I'm a big believer of "raising the free line".  This is the idea of creating as much value loaded information as possible and then just giving it away for free.  Why?  The Internet has dramatically changed consumers expectation of a valuable product and we're ahead of the game; and maybe a little bit crazy. 

All cards on the table, my goal is to create enough trust to build strong working relationships with visitors who will ultimately see the value of the services we offer, or at least have a glowing recommendation to pass along to their professional friends about all the great information I'm just giving away.

With these thoughts in mind I am eager to give the first look at some of the free market reports we have started compiling for very specific online real estate markets.  Some of our competitors are charging $100-200 and more for the same information.  It's my goal to provide the most comprehensive and detailed competitive marketing report available to real estate professionals, period.

Take a look at the Chicago Illinois market report.

Labels: Business Development, SEO Strategies, SEO Tools, Working The Magic

A few days ago Google updated the "What's an SEO?" page of their Webmaster Help Center. They have done a good job to outline the benefits professional SEO companies provide while giving advice on how to spot and avoid unethical SEO companies.

Here are the six questions - and our answers - that Google recommends you ask a prospective SEO company:

1. Can you show me examples of your previous work and share some success stories?
We have several examples of our #1 search rankings for highly competitive search terms in our SEO Portfolio. Because of client confidentiality we don't display every success story but we are happy to provide more examples if you contact us.

2. Do you follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines?
Yes, we follow the technical and quality guidelines including:

• Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
• Don't use cloaking or sneaky redirects.
• Don't send automated queries to Google.
• Don't load pages with irrelevant keywords.
• Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
• Don't create pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other badware.
• Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.

3. Do you offer any online marketing services to complement your organic search business?
We provide competitive analysis, keyword research, SEO strategy updates, technical assistance, webinars, monthly analytic reports; a full range of SEO Services and Real Estate Coaching.

4. What kind of results do you expect to see, and in what timeframe?
With our system we will give most anyone in the real estate profession top rankings (#1-5) in the organic search listings for their most relevant and highly searched term. We constantly track the climb in rankings and generally achieve our goal results 4-12 months from implementation with the factors being:

• Age of the domain (Brand new websites take longer)
  
• Search term competition
  

5. What's your experience in my industry?
We ONLY position websites related to the Real Estate industry.

6. How long have you been in business?
We have positioned Real Estate websites in highly competitive markets across the county since early 2002. Here is a bit of our Real Estate Business History.

To get in touch with one of our SEO Professionals or to learn more please contact us.

Labels: Business Development, Google, SEO Companies, SEO Strategies

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

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

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

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