap. When letting many of those same people know that we are number 1 for "Bellingham WA Real Estate" their response might be "Where? Never heard of Bellingham."

Ironically even though we have had the ranking in both Bellingham and Seattle for a similar length of time our Bellingham team is out producing Seattle in terms of closed transaction and GCI by a margin of 30 - 40%.

Of course I wouldn't give up my rankings in Seattle since it is still profitable however knowing what I know now I recommend smaller markets rather then the major metros for optimization since ultimately agents will make more money dominating a smaller manageable market then trying to dominate a large major metro.

There is also the subject of the Long Tail of Search. Given that more sales are generated from longer tails (or more targeted search phrases) the leads generated for Bellingham WA Real Estate will frankly just convert at a higher rate. That means less wasted time following up with leads from a large metro (which in many cases means they don't know the market very well) to following up with leads which are more targeted (which means they do know what they are looking for) and as a result closing ratios will go up significantly.

The one trade off is that in a major metro sometimes the price point can be higher then in the smaller markets, but then there are small boutique markets where the median price range is actually higher then the major metro.

So the perspective is this. If you are in a smaller market it is possible if not likely that you can make more money dominating that market then trying to dominate a larger metro based market with the right online SEO strategies. There is usually less competition (easier to get to #1) and it's easier to manage the business that you generate.

If you are in a major metro instead of trying to dominate the major metro figure out a sub market or sub city that you can easily manage and grow your business from there. Eventually you can grow your team into the larger metro, however for efficiency and profitability start with the smaller city and grow up... Crawl, Walk and then Run

Labels: Business Development, SEO Strategies

How did your visitors find your website?

Labels: Google, SEO Strategies, Website Design

At some point I'm sure I'll talk about PPC strategies however I wanted to contrast SEO vs PPC. PPC means Pay-per-click. All the main search engines provide some sort of Pay-per-click system. These result in text based content showing up on the search engines themselves and if you choose also as text based ads on other websites where the websites have decided to subscribe to the text ads as in the Google Adsense program.

First of all as a professional on the internet my personal opinion is that you should be doing both SEO and PPC. PPC works well especially with more obscure keyword combinations that you haven't optimized for on your site or for launching a site and making sure that you have leads coming in day one. It's easy to do, however you will need to have reasonably deep pockets if you only do PPC since your lead flow will be determined by the amount of daily or monthly spend.

When launching a new market often we will run the PPC until the SEO catches up with the PPC at which time we will either reduce and in most cases eliminate the PPC all together. This makes the marginal cost of our next lead typically zero which is huge since we can then reinvest what we would have put into marketing back into service oriented or brand oriented activities or better yet profit :D since at the end of the day isn't that why we are building our online brands anyway to make a profit and someday retire to the Bahama's or some exotic place....

If you are aggressively growing your real estate practice in the short run you will likely spend a similar amount on both your PPC as your SEO campaigns. Let's say you invest $2500/month in your PPC campaign to generate 150 leads per month. That means your lead cost is $16.66/lead. A typical SEO campaign may generate say 20 leads first month, 50 leads second month, 100 leads the third month and 150 leads the fourth month leading up to say 300 leads a month after 8 months.

At the end of 8 months you cut back on your SEO optimization efforts to say $700/month to maintain the 300 leads per month after that we can compare the following.



Obviously in the short run PPC will provide more leads for the dollars invested but even before year end and somewhere around month four your SEO efforts should overtake your PPC efforts meaning that your marginal cost per lead should be lower then doing PPC. Also around month seven or eight your average cost for all leads generated should be better then PPC. Now the question is where do you want to invest your long term efforts, on SEO or PPC? I think the choice is clear... This is the economics that we have built our real estate company around and you should to...

Obviously if you quit doing PPC your lead generating will drop to zero at the end of one year. If you quit doing SEO at the end of one year you will get leads for months if not years after your initial efforts. Now compare that to more traditional methods of lead generation.

(Disclaimer... The above is for illustration purposes only and is based on a SWAG [Scientific Wild Ass Guess] however you get the picture... SEO done right should overtake PPC and give you significant competitive advantages over your competitors which means growth in marketshare or profit or both compared to other agents in your market)

Labels: Business Development, SEO Strategies

One of the first things I did when I first started to work on my own sites was to look at the sites that ranked at the top of the search engines for terms that I thought made the most sense. By using the Google Toolbar I was able to do a search for a term. Look at the result and click on the highlighter button on the toolbar and I would see how many times the search term showed up on the site that I was looking at. What I found is that the typical real estate site would have the city name and the term real estate strewn throughout the index page. In fact though keyword density is not an exact science I came to the conclusion that a term needed to show up at least 30 different times on a page in some combination of terms relating to the keywords that you were optimizing around.

Obviously Keyword Density is just one component in SEO, however its important to make sure that your content which should flow well for the reader should also have enough references to the keywords you want to show up for so that Google or any other search engine can be sure that they are sending readers to a site that is relevant to the search that they made. If you aren't sure about what keywords you should be optimizing around try using SEO Digger on your competitors websites and seeing what keywords they are optimized for as well as the projected traffic and ranking for those keywords. This will at least give you an idea of what keywords your competitors deem important and you might find some hidden gems in their keywords that you can use on your site as well.

So class, remember there will be a test on Keyword Density... It's a test that the search engines will do on your website to make sure they are sending their constituents to the right site. :D

Labels: SEO Strategies, Website Design

For the last couple of days I've been reviewing ActiveRain a bit and reading many of the SEO related blogs there. It seems that most of the SEO commentary is relating to blogging as the primary vehicle for generating traffic to a website. I did read a bit of a blog from Mary McKnight who definitely does a bit of blogging on ActiveRain as well as I'm sure other places as well and she had a post on Black Hat SEO. Anyway I thought I would post a bit on Black Hat vs. White Hat SEO.

First of all I wouldn't term it Black Hat vs. White Hat. I would look at it a bit more from an organic perspective of what works and what doesn't. Blogging aka Content is critical for any SEO strategy to be effective. If you don't deliver on the content relative to the ways people are finding your site Google and the other search engines will figure it out. The bottom line is make sure that your content matches the message you have given the Search Engines when you do your SEO work.

Backlinks is also a critical element however if your back links are from Casino sites or pharmacy sites and you are a real estate website you are confusing the search engines. Make sure that your back links back up your content. As a real estate professional you want links back from other real estate professionals. Also don't ignore local content providers as well.

Build up a newsletter following. By bringing people back to your site even if its from emailing out a newsletter this yields traffic and the Toolbars which Google and Yahoo provide give them valuable information relating to how popular your website is. If you can get people returning to your site time and time again you will be more relevant then your competition. I would recommend that any newsletter only tease the client while having the balance of the content on your own website.

Don't be a link farm. Now this relates to back links. However you don't want to hand out valuable real estate on your website for links to other sites that are unrelated. Who you link to reflects on you. As a real estate website linking out to a coffee website (no matter how good their coffee is) will reduce your relevancy. The only proviso is if it is a local coffee company which lists on their site references to the community both you and the coffee company are in and they are linking back to you.

Change up your content from time to time. Though not as critical as some of the other items above, changing up the content and the look and feel of your site will create a bit of buzz. Remember the GE study about making minor changes to the work environment. By making minor changes you can increase your stickiness and most likely your lead capture.

Things that can get you in trouble:

Hidden Content - Using content the same color as the background. You need to make sure that there is contrast between the background colors and the text color. I haven't seen a site get caught personally for this but you should be able to write content that you can display that will help you and not hurt you. One proviso is frames. Google suggests the use of the noframes tag and including content from your frames in that tag. You might get some heat from SEO people who call it hidden text, however I can tell you that it isn't penalized, however do make sure that the noframes text follows the content of your actual site.

Spamming Weblogs... Okay I've done this in the past and again didn't get in trouble for it. I've changed my way (basically I figured out how to do it better and faster ethically). However back about five years ago spamming weblogs was touted as a way to get a rapid amount of links. We had one site that we owned that got blacklisted by Yahoo for the practice. Obviously you don't want to get blacklisted by any search engine if you can help it... BTW: This is the only time we have been blacklisted for any practice and we've tried a lot of stuff over the years.

Labels: SEO Strategies, Website Design

I'm a little leary connecting directly from an SEO site to a real estate website however as an SEO company one should indicate the success they have achieved in the markets in which one competes. I've picked a couple of sites for this post however we also have the number 1 site for Scottsdale Real Estate, Phoenix AZ Real Estate, Nashville Real Estate and a number of smaller communities in different markets.

Below you will find a couple of screen shots of Google (today - June 15, 2008) of a couple of sites that we have optimized. Certainly feel free to visit the sites or try to search Google yourself for these sites with the same search terms to verify the results.


Obviously the above is for "Seattle Real Estate" in Google. We have had this rank in Seattle for almost 5 years straight. Every once in a while we get bumped down a notch or two in which case we just go on a bit of a campaign for a couple of weeks and we ultimately re-achieve our top spot again.


The above site is one of the sites we have had the longest. A couple of years back we noticed that Google was starting to allow multiple pages to be listed if your site was ranked #1 for a particular term (in this case: Bellingham Washington Real Estate). Ultimately by adding a number of well designed sub-pages and putting together the right campaign relating to those sub-pages we receive more then our fair share of traffic.

Again these sites are optimized around the "City Name (and sometimes state)" followed by "Real Estate" which ultimately yields the most traffic of any term... Most SEO companies wouldn't even think of competing for that term since they will suggest it is too competitive. We don't believe that to be the case for most markets around the U.S. And even if it is our system will definitely get you close to the top even in very competitive markets and with a little bit of long term strategy and persistence we should be able to help you achieve similar results in most any market.

Labels: SEO Strategies

For most real estate agents, compared to where they are now they would likely be satisfied with a few leads a week. In fact if worked properly they should be able to convert 3 - 5 new leads per week in to 2+ closing per month if worked properly. Of course that is also a question of how to work the leads properly, however that's not the subject of this post.

Ultimately if you are doing good SEO work on your site eventually you will be ranked for the keywords that you have optimized around and you should if your site is designed to capture the leads, generate more leads then you can handle. You'll have a couple of choices at that point. One refer leads out to other agents in the office, or build a team. Both of these are valid strategies however building a team will likely give you more control in the long term growth of your business so I would suggest you start there.

If you haven't read the book, "Millionaire Real Estate Agent" by Gary Keller this would be a good place to start on growing your real estate practice. Even though the three L's, Leads, Listings and Leverage are a bit different, as an online agent with a great web presence you can skip to a large extent the second L (Listings). Listings ultimately give you the vehicle to advertise in the offline traditional model, however with the right IDX system on your site you can get the benefits of listings without the headaches. Of course if you like listings then you can grow your real estate practice even faster.

Another book you may want to consider is, "The E-Myth Revisited", my Michael Gerber. This is another great book on building a franchisable business which ultimately should be the way you set-up your real estate practice.

Ultimately the reason to do SEO right is to generate ongoing business, but the reality if done right you will start to dominate your market online and the lead flow will be more then one agent can handle. I'm definitely a product of SEO done right and I'd like to help you do SEO right in your market as well. As always do feel free to send me an email direct @ Glenn@WorkingTheMagic.com or call me direct @ 360-220-1470.

Labels: Business Development, SEO Strategies

Last year in October I had the opportunity to attend a Hobbs Herder Mega-Managing Convention down in Irvine California. First off my hat is off to Hobbs Herder. They dominate the agent advertising and branding space with some of the highest quality materials custom designed for the agents that they work with. What was interesting sitting in the room with a number of owners of real estate firms is that virtually without exception the agents and the owners were hurting and they were hoping that this conference would give them the tools and direction to ultimately turn their businesses around.

Unfortunately I came away with the impression that the company was teaching dinosaurs how to be better dinosaurs. It's really the demographics of the real estate companies in general. Typically the offices are paid a cap up to a certain amount per agent who closes transactions with the company, however the company provides little if any advertising or business for the agents themselves so agents will go from company to company looking for the lowest cap that they can pay while getting the most support and services for the money that they pay. Ultimately it turns out that it is normally a war of personalities rather then agents getting real value. Everyone says their broker is the best and its almost a religion for agents comparing their wonderful brokerage vs someone else's wonderful brokerage and how good and special the broker of the office is and how supportive they are of their business.

Anyway what offices and companies like Hobbs Herder attempt to do is get agents to spend their money on marketing and advertising which promotes the agent while at the same time promoting the brokerage in general and at yet the same time sharing a percentage of the revenues generated by the agent with the brokerage they are advertising. Now I don't know if you are following all the money that is being shared in expenses from the agent to advertising and the brokerage, but rest assured there isn't much left over typically for the agent.

I have been approached by a number of companies over the past few years which have been touted by some Mega Agent as being the best lead generator since sliced bread. One that I tried for a number of month was "Custom House Publishing". They provide a 12 page branded newspaper with articles and the ability to customize most every page of the newspaper in favor of the agent and then mail the newspaper out to in our case I believe 12,000 people at around 60 cents per piece...

If you do the math that's $7200 every month or two that we were spending to get a newspaper out. Now you would think that at $7200/month that we would get some business out of it. At least enough to pay for the paper. Well think again... We may have tracked one transaction to the newspaper and unfortunately once we got tired of paying the $7200/month (which only took about 8 months) there was very little return after the fact of people who may have kept the paper around. Ultimately the bang for the buck was pretty bad.

When we opened up Portland Oregon, Qwest Dex Yellow pages made me a deal for a banner on the front cover of 618,000 phone books advertising our real estate business to the toon of $26,000 for the year down from $100,000. We bought the panel the day they were closing the book and paid for it over the next year. We got lots of phone calls from the ad but they were mainly from people who were looking for help with their phone service. We may have tracked about 15 leads during the course of the year that actually was interested in something real estate related.

We also did the Harmon Homes a bit, Real Estate Book and a few other venues mainly because agents wanted to see their pictures in the books and again very little return on investment. How did we pay for all of this advertising... Well from our Internet Real Estate business.

Bottom line is we do almost zero offline now and our spend on actual advertising online is pretty minimal as well, almost everything we do is SEO related to our websites.

In Bellingham this year we will do approximately $800,000 in GCI (Gross Commission Income) +/- . This is split on a 50/50 basis with the agents who actually write the contracts, however this year we will spend maybe 80 hours this next year on SEO. This is mainly because we have done the SEO in prior years. If you figure out just maintenance on that this next year at say $3000/month which is being generous that's $36,000 invested to generate $800,000 in GCI. Now I don't know what the economics of your business is but $36,000 to return $800,000 in my book isn't a bad investment. Of course we have some office overhead and some administration overhead, but generally speaking our overhead is very reasonable and controllable. In fact we could let everyone go in the company if we chose to and the websites would keep on churning out leads day after day for months before it was impacted by any significant decrease in web ranking. Now calculate the ROI on that... Well anyway its great return...

So when you are looking at ROI for SEO consider that if its done right its easy to maintain and it should create returns for you for a long time. If you discontinue your post card campaign which provides some return how quickly will it quit returning on the money invested? Pretty quickly...

Obviously in the short run don't quit what you are doing to generate business, however do invest in a solid SEO plan and expect that eventually you'll be able to cut back on the mailings, open houses, and other activities and ultimately the marginal cost of your next lead may very well be close to zero.

If you are a new real estate agent it's likely that you have been struggling to get your business of the ground. According to NAR if you have been in the business two years or less your median income is $10,500/year. I don't know about you but I didn't get into this business to earn $10,500/year in my first two years. Actually I did much better, but I did it against all the advice that my broker was handing out which was all about getting a listing, advertising it, doing the open houses, mailing Just Listed and Just Sold cards. In fact I did it without listings at all.

My first website http://www.birchbay.net/ was originally a community portal for a small vacation community in Birch Bay Washington. From there I added http://realestate.birchbay.net/ which looked a bit different then today while at the same time launching a number of additional websites over the next year including http://www.bellingham.net/ and http://realestate.bellingham.net/ which today provide the majority of the leads that we generate in the entire Whatcom County region where our BuyerTours Realty office is located. To make a long story short, I got into real estate kicking and screaming. It wasn't an industry that I was wanting to be in at the time however a REALTOR in our market decided I was going to get into real estate whether I liked it or not and basically wouldn't take no for an answer. He mentored me in the real estate business, but my terms was that I was only going to work with my internet prospects, not do open houses (he talked me in to wasting my time at two open houses), not wear my REALTOR pin (haven't worn it yet), not mail my friends and family that I was in real estate (if this was the audience I was going to make a living on, I knew I would starve), not mail just listed (I didn't list any properties my first two years anyway) or just sold cards (I really wasn't looking for listings), or for that matter run ads in magazines (I didn't have any listings so this was pretty easy). I would build my websites, position them and follow-up with the clients from there I would either sink or swim. I started this process at the end of April 2002 and between April 2002 and the end of the year I ended up landing 17 clients off my sites which closed before year end and I was ultimately rookie of the year without carrying a single listing.

My mentor, Hugh, had a phrase he would always preach around the office, "Without a listing I don't have a job." By the end of the first year I had modified that comment to be, "Without a website, I don't have a job."

2003 was a great year as well. I was at Prudential Kelstrup REALTORS where I started the business and in 2003 I s