Real Estate Marketing: Tools and Tips

Web Sites: Your Home Base Online

In the real estate business, you are your business. One of the most important things you must do is to promote yourself, your capabilities, your brand.

Over the course of your career you will spend many thousands of dollars on marketing yourself. What is the call to action on all of these marketing efforts? Your own web site is an essential part of your marketing, because it serves as a home-base for all of your efforts. ALL of your marketing efforts should promote you, and refer people to your web site so they can explore your services at their own pace.

Successful online marketers will acheive the following goals with their web site:

• Prominently brand yourself on every page -- you should be easy to remember and contact!
• Describe your experiences, skills, and specialties so visitors know why you are the right agent for their needs
• Convert visitors into clients by collecting leads
• Offer timely content to keep visitors coming back, and you in their minds
• Provide detailed information on your listings with extra photos, virtual tours, and other information

Our web site tool is designed to allow you to acheive all of these goals in a cost-effective manner.

Search Engine Marketing

Everyone wants to know how to get more leads online! One popular way to do this is with search engine marketing. So, how do you get your web site on search engines?

Before we tackle this question, we'll take a moment to explain how the search engine industry works.

Introduction To Search Engines

As we all know, people enter queries in search engines, and search engines show results. But how do they know what web sites exist, and how do they pick which results to show? All search engines continually surf the web using software called robots or crawlers, looking for new web pages to add to their "database". Each search engine can then search their database when you enter a query and offer results. However, every search engine uses a different methodology to determine which matches to show and in what order. For instance, if you search on Google and MSN and Yahoo for the same query, the results will be different!

The name for the results shown when you search on a search engine is natural search results. Additionally, many search engines also display sponsored results. These are results that would not normally be shown, but the web site owner has paid the search engine to show their web site at the top of the search results. Typically the search engine makes clear which results are natural and which are sponsored.

Getting "Results" From Natural Search

Ideally, you want your web pages to appear in the top 10 results for relevant searches. Typically only about 10 results can be seen without scrolling or going to the next page. Statistically, the vast majority of clicks are on the top 10 results.

Getting your site to show up in the top 10 natural search results is not an exact science. Typically, there are far more than 10 web pages about any given topic. For instance, a Google search for "Florida Real Estate" returns 17.8 MILLION results. Each search engine uses its own methodology to rank the results, and no one really knows exactly how these methodologies work. However, the search engine companies do explain some best practices to acheive higher results. These best practices typically work for all search engines. At a high level, these are the things that your website should do:

• Your web site should contain relevant content to your keywords, and the keywords should be used in the content and links.
• Your web site's meta tags should be tuned to your keywords.
• You should have other web sites link to your web site. The more popular the other web sites, the better.
• Your web site should be search-engine friendly.

If you're interested in more details, SearchEngines.com is an excellent site that explains in detail everything there is to know about search.

Keywords and Content

Because there are so many pages about each topic, it is very difficult to get top 10 results for generic keywords like "Florida Real Estate". However, by focusing your efforts on specialized keywords you will achieve much better results. Many of our customers get top 10 results for their keyphrases. Once you get down to a single building, subdivision, landmark (lake, park, etc.), the number gets much smaller. You can (and should!) build web pages that talk about these topics and target your meta keywords to this topic. Over time (it can take 8 weeks or more) your site will begin to appear on search results relevant to your business.

How should you choose these specialized keywords? Overture provides a great keyword suggestion tool. Enter in some of your specialites

The following is a list of ideas for web pages that you should add to your site to improve your search engine marketing efforts as well as provide useful information to your visitors:

• Your services: are you a buyer's agent? Listing agent? Explain your services.
• Are you an expert in relocations? Starter homes? Talk about it!
• What region is your business focused on? The more specific the better. List particular buildings, subdivisions, landmarks, school districts, etc.

Getting Others to Link to You

A large part of how high many search engines rank your site is based on how "popular" your web site is. The search engines determine your site's popularity by a number of means, but mostly it boils down to how many sites link to you, and how popular those sites are. Therefore, PR (public relations) efforts to get others to link to you is an important part of search engine strategy.

While sometimes you can get others to link to you unilaterally, for instance in an article about you, usually getting someone else to link to you will also involve linking back to them. It's only fair, right? This concept is called link exchange or reciprocal linking.

Talk with all of your local business partners, such as lenders, appraisers, etc. and ask if they'll exchange links with you. Also try to get mentions in local papers, community sites, or as sponsors of charitable organizations that you're involved with. Anyone that you are involved with that has a web site, get them to link to you! This is accomplished easily by adding a "Links" or "Resources" page on your web site where you keep a list of all of your link partners.

There are also many link exchange organizations out there. A few, listed below, are even focused on the real estate industry. Often you can find partners to link with through these organizations. Please note that this list is provided as a convenience only.

Search-Engine Friendliness

Our web site tool uses the latest technologies and techniques to ensure your web site is search-engine friendly, and provides opportunties for you to customize your meta tags. Our customers typically get a good ranking on search engines for their keywords, provided that the keywords are chosen wisely and relevant content is added to the site.

Natural Search Conclusion

Optimizing your site for search engines to get good natural search results is an important part of any search engine marketing plan and will provide you a continuous stream of traffic without further investment.

Becoming an expert in search engine marketing takes time and expertise. For a reasonable fee, we can work with you to develop a comprehensive search engine strategy and optimize your site. Please contact us if you are interested in having Full Exposure help you get search results.

Buy Your Way to the Top with Sponsored Search

Many people choose to augment their search engine marketing plans with sponsored search. Sponsored results offer companies a way to ensure that they are listed at the top of the results, even if their web site would not normally be shown at the top for those keywords. Typically you pay the search engines a certain price for each click on a sponsored result, rather than for showing the result. This is good for you because you only pay when someone clicks on your sponsored search result. For this reason, sponsored results are often called CPC (cost-per-click) advertising. If you want to purchase this kind of advertising, try Google AdWords or Overture. Prices for paid search range from as low as $0.05 per click to several dollars per click! Typically there are 3-10 sponsored search slots on the first page of search results, and the best slots go to the highest bidder on each keyword.

Web Site Statistics

A good web site tool will also show you how many visitors you are receiving from the search engines. Our web site tool details the number of visitors to your web site coming from search engines as well as the different search queries and keywords that led them there. This information is critical to evaluating the success of your search engine marketing efforts.