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

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

Update: WorkingTheMagic.com is out of the sandbox and now ranks in the top 10 for one of our most competitive search terms Real Estate SEO.

Labels: SEO Companies, SEO Strategies

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

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