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Do It Yourself – SEO for Real Estate Agents

Hi everyone, this article comes straight from our resident expert in online marketing, Aaron Jones. He’s good at what he does, so listen up and give it a shot; you won’t be sorry!

In this market, it helps to have an edge. Our ‘Internet Marketing for Real Estate Agents’ series is here to help you succeed in this fast-paced information driven business environment. It’s Easier than you Expect & more Important than you Realize.

search engine optimization for realtors

Search engine optimization (SEO): The process of improving the visibility of a web site in unpaid search results.

Hold on there, get your finger away from the ‘close’ button – don’t let the technical terms spook you – this is a very valuable tool and you will have a grasp on the basics if you give this article a chance.

Ready? Here we go.

First of all, if you have an online presence and want people to be able to find you, your website or your listings, SEO is a valuable tool for you. You do not need to have a website to implement this type of internet marketing, but it certainly helps.

Let’s define what I meant when I said “Online Presence“. If you have ever commented on a news article, set up a Facebook account or posted a listing online, you have an online presence. Most people consider their company or personal website to be their ‘online presence’, but that is only a part of it. Internet marketing and SEO is all about promoting yourself, your listings and your business online, making every online interaction and website as effective as it can be for driving search results and getting found.

So the first real step in search engine optimization is to know what your online presence looks like. How do you do that? Google Yourself. It may sound silly, but if a referral customer is looking for a way to contact you, they will probably be typing your name into a search engine. Look for content that casts you in a less than professional light; you may be surprised at what you find! There are ways to get content removed from search engines, but the best way to clean up your online reputation is to create and promote the content that you want customers to see.

Your personal brand is important, but business comes first. SEO is one of the keys to selling real estate online – this is the #1 way to get more eyes on your listings, and with a little patience, you can do it yourself. Now, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, but since Google has over 70% of the market share for online search, we will stop saying “search engine” and start saying “Google”. Don’t worry, most search engines work in a similar way, so if you work towards good scores in Google, you will get results in the rest as well.

I should also mention that, while I do Online Marketing for a living, there are a lot of people out there who will charge an arm and a leg for what I’m about to explain to you, so be very careful if you decide to hire someone to do this for you, you might get taken for a ride.

Without further ado, here is part one on how to use SEO to build your business online. Stay tuned for part 2 next week.

The Three Ways that Google Ranks your Online Presence

1) The Content

This is the first and perhaps most valuable piece of the puzzle. Google can only read text that you can copy and paste, so if you upload a picture of your amazing listing flier, you shouldn’t be surprised if no-one can find it; Google needs the text to correctly categorize and rank it. There are ways to do SEO for images, but it is always better if there is text accompanying or explaining the image. The best thing about this is that since your website is already mostly text, you are halfway there, the next step is optimizing that text.

Google categorizes and ranks your content based on what words you use and how often you use them. If you were using Google several years ago, you may have run into websites that were just huge blocks of nonsensical text. People used to use this technique, called “keyword stuffing” to promote their website on Google. Now it will just get you banned from search results.

Think along these terms. If you were a customer, what would you search for to find this piece of content (house, agent website, blog, etc)? What specific words would you use? If you use those words in your website or online listing, you are helping your customers to find you, and that is great news for everyone! Well, except for your competition.

2) The Context

Context is very important for SEO and Google is really starting to use context to drive search results. For example, if you search for VA Loan or VA Mortgage, your results will be targeted towards Veterans, but if you search for VA Housing or VA Property, your results will be about Real Estate in Virginia – computers are getting smarter, so you need to make sure that your content has the right context.

How do you give context to your content? Part of it is the website that the content is hosted on. A post on Activerain.com or Trulia.com will have the natural context of real estate information, while a article from the Wall Street Journal will automatically score higher on financial topics. If you are putting the information on your website, Google gets that context from your websites “Meta Data”. Long story short, Meta Data is information that is in the code of your website (or isn’t, but should be, depending on who designed it) and it tells search engines what the website is about. If you are brave, look at the source code for your website (usually can be found by right-clicking on your web page) – otherwise simply use this tool to discover what your meta data says about your website. If you want to change your meta data, you have to edit your website – I would ask whoever set it up in the first place to do that for you, or Google it if you are feeling brave.

Quick primer on meta data – there are MANY types of meta data, the three most important for SEO are Keywords, Description and Title.  Keywords should be words that are relevant to your content, separated by a comma.  Description is a short (160 characters or less) chunk of text that describes your content.  Title is the “name” of your page, and should not exceed 60 Characters,

The last way that Google gets context for your information is through outbound and inbound links. If both Activerain and the Wall Street Journal link their readers to your post about the financial aspects of real estate, you will get an added benefit for both Financial Topics and Real Estate Topics, because known experts have linked towards you. If you are linking out to them, it gives added context to what your material is about.

3) Competition

Online marketing has been a big thing for several years now, so your competitors might have beat you to the punch. Don’t get discouraged , just because you are starting behind is no reason to not start – you can and will catch up, but it will take a bit of time. If you are just starting with online marketing, you are not going to stand a chance against Amazon, Ebay, Zillow or other internet powerhouses, so I would encourage you to start small.

Here are the questions you should ask yourself – what piece of the market do I own? What clients do I really connect with? What are specific words used for my area (town, county, city, nicknames).

People tend to “search” like they talk, so remember that you have to put yourself in the customers shoes. A person coming into town to find a house to move into will not necessarily use the same words or phrases as a local. They may use zip codes, landmarks or other non-standard language to try to find what they are looking for. Once you know who your audience is, you can start talking like them. If you have multiple audiences that use different language, it is better to have multiple pages or articles that target each audience rather than trying to talk like 3 groups at once.

In the second part of this article we will give you some examples of how SEO works with social networking and blogging. We will also show you how to track your progress for the best results!

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Follow us on twitter for current news, advice and market status updates.

Have a question or something to add? Leave a comment or send us an email

Geoff Boyd – PrimeLending – Clackamas, OR

2010
09/01
CATEGORY
Realtor
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The Good, The Bad and The Ugly – Your Market Update for July 1st, 2010

Market News for Mortgage Topics

Here are some great links to get you started.

Housing Market Data for Portland, OR

Barry Riholtz (The Big Picture) Interviewed about the Housing Market

House and Senate Pass Unemployment / Homebuyer Tax Credit Extension

Pending Home Sales drop 30% month-over-month

This is about as good (bad?) as it gets, folks.

Rates are back to all-time lows today. The recent dip in stocks has helped drive Mortgage Bond buying, even at rates that would have been laughed at 5 years ago. Don’t expect rates to move much further down, because we can already see diminishing returns setting in. If you have been waiting for the right time to buy and you are positioned to make that leap, now is the right time. The housing market is full of opportunity for buyers, many people are (almost) literally giving away their homes through short sales and even banks are looking at ways to get rid of their foreclosed-upon REO properties.

One of the classic indicators for mortgage rates are treasury bond prices. At these low levels, we see how shaky those ties are, as treasury bonds are still being pushed higher on international and domestic concerns, while mortgage rates seem to have bottomed out.

Holden Lewis over at Bankrate wrote today in his Blog that the Bankrate Rate Survey showed an all-new low for rates.  Check out that article (and some shameless promotion of his Twitter account) here.

Do you Feel Stimulated Yet?

We are finally getting to see the “real” state of housing, as reports roll in for purchases during May, the first data we’ve had in a while that was not colored by the new homebuyer tax credit – I’ll give you a hint, it’s not pretty.

When Bloomberg News surveyed 36 different economists, they predicted a month-over-month drop of 4% – 25% in pending home sales. If you read through the links above, you know that the actual drop in pending home sales was 30% – which shows that, even this far into the recession, the calculations that economists use are fairly worthless is predicting reality.

I’m seriously considering writing a book entitled “accurately predicting economic factors in a recession” – it would only be 1 page, and that page would say “keep calculating until you get a negative result, and then double that negative result”.

The long-term effects of the homebuyer tax credit are as-of-yet unknown, but we do know that it has not been a magic bullet for the housing market, and that it has been an excellent source of income for inmates.

Jobs Report Due Tomorrow – Do we even want to know?

Here are the basics. Earlier this week, ADP released their National Employment Report for June, which showed a gain of 13k, much less than the estimate of 61k or May’s 57k gain. Today we see that jobless claims are up to 472k, again worse than estimates and worse than the previous months number.

So, the best data we have shows that we lost about 250,000 jobs from the first phase of the census operation ending. The government will continue to employ a skeleton crew of census workers to complete wrap-up operations, but for most areas, the initial push (and most of the jobs) has ended. This means that to break even, we need to have created a quarter of a million jobs. Its not going to happen.

But, how much are we going to miss? The general consensus that I’ve seen (which is optimistic in my opinion) is only 100k-130k jobs lost. That means that 120k-150k jobs were created to “soak up” some of the census losses. Can we be pleasantly surprised tomorrow morning? Sure we can; its entirely possible that a bunch of phantom jobs will swoop in and boost the market. More likely, we will get a pretty negative report tomorrow and, moving into the weekend, we will hear a lot about double-dipping and economic uncertainty

But where do we go from there?

For the market, we are going into a 3-day weekend. This means a lot of time for sentiment and inertia to build up one way or another. If we go into this weekend after a week of bad news, its likely that we will move into Tuesday riding a wave of uncertainty and see some level of fallout from that.

So, until then, we will cross our fingers that jobs are going to come back and, with them, some sense of stability in the economy.

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Follow us on twitter for current news, advice and market status updates.

Have a question or something to add? Leave a comment or send us an email

Geoff Boyd – PrimeLending – Clackamas, OR

2010
07/01
CATEGORY
Finance / Rates
Housing Market
Mortgage
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