By Anita Koppens on December 27, 2010
Real estate agents have relied on their brokers and traditional marketing for too long and are in danger of losing ground to new agents that are paying attention to emerging technological advances in the industry. Many agents have ignored the trends or not understood how to engage their target market which has shifted to online search for all products including real estate. The Internet minded agent has a distinct advantage over those that hold on stubbornly to old marketing outlets such as print and magazine advertisements, or worse, do no marketing and expect leads to fall from the sky.
- New Beginnings
2011 is the year to rethink your marketing strategy and embrace the concept of search engine marketing, (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO). Since most homebuyers are now using the Internet to not only find homes, but make contact with a real estate agent to represent their interests, it’s critical to utilize website technology that captures this buyer when they first begin to look.
It can be overwhelming for agents to gauge what is most important when approaching SEO for real estate because there are truly hundreds of new products that are meant to engage the client once they’ve found the website, but do not provide any “teeth” to capture traffic from the search engines. IDX solutions that only feature sort and save features are still ultimately behind in keeping up with SEO because the MLS data held within most IDX’s cannot be indexed and used to drive search engine traffic to real estate agents’ personal websites.
Many real estate website providers have produced the ‘bling’ that keeps buyers on the site, but without ranking for keywords, the flash is literally lost on the web. Agents still have to drive their traffic via business cards or direct traffic from email signatures etc., versus capturing searches based upon property features. The fact is that most homebuyer’s search style is based upon very specific criteria and the search engines have no option (unless given one) to default to websites that have been online for a long time, regardless of the actual content. When a property’s features are search engine visible and the content (or listing agent remarks) is presented and optimized on indexable, individual pages… matches for specific searches can be made.
The real estate industry continues to suffer disproportionally compared to other industries, so, to not seek out and take advantage of top real estate technology could prove disastrous to many careers. It’s really a matter of pushing to be better than your competition. The Internet is currently proving to be the great equalizer because success on this medium is a matter of the most diligent and forward thinking individuals.
Posted in Real Estate Marketing, Real Estate Technology | Tagged IDX Solution, Real Estate Marketing, real estate technology, SEO for real estate
By Anita Koppens on August 26, 2010
Achieving Internet visibility in the real estate industry is pretty difficult because there is simply too much competition for the same keywords. An unexploited loophole to get around, under and sideways of this problem is to go after many long tail (non-competitive) keywords. Most of the top keywords are really perceived top keywords when in fact the lion’s share of traffic comes in from highly specific (long tail) searches. An additional advantage that long tail keyword optimization offers is that people searching on specific phrases are much more likely to convert to buyers.
Winning Real Estate Technologies Require a Strong Foundation
What does ancient Egyptian pyramid architecture have to do with winning search engine traffic? Obviously, the Egyptians builders understood the importance of a strong foundation. Only a strong, well-constructed foundation could stand the test of time and support the weight of the rest of the pyramid.
Website content and architecture needs to follow the same principles. The content that your real estate technology provides needs to be substantial and cover a broad spectrum of interrelated keywords and themes, all supporting the primary (and typically most competitive keywords for which you are trying to win traffic). Think of the most competitive keywords (e.g. Phoenix Real Estate) as the topmost blocks on a pyramid and related, more detailed keywords (Phoenix 4 bedroom, gated real estate) as the foundation.
No one would ever try to build a structure from the top down, but most website owners try to do just that. The website typically focuses on (or is optimized for) just a few top keywords and the owner of the site must try to win by backlinking (blogging, social media, and reciprocal links). But this is extremely difficult to do since so many other website owners are doing the exact same thing.
The way to win most of search engine traffic is to focus on many keywords, both competitive and non-competitive (otherwise known as long tail keywords). In real estate, the easiest way to accomplish this is to use a tool that every real estate agent is already familiar with which is their MLS. The MLS is really a database full of keywords that can draw search engine traffic if used to its utmost potential.
When the listings in the MLS database are stripped down to individual features of a property, there are many ways that the property can be categorized. For example, a home may have 4 bedrooms and a pool, it may be within a gated community and it may provide views of a mountain or a lake. All of these features can and should meet the search requirements of a homebuyer.
When the listing is broken down to represent the individual features and keywords are created and placed on search engine optimized pages, many building blocks are created for search engine visibility. MLS listings (not just yours, but all of them within your market) become the structural foundation and you get to use a resource that you’re already paying for in a completely different and powerful manner.
Posted in Real Estate Technology
By Anita Koppens on July 9, 2010
Start Small, Grow Big
I just saw the new welcome video added to the Dynamic Page Solutions members-only page and it has inspired me to share my experience creating links to my DPS websites. had been blogging for over two years before my DPS sites were up, so I already knew how to create original content (you can judge whether my blog content is good or bad by visiting www.NWABQ.com, and by the way, don’t let the fear of not being a great writer stop you, it doesn’t matter as long as you understand what your keywords are and what your anchor text should be) and how to add links to what I wrote. However, I wasn’t getting any results from my blogging efforts.
Then I met Anita K. through her blog posts on ActiveRain.com, and after a few months of reading what she had written, I decided to give Dynamic Page Solutions websites a try.
Immediately Anita encouraged me to use my blogging efforts to help boost traffic to my DPS websites. Since I was already an experienced blogger I thought this was an awesome idea. I have several Albuquerque websites through DPS, but when I decided to put my blog writing and link creating skills to better use I decided to pick one primary website that I was going to point my links at. This way I could look back after some time and decide if the time I had dedicated to creating original content was worth it or not. I choose to focus on www.SearchAlbuquerqueHouses.com simply because I liked the domain name the best and it was the easiest to remember.
After 6 months or so of focused link building to this one site, I’d like to share my results.
As of today, SearchAlbuquerqueHouses.com leads my four Albuquerque DPS Sites in traffic by leaps and bounds. Over the last thirty days it has nearly four times the traffic (2,800 visits vs. 700) of the next leading website, AllAlbuquerqueRealEstate.com. The number of indexed pages is also considerably higher at 3,340 vs. 1,220 (I thought three thousand plus indexed pages was fantastic until I read Anita’s blog that said one customer had over 30,000 indexed pages on Google!).
I think the resulting increase in traffic speaks for itself.
But you might be wondering “has the increased traffic has resulted in any closed transactions?” I mean sure, watching web traffic increase and spending lots of time writing is fun and all, but “where’s the beef?” Well, the answer to the question is an emphatic “yes!” So far I’ve closed half a dozen transactions and I have another 5 leads from the websites under contract, plus numerous prospects.
Starting this month I will be focusing on another website to see if what I have learned over the last 6 months can be applied with even greater success to another site. So if you know of anyone interested in searching for Albuquerque NM homes for sale, let me know!
I can say with 100% confidence that creating links back to my website has been time consuming, but it has been time well spent.
Rich Cederberg
NM Buyer Specialists
Posted in Off Site Link Building, Real Estate Marketing | Tagged search engine optimization, SEO for real estate
By Anita Koppens on June 18, 2010
Including keywords within a domain name is important, but the actual keywords in a domain name are just a piece in the puzzle as far as ranking factors. For example, a site will not rank for “Phoenix real estate” simply because the domain is phoenixrealestate.com. The value of a domain name is in its age and the external links that point to the domain. The SEO value of external links have many factors as well like the authority of the external site from which the link originates and the diversity of sources from which you are getting your external links.
Ranking Factors
You will not rank for Phoenix real estate unless you put significant effort into offsite linking to your site. When a site is brand new, it will take time for the search engines to begin to trust that the site and its content can be considered as “dependable” enough to use as a possible match for its users. The main goal of any search engine is to provide the best and most relevant search results for anyone that is using the search engine to find products, answers and ideas. This is why it’s important to “show” the search engines that your content is valuable and it can be trusted. All of the onsite factors (Meta data, keyword usage and of course MLS content) are taken care of automatically through our technology, offsite factors are something that is in your control. The way to do this is to start blogging, writing articles, submitting your URL to authoritative directories, etc.
Here is a link to the results of an international survey from top SEO’ers on the most important ranking factors. One of the most important offsite factors was keyword focused anchor text from external links. This means that the hyperlinks created on offsite sources (like blogs, directories, article directories, social bookmarking, etc.) contain keywords that are relevant to the page they are pointing to on your DPS site. If you look at the title bar of any one of the topic pages of our real estate websites or MLS IDX solutions, you will see two key phrases to choose from to create keyword focused anchor text. You don’t have to stick only to these, you can change them around, but it is valuable to use some variation of the geo centric location (Phoenix), and the property feature, (say…gated if you have a gated topic page) and some synonym for real estate (“property” for example).
When you write your blog post or article or whatever else you’re doing, include one of these key phrases within the body of your copy and create a hyperlink pointed back to the particular page you are looking to rank for, be sure to use the address from that particular page. Hint: If you’re on the “luxury” topic page of your site, use one of the key phrases in the title bar and when you’re ready to include the URL, just double click in the address bar to copy the entire URL.
The more quality external links that are pointed to your DPS website, the more pages the search engines will index, some of our clients have more than 30,000 pages indexed with Google. ALL OF THESE PAGES ARE OPTIMIZED FOR DIFFERENT KEYWORDS! Now try accomplishing that with ANY of our competitor’s real estate technologies….you can’t.
Posted in Off Site Link Building, Real Estate Technology | Tagged IDX Solution, MLS listings, real estate technology, real estate website content, search engine, SEO for real estate
By Anita Koppens on June 11, 2010
Okay, so most of you are used to hearing us tell you about the power of long tail keywords and we’ve made believers of you…so why not continue to enhance the traffic potential of your website by adding your own custom content? It’s very valuable to add copy to your static pages which are the index page and your topic pages. The kind of content that you should think about adding is basically anything that you feel might be of interest to homebuyers in your area.
While everyone would like to think that a homebuyer that visits our site would like to read what we have to say about the community, that’s not really the case. In reality, your writing more for the search engines than people that visit your site because people that are using the Internet to look for homes are doing just that….looking for homes, and will most likely click on a picture before they will ever read details. So with that in mind, when we say write about what would interest homebuyers, we’re really saying write about what would be semantically connected to real estate and include relevant content that pertains to the area that you are marketing your services as a Realtor.
Some examples of semantically connected keywords for real estate are properties, property, MLS listings, homes for sale, houses for sale, realty, etc. Relevant content that can help to capture homebuyer leads should include local points of interest, employers, and names of master planned communities, zip codes, parks, desirable schools and school districts and more. Including this kind of information on your web pages goes a tremendous way in capturing valuable traffic and reinforces the overall theme of your website which is of course real estate for sale.
Only including unique content on your real estate website is super important because the search engines simply do not value copies of the exact same content that appears on hundreds of other websites so keep that in mind if you think “content” means syndicated content whether you pay for use of the content or not. Unique content is also helpful in differentiating your web pages from any other web pages that might be make individual MLS listings visible. Resist the urge to copy work from other published web pages, it’s very easy for the original authors to see if someone has “borrowed” their content without permission.
Try to stay on topic if you’re writing for one of your topic pages. For example, if you’re writing for a luxury property topic page, use copy that would be relevant to that topic like including the names of prominent neighborhoods, golf courses and country clubs. If you have a topic page for lakefront homes, write about the lake the views and the activities. Don’t get overwhelmed if you’re really not a writer, we offer custom written copy from an SEO perspective; just contact one of our sales reps for the details.
Posted in Real Estate Marketing | Tagged long tail keywords, Real Estate Marketing, real estate website content, real estate websites, SEO for real estate
