Property Ad Guru » SEO

Google: We’re Not in Real Estate

Alice Allan — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 22:42:36 +0000

“We are no more in the real estate business than we are in the cafe or the museum business.” That’s the contention of Carter Maslan, Google’s director of product management, who attended the Inman News Real Estate Connect conference in San Francisco last week.

As inman.com’s Matt Carter reports, Maslan is keen to put the emphasis on Google as a search tool. “What we are doing in real estate is really [no different than] what we are doing in [other areas of] local search,” Maslan is quoted as saying.

Google’s emphasis may be on search rather than real estate, but that hasn’t stopped people speculating on how the search giant could impact on established real estate websites. As we’ve just reported on propertyportalwatch.com, one financial analyst recently went so far as to downgrade their recommendation on the REA Group – owner of Australian market leading portal realestate.com.au – to a “sell” based on the potential impact of Google.

At the same time, much of the initial panic sparked by Google’s entry into real estate search seems to have been replaced with a “watch and wait” strategy. As our wrap-up from the Inman Connect conference shows, none of the property portal owners in attendance have seen any decrease in traffic due to Google Maps’ real estate search, but most are still aware that the company could eventually have a big impact on online real estate search.

But at least one industry commentator thinks that day is still a long way off. homethinking.com founder Niki Scevak recently wrote that “Google will never be successful in real estate until they recognise that maps are a poor cousin to other types of user interface designs for real estate.”

Clearly, there are plenty of views on how Google’s real estate search will change the industry, and we’d like to hear your take as well. How have you seen real estate listings on Google Maps change things in your own market?

Link Building Tips from Google

Alice Allan — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 23:11:08 +0000

A little while ago, we touched on the topic of link building and how legitimate links can improve your search engine rankings. Now, Google has published its own take on quality links.

In a recent blog post, Google search quality strategist Kaspar Szymanski outlined some of the “best practices for organic link building.” Szymanski’s advice is to:

- Get involved in your community: Offer advice and tools on blogs and forums to build your reputation as well as promote your website. For real estate professionals, this could mean commenting on communities like activerain.com or propertyowl.co.uk, or on the website of your local newspaper.

- Solve problems: Publishing tutorials, research results, or anything else that could help people in your local real estate industry is to be encouraged, as it will prompt people to link to your website as an authoritative source.

- Entertain people: Publishing material that’s simply humorous or curious can also bring in the links, but Szymanski emphasises that this type of content shouldn’t be your only marketing effort.

- Look to your competitors for tips: Find out what works for other publishers in your area, but be sure to adapt your strategy for your particular audience.

It’s clear that all these strategies require a long-term commitment to link building, but Szymanski argues that this strategy will pay off over time. “There are those who advocate for short-lived, often spammy methods, but these are not advisable if you care for your site’s reputation,” Szymanski concludes.

Google AdWords, SEO & Blogging: A UK Perspective – Part Two

Alice Allan — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 23:20:01 +0000

In part two of his article, Harwards sales and marketing director Bruce Fenton talks about how UK agents can use Google AdWords, SEO and blogs to their advantage.

“So now you have a great website (pat yourself on the back) and you want to show it off. The great news from YouGov is that your customers want to see it too. Just one more thing to do then: ensure it can be found!

1. Google AdWords. Most search traffic in the UK comes via Google, so this should be our preferred pay-per-click service. Google AdWords allows you to post a small three-line advert box at the side of natural search results.

The system is very flexible but requires a fairly good understanding to ensure best results. Essentially, you need to know which search terms are most likely to be used by real potential customers of your services. Do not make the mistake of trying to just get every person on the Internet to visit your site. Always keep in mind that clicks cost money and that a man looking to rent a bulldozer in Beijing is not of value to you.

The big plus side of AdWords is that it will bring new traffic to your website from day one. The negative side is that you will always have to pay for that traffic and the cost will most likely go up as your competitors bid for similar key phrases. (For more AdWords tips, click here.)

2. SEO. If you do not already know what this is, you’re probably not on the front page of Google’s search results. Search Engine Optimisation has become an eternal battle between companies all over the known universe.

When you search for a service, for example a letting agent, you probably go to Google and type in something like “Letting Agent in Exeter”. Google then retrieves what it considers to be the ten sites best matching that search, based on various criteria designed to ensure the sites displayed are genuine, trustworthy service providers able to directly assist you. That is a wonderful big thumbs up for those ten businesses and a problem for any agent not in that initial list.

SEO is the fringe science that allows agents to achieve this golden standard. The benefit of SEO is that once it is done it can drive significant free traffic to your site and generate an air of confidence in those visiting you which is absent from AdWords. The only consideration is that if you get a great new position it is wise to keep an eye on this and tweak your site in response to any negative movement in the future. Remember that your competitors all want to clamber over you to the top! (For more SEO tips, check out our guest series here.)

3. Blogging. I won’t insult anyone by telling them what a blog is as I think we all realise this is essentially a blog article. The obvious advantages of using a blog are that customers have a more engaging and personal experience prior to making initial contact as well as having an additional reason to return or recommend others to visit.

Someone who is not actively looking for your services may come just for your informative articles only to suddenly find they now do need to move house. Rest assured that as the agent they know best, you will be their first point of call.

Blogs also assist in SEO and can ensure your company is found in a much more diverse range of search terms than any home site ever will be. If your blog is particularly successful you can even offer clients a golden service package which includes a blog article specifically about the property they are placing with your company.

The main point to keep in mind is that a blog takes time and effort to be of any use to anyone and for your writing style to develop. It is easy to be enthusiastic for two or three posts and then abandon the whole thing as a waste of your time. It is not – it just takes a degree of commitment. Failing that, use one of the many external services that can run your blog for you by providing optimised relevant articles on a regular basis for a price.” (Check out our Top 10 Tips for Blogging here.)

Got a great online marketing strategy you’re keen to share? Get in touch with us at editor@propertyadguru.com.

Google AdWords, SEO & Blogging: A UK Perspective – Part One

Alice Allan — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 22:47:54 +0000

This week’s agent strategy comes from Bruce Fenton, sales and marketing director of UK real estate agency Harwards. In part one of his article, Bruce points to some differences in attitudes about real estate marketing in the US and UK, and gives UK agents a first step to consider.

“The residential property industry in the UK has seemingly resisted the movement towards e-business methodologies, unlike our brethren in the US.

The US real estate market (as they call it) has embraced the Internet as its ally, advisor and closest friend. It is certainly not unusual for a “Realtor” to be running a local property blog attached to a high-spec professional business web page. They will almost certainly be using pay-per-click marketing services and paying for continual website optimisation.

Sadly, the UK has largely failed to leap on board the speeding train that is the e-commerce revolution.

For a long time agents relied on being in a local newspaper’s property section, having lots of branded boards erected and being physically located in a good spot with a nice window display. Once upon a time, that was all perfectly adequate and just about all one could do without spending vast sums on television or radio advertising.

Things have changed a great deal since those days. You might not think so if you talk to some local agents.

We all know that the biggest change to the residential property market has been the introduction of property portal sites such as rightmove.co.uk and findaproperty.com. Though not cheap, these sites have ensured that any agent can achieve a relatively broad level of visibility. I would suggest, however, that portals offer a level playing field to start from rather than a final solution to marketing strategy. After all, your competitors are likely right there alongside you – what makes you perform better than them?

Last month a YouGov poll was carried out on behalf of Hamptons. They asked 2,255 people how they look for property. This found that although 61 percent did indeed use property portals, 59 percent looked on agents’ own sites.

This should either excite property agents or leave them deeply concerned. I have seen some very professional agent sites and others that verge on the comedic. Before even considering any of the strategies I’ll detail in part two, agents should ask someone they trust the opinion of to look at their website and contrast it against those of a few competitors.

Having a professional online profile is essential. Part of that is ensuring the potential client has a pleasant experience whilst visiting the company website. If your site fails the test, do not implement any of the strategies in part two until you have addressed any fundamental issues discovered.”

Tune in tomorrow for part two of Bruce’s article, where he outlines exactly how UK agents can use Google AdWords, SEO and blogs to their advantage.

Using Google Keywords for More Traffic

Alice Allan — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 22:59:01 +0000

Of all Google’s free tools, Google Keywords might be the most useful for real estate agents looking for more website traffic. Used correctly, it can turn what might have been a wasted blog post or website update into a page that brings in thousands of new visitors.

What Google Keywords does is show you how many people are looking for specific keywords and what the competition for those keywords is like. Using the tool is a simple process:

1. Open up Google Keywords and type in a word or phrase – “Michigan houses for sale,” for example.

2. A list of “keyword ideas” will now appear. These can be sorted by various criteria, but to start with click on “global monthly searches.” This ranks the keywords in order of most searched to least, showing how many people are looking for that term.

3. Scroll down the list until you find a keyword that has a relatively low “competition” score. This means there won’t be too many other website vying for people’s attention on the search results page.

4. Once you’ve settled on a keyword, you can click though to see which websites you’re up against and how these websites are using the keyword. The trick is to slot your next blog post or page into a gap that few people are covering.

“Michigan houses for sale” faces some stiff competition from the likes of realtor.com and zillow.com, but scrolling down the list, it’s clear that if we focused in on more local keywords – “Michigan Oakland County,” for example, we’d have a much better chance of getting noticed.

Looking for more Google-related tips? Start with our articles on AdWords and “finding the fold” on your website.

SEO for Real Estate: What to Avoid

Alice Allan — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 23:04:46 +0000

We’ve gone into detail on SEO for real estate agents here at propertyadguru.com, but the best thing about this topic is there’s always more to learn.

As well as knowing what you should being doing to optimise your website, it’s important to understand where you might be going wrong. That’s where Stephan Spencer’s recently published list on searchengineland.com comes in very handy.

Among these 29 SEO “must nots” in SEO, the ones we often see while browsing agent websites include:

- Home pages that are “splash” pages with little content

- The use of the same title tag on multiple pages

- The use of pop-ups

In his article, Spencer goes into detail about why website owners should avoid these and other common mistakes – a must-read for all agents looking to understand SEO.

Long Tail Changing the Landscape

Alice Allan — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 22:43:47 +0000

Yesterday we heard about the “long tail” of search and how agents can use this trend to make the most of their SEO and SEM efforts. Today, Modern Search creator Joe Hanna writes from an Australian perspective about how long tail search is changing the Internet for agents as well as property portals.

Recently, you may have noticed a change in the way Google looks and works. Basically, the deeper search options are on the left, which allows you to drill much further into search results. If you use the “everything” option, you will get all types of results within the main search results area, but you can also decide just to look at things like maps, blogs, or news.

These changes are interesting because they reflect a change in the way we are all using search engines. Of course, most people use search engines as the starting point for their online activity – even when navigating to a known business or website many people still use a phrase in a search engine to get there. So in some cases we are searching in less sophisticated ways by relying on Google and other search engines to navigate to known websites. But we are also becoming more sophisticated by using longer search terms to get more accurate results.

There’s been a dramatic increase in the use of three and four keyword phrases in search. In part, this is a reflection of the size and scale of the content now indexed by Google. A search today for “houses” would return plenty of useless results. However, a search for “two bedroom apartment in Bondi” should bring up much more accurate results.

These “long tail” searches are well understood by Google and they’ve responded in a range of ways – the recent changes to the search results page are a good example.

Google have also stated their vision of “working with the real estate industry.” The recent map integration with smaller portals and a number of larger real estate agencies points to a desire to provide direct access to property listings.

This is not without controversy. Both domain.com.au and realestate.com.au have opted out at this stage, yet they remain a significant source of revenue for Google as advertisers. The advertising budget of course is an aggregated spend from agents. Many within the real estate industry wonder how Google can afford to promote free services that drive traffic directly to real estate agents sites and listings when they are extracting so much money from key classified categories dominated by large portals.

If the long tail of search is here to stay, how will portals respond? Both realestate.com.au and domain.com.au have significant investment in SEO and paid search, and increasingly allocate more of their marketing dollars to online traffic building. Traditionally, portals had focused their SEO on generic terms such as “real estate for sale” (as they still do), and often click-throughs from search engines took the user to their homepage, where they were expected to engage with the site directly.

This approach is changing. The portals are finally realising the value of long tail SEO, and have started opening up their search results pages directly to the search engines, which means more specific searches like “real estate for sale Fitzroy” are starting to return links to the actual search results pages.

This is a slow process for search engines and a reactive one. Most of the innovation in this area comes from the smaller players in the market, with the larger portals responding after seeing their success. In part, this innovation from smaller players comes from necessity – they can’t compete with paid campaigns so they need an alternative SEO strategy.

Despite these changes, there’s still a tension for portals. Even though they are more indexed and open than in the past, portals still only open up certain searches and only provide results based on suburbs. They want users to search, land within the portal, and stay there.

So what does the future hold?

It’s not surprising that we’re starting to demand more from our searches within search engines and expect to be led to those results directly. Being sent to endless directories and being caught up in a search result “loop” is one of the most frustrating search engine experiences. The travel industry is a classic case – it often feels impossible to find an actual property page, as the competition amongst portals and directories is so aggressive.

An increase in specific long tail searches is also inevitable. Whereas in the past we needed to rely on tools within portals like saved searches and alerts based on more refined search terms, now we expect exact matches from Google searches.

New search engines like Modern Search provide users with direct access to long tail search results where the results returned match the exact offering – if you type in “3 bedroom apartment Fitzroy city views,” that’s what you will see. Over the next 12 months, users will increasingly adopt this method of searching. The landscape of search will keep shifting, and players that can adapt will reap the benefits and find ways to offer new value to users.

Disclosure: Modern Search was created under the direction of propertyadguru.com owner Classified Ad Ventures.

Chasing the Long Tail of Search

Chasing the Long Tail of Search

Alice Allan — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 23:06:37 +0000

There are plenty of tricky terms to understand in the world of online marketing, and the sub-categories of search engine marketing and search engine optimisation are no different. Take, for example, the truly strange-sounding idea of “the long tail of search.”

“Can searches even have a tail?” I hear you asking. The fact is they can, and that tail can be extremely useful when it comes to finding customers.

To explain, we turned to Joe Hanna of Modern Search – a new Australian search engine, currently focusing on property, that was created under the direction of propertyadguru.com owner Classified Ad Ventures.

“Long tail can be loosely defined as the use of three or more keywords when searching online,” Hanna says.

“For the real estate industry this is often searches for a particular property type within a particular suburb or region. ‘Houses for rent Potts Point,’ for example.”

Hanna says that as time goes on, users will become more comfortable with long tail search queries, making them even more specific – think “3 bedroom apartment for sale Fitzroy with city views.”

So why do agents need to think about these longer searches in terms of their SEO and SEM strategies? “For one thing, the competition for such specific searches are much lower than the more general terms, and as a result the cost is substantially lower,” Hanna explains.

“Secondly, agents can specifically target people searching for suburbs that they service, or particular property types. Whilst the number of people searching for these terms is much smaller than those searching for general terms, the conversions are often much higher.”

Do higher conversions and lower costs sound interesting to you? If so, stay tuned for more advice from Modern Search on how the long tail is changing things for real estate agents, property portals, and the Internet as a whole.

Agent Strategies: Blogging Plus SEO

Alice Allan — Mon, 31 May 2010 22:38:57 +0000

Welcome to another instalment in our new agent strategies series, where agents from around the globe share their tips for success in online marketing.

Today’s strategy comes from Andrea Swiedler, a realtor with Prudential Adams & Associates in New Milford, Connecticut. Read on to find out how she increased her traffic with a combination of blogging and SEO:

I believe success online is a combination of things, not just one thing. Blogging will keep my content fresh, while SEO has a very big place in both my blogging and my websites. Without using SEO even the blog would fail to make it on page one.

Before I came to ActiveRain and started blogging and learning about the right way to direct traffic to my blog and website, my stats were down – the only way you could find me was if you could spell my name! I went from stats like 192 unique visitors in March of 2008 (pre-blogging) to 692 for March in 2010.

I am sure this is a direct result of blogging and SEO combined. Although that may not seem like a large number, I am located in a town with a population of about 26,000 and a lagging market. The other towns I cover are much smaller – 3,500, 3,000, you get the picture. These towns have a fair amount of luxury second homes. A very tough market indeed. So all in all, I am very pleased with the results I am seeing and only expect it to increase as my skills with SEO and blogging increase.

To understand what is going on a bit better I have Google Alerts set up for a few of the keywords for my website. Google has started picking me up almost instantly when I write fresh content on a subject.

Again, blogs work, SEO works. I have had leads that came from the Internet – leads that closed sales. Those are the important ones!

Got a great online marketing strategy you’re keen to share? Get in touch with us at editor@propertyadguru.com. For more SEO tips, check out our guest series here.

Legitimate Links for Better Rankings

Alice Allan — Mon, 03 May 2010 23:04:02 +0000

If you’ve been running a website long enough, chances are you’ve had an email that reads something like this: “I just visited your website and think your content is excellent. I feel a link exchange between our websites would be mutually beneficial.”

It all sounds convincing at first, but on closer inspection you find the request is from a website that has no connection to real estate whatsoever. So why on earth are these people getting in touch? Chances are, they’re still convinced that link volume is the key to great search engine rankings.

In a way, they’re right. It’s generally agreed that the higher the number of legitimate links to your website, the higher it will rank in search engine results. But the key word these days is “legitimate”. As searchenginewatch.com pointed out back in 2002, search engines have evolved to recognise artificial link building strategies.

Today, good link building means you need to plan rather than spam. Some tried and tested strategies – recommended by SEO experts time and again – include:

1. Great content. In a perfect world, your website would be so interesting and informative that other people would have no choice but to link to it. In this case, all you’ve done is put the effort into making great content, which we’ve discussed in depth here.

2. Guest posts. Ok, so perhaps your website isn’t so perfect that you can simply sit back and let the links roll in. But another way to get relevant websites to link back to you is to offer to write guest posts. As long as what you’re offering is relevant and well written, this should be a win-win situation: less work for them, more links for you.

3. Ask, but do it with care. The link exchange request described above is a bad example of a reasonable strategy. So how do make it work? Rather than sending the same hopeful email to a hundred websites, start by doing your research and find those that at least have a section dedicated to links.

Next, place a link to that website on your links page (as long as it’s actually relevant to your readership). Once you’ve done that, contact the webmaster to let them know you’ve already linked to them, and explain exactly where you’d like your link to be placed. You can even go as far as providing them with the html, making their job as simple as cutting and pasting.

Needless to say, those three tips only scratch the surface of link building. If you’re keen to dive deeper into the topic, we suggest you start with searchengineland.com’s Link Week series, which offers plenty of wisdom and a bit of tough love to those in the link building business.

Link Building Tips from Google