SEO for Realtors 5 – More Competitive Spying – Finding Gems Through “View Source”

January 26th, 2010
Ever wondered what keywords your competitors consider to be important? It’s pretty easy to find out. All you need to do is have a look at the “source code” which is clearly visible on a majority of web sites.
Viewing source code is as simple as:
  • Selecting “View>View Page Source in Firefox.
  • Selecting “Developer>View Page Source” in the page menu in Google Chrome.
  • Selecting “Page>View Source” in Microsoft Internet Explorer
Upon doing the above, you’ll see a mishmash of code, but near the top you should see a block or separate pieces that look something like the following:
  • <title>Real Estate Including Residential and Commercial Real Estate | XXXX-XXXX International, Inc.</title>
  • <meta name=”Description” content=”Search homes for sale, find XXXX-XXXX agents or offices, and learn about real estate, mortgages and moving assistance.” />
  • <meta name=”Keywords” content=”properties, houses, mortgage, home sales, for sale, real estate agents, real estate, listings, search for homes, sell a house, buy a house, home buying tips, mortgage calculator, moving tips, realtor” />
What this means:
  • The <title> tag is the title that appears in the top bar of the browser for the page. This is one of the most important page elements from an SEO perspective and if your competitor is doing good SEO you’ll see their most important keyword for any particular page near the front of the title tag text. Note how the <title> tag changes on each page with different keywords (and if it doesn’t, the site owner doesn’t likely know anything about SEO).
  • The “meta name = Description” tag does not necessarily contain keywords but DOES contain the text your competitor wants searchers in Google to see when the page shows up in their results. BTW if a page doesn’t have a description tag you can feel pretty confident that the site hasn’t been very well optimized.
  • The “keywords” tag is an interesting one. Most SEO pros agree that it has very limted value for any competitive terms, but many companies still list their keywords their to benefit from the minor impact it will have. One area it may have a big impact is misspellings. If your company name is easy to misspell, definitely put it in the keywords tag as it will help Google find you and obviously the competition for misspellings is usually low (so having them in the tag can have a major impact). Also, your visitors never see the misspelling when it’s included only in the keywords tag.
So, now that you know how to check out the competition and pick your keywords, it’s time to use what you’ve learned in lessons 1 through 4 and finish prirotizint your keyword list. In our next lesson, we’ll discuss how to assign keywords to the spots they need to be on your site.

Questions? Comments? Just follow me on Twitter and send me a direct message or request my email. I’ll follow you back and post answers to any questions that come in either directly or here in this blog.

Posted in How To, Real Estate Marketing, SEO for Realtors | 1 Comment »

SEO for Realtors 4 – Competitive Research (Spying On Your Competition)

January 18th, 2010

If you used lessons 1 through 3 to gather a great keyword list, you’re now ready to do some competitive intelligence (alternately, if you just happen to be interested in your competition, the following is also a fun and insightful exercise to perform on your competitors’ sites).

Today we’ll look at Yahoo Site Explorer. This is a great tool that lets you enter any website and then generate a list of ALL the pages that link to that site.

Here’s what to do to find out how hard it will be to “win” in your market for your keywords:

  • Do searches in Google for your most important keywords.
  • Make a list of the competitors who come up in the Google search results for those keywords.
  • Go to https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com
  • One by one, enter the urls of the sites (see the “remax.com” example below – we used them rather than pick on a smaller local Realtor.
  • On the results page when you’ve entered your first (and subsequent) websites, select “Except from this domain” and, for simplicity’s sake, “Only this URL” (see screen shot below).

You now have a list of all the links into that site. This list is important because it tells you how strong your competition is in terms of inbound links and how hard it will be to beat them for position.

Personally, if a site has less than 100 links I assume it will be easy to beat, even with a small individual site. If there are between 100 and 500 it will be a little harder but still manageable. Between 500-1000 and we’re looking at 6 months + of effort. If there are over 1000, I’d defnitely pick some terms that don’t compete too heavily with them as it will take a lot of effort to beat them.

I usually pay the most attention to the sites listed in positions 7 through 10 for a specific keyword search as these are the ones you need to beat to get on the Google first page (and if you can’t make it onto the first page there’s not much point).

NOTE: you should also note for a specific competitor whether their inbound links are of high quality or not. For instance, 250 high quality inbound links from other legitimate realtors and industry partners would take a while to beat. 250 links that are all from shady-looking directories, on the other hand, would be easy to beat.

Another reason this list of inbound links to competitive sites is important is that it will also give you ideas for places to get links from for your site. We haven’t talked much yet about building inbound links, but we’ll definitely address that in future posts and lessons.

To export the list, simply click on the highlighted “TSV” in the “Export first 1000 results to TSV” line (see example below). This TSV (tab separated value) file is a format that you can then export into Excel – a very straightforward process although you may have to play with the import settings that come up in Excel.

Screenshots:

Yahoo Site Explorer Screen Shot

Yahoo Site Explorer 2

With this knowledge, you should now be in a position to make some smart decisions on finishing the prioritization of the keyword list you’ve created.Next post we’ll show you how to look through your competitors’ website source code and figure out:

  • if they are optimized for SEO and
  • what they are optimized for.

Questions? Comments? Just follow me on Twitter and send me a direct message or request my email. I’ll follow you back and post answers to any questions that come in either directly or here in this blog.

By the way, feedback so far has been that this info might be go a little deeper than many Realtors want to tackle on their own. Please let me know your thoughts as I may post these lessons less frequently and move  more towards quick tips for online marketing.

Cheers,
Rob

Posted in How To, Real Estate Marketing, SEO for Realtors | No Comments »

SEO for Realtors Part 3 – Picking Your Keywords

January 13th, 2010

Did you do your homework from Lesson 2? If so, you’ve got your list of locations and specialties.

In this lesson we’re going to teach you how to pick and prioritize keywords that you’re going to optimize for using SEO techniques on your site.

For this example, let’s assume you’re a San Diego realtor who specializes in selling homes in oceanfront neighbourhoods north of the city (this brings back happy memories for me of learning how to surf badly at Scripps Pier when I was working in SD).

With this in mind, let’s look at some broad terms we’re going to start with:

  • La Jolla
  • Torrey Pines
  • Del Mar
  • Solana Beach
  • Encinatas
  • San Diego
  • Waterfront
  • Oceanfront
  • Beachfront
  • Real Estate
  • Homes
  • Houses

At this point it’s time to take your keywords and organize them into logical keyphrases. Because we do this often, I usually break out Microsoft excel to organize them. However, in your case it’s not necessarily worth the time to learn the excel techniques, so just do this next step however you like – scribble on a notepad, use a word processor – whatever suits you.

Keep in mind you don’t need to necessarily get every single variable as we’re going to use Google Keyword tool in a minute and it will add some logical selections.

The complete list (which started with only 12 terms) that I came up with included over 60 distinct keywords/keyphrases, although for the purposes of this lesson I’ll leave out the “homes” and “houses” variations and just go with the “real estate” variations I came up with (when you do it you’d leave them all in the list):

  • La Jolla Waterfront Real Estate
  • Torrey Pines Waterfront Real Estate
  • Del Mar Waterfront Real Estate
  • Solana Beach Waterfront Real Estate
  • Cardiff by the Sea Waterfront Real Estate
  • Encinatas Waterfront Real Estate
  • San Diego Waterfront Real Estate
  • La Jolla Real Estate
  • Torrey Pines Real Estate
  • Del Mar Real Estate
  • Solana Beach Real Estate
  • Cardiff by the Sea Real Estate
  • Encinatas Real Estate
  • San Diego Real Estate
  • La Jolla Beachfront Real Estate
  • Torrey Pines Beachfront Real Estate
  • Del Mar Beachfront Real Estate
  • Solana Beach Beachfront Real Estate
  • Encinatas Beachfront Real Estate
  • San Diego Beachfront Real Estate

This is where the fun starts. You will now take your list and go to https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Once the keyword tool is open:

  • Make sure United States is selected as your “country” and English as your “language.”
  • Select “descriptive words or phrases.
  • Paste the keyword/keyphrase list you’ve created into the box where it says to put them in “one keyword or phrase per line.”
  • Fill in the “captcha” (the word it asks you to write in to make sure you’re not a machine).
  • Click “Get keyword ideas.”

On your screen you should now have  a set of results:

Google Keyword Tool Results

At this point, I usually click on “Global Monthly Search Volume” to display the total volume of searches on each keyword. Note that this volume data is notoriously inexact, but it is still a great source for when you’re comparing different terms (i.e. you might not get the exact volume for a keyword, but you can have confidence that its volume in relation to the other keywords will be pretty accurate.

Up top we see the keywords we originally entered and see that there are only about 7 that have any volume to speak of.  A little further below you can see “Additional keywords to be considered.” You’ll see hear way more keywords, but many of which are not relevant.

In optimizing your site for Search, you want to assign ONE keyword to each page for optimization. With this in mind, go to your web site and determine how many pages you have that can be reasonably optimized.

What you want to do now is:

  • Note how many pages your site has that have written content on them and then rank your Google keywords and suggested keywords  in priority order according to:
  • Which ones are most relevant and can be appropriately used in the written content on your site (and on a specific page on your site in particular).
  • Which ones have the most Global volume.
  • Which ones have the least competition (denoted by the colored bars in the Advertiser Competition column. The further the bar is filled in, the less the competition.

In looking at the results you’ll notice that “San Diego real estate” has an absolute ton of traffic, but also has a ton of competition (and is less relevant) – you’d probably do way better to focus on some of the keywords with less volume but less competition too.

You’ll also find some real gems down in the “Additional keywords to be considered.”

Note that the competition is actually based on Google advertising data, although it also generally signifies the rough level of competition for “natural” search results you’ll be getting through SEO.

Note also that you’ll want to prioritize more keywords than you think you’re going to use right away because:

  • You may add more pages or blog categories (we’ll cover blogging and SEO a little later).
  • You may find there’s too much competition after we do our next lesson.

Pretty simple huh?

This may seem a bit intimidating at first, but if you are serious about SEO as a real estate agent you definitely want to go through these steps or you’ll waste countless hours down the road.

In our next lesson we’ll look at some additional tools to gauge your competition before making final decisions. Also, don’t worry – we’ll do a deeper explanation about matching keywords to pages on your site in a future lesson.

Questions? Comments? Just follow me on Twitter and send me a direct message or request my email. I’ll follow you back and post answers to any questions that come in either directly or here in this blog.

I also welcome feedback on typos – my proofer is off in England right now drinking warm beer and may not be entirely reliable ;-)

Cheers,
Rob

Did you do your homework from Lesson 2? If so, you’ve got your list of locations and specialties.

For this example, let’s assume you’re a San Diego realtor who specializes in selling homes in oceanfront neighbourhoods north of the city (this brings back happy memories for me of learning how to surf badly at Scripps Pier when I was working in SD).

With this in mind, let’s look at some broad terms we’re going to start with:

La Jolla

Torrey Pines

Del Mar

Solana Beach

Encinatas

San Diego

Waterfront

Oceanfront

Beachfront

Real Estate

Homes

Houses

At this point it’s time to take your keywords and organize them into logical keyphrases. Because we do this often, I usually break out Microsoft excel to organize them. However, in your case it’s not necessarily worth the time to learn the excel techniques, so just do this next step however you like – scribble on a notepad, use a word processor – whatever suits you.

Keep in mind you don’t need to necessarily get every single variable as we’re going to use Google Keyword tool in a minute and it will add some logical selections.

The complete list (which started with only 12 terms) that I came up with included over distinct keywords/keyphrases), although for the purposes of this lesson I’ll leave out the “homes” and “houses” variations and just go with the “real estate” variations I came up with (when you do it you’d leave them all in the list):

La Jolla Waterfront Real Estate

Torrey Pines Waterfront Real Estate

Del Mar Waterfront Real Estate

Solana Beach Waterfront Real Estate

Cardiff by the Sea Waterfront Real Estate

Encinatas Waterfront Real Estate

San Diego Waterfront Real Estate

La Jolla Real Estate

Torrey Pines Real Estate

Del Mar Real Estate

Solana Beach Real Estate

Cardiff by the Sea Real Estate

Encinatas Real Estate

San Diego Real Estate

La Jolla Beachfront Real Estate

Torrey Pines Beachfront Real Estate

Del Mar Beachfront Real Estate

Solana Beach Beachfront Real Estate

Encinatas Beachfront Real Estate

San Diego Beachfront Real Estate

This is where the fun starts. You will now take your list and go to https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Once the keyword tool is open:

Make sure United States is selected as your “country” and English as your “language.”

Select “descriptive words or phrases.

Paste the keyword/keyphrase list you’ve created into the box where it says to put them in “one keyword or phrase per line.”

Fill in the “captcha” (the word it asks you to write in to make sure you’re not a machine).

Click “Get keyword ideas.”

On your screen you should now have a set of results.

At this point, I usually click on “Global Monthly Search Volume” to display the total volume of searches on each keyword. Note that this volume data is notoriously inexact, but it is still a great source for when you’re comparing different terms (i.e. you might not get the exact volume for a keyword, but you can have confidence that its volume in relation to the other keywords will be pretty accurate.

Up top we see the keywords we originally entered and see that there are only about 7 that have any volume to speak of. A little further below you can see “Additional keywords to be considered.” You’ll see hear way more keywords, but many of which are not relevant.

In optimizing your site for Search, you want to assign ONE keyword to each page for optimization. With this in mind, go to your web site and determine how many pages you have that can be reasonably optimized.

What you want to do now is:

Note how many pages your site has that have written content on them and then rank your Google keywords and suggested keywords in priority order according to:

Which ones are most relevant and can be appropriately used in the written content on your site (and on a specific page on your site in particular).

Which ones have the most Global volume.

Which ones have the least competition (denoted by the colored bars in the Advertiser Competition column. The further the bar is filled in, the less the competition.

In looking at the results you’ll notice that “San Diego real estate” has an absolute ton of traffic, but also has a ton of competition (and is less relevant) – you’d probably do way better to focus on some of the keywords with less volume but less competition too.

You’ll also find some real gems down in the “Additional keywords to be considered.”

Note that the competition is actually based on Google advertising data, although it also generally signifies the rough level of competition for “natural” search results you’ll be getting through SEO.

Note also that you’ll want to prioritize more keywords than you think you’re going to use right away because:

You may add more pages or blog categories (we’ll cover blogging and SEO a little later).

You may find there’s too much competition after we do our next lesson.

Pretty simple huh?

This may seem a bit intimidating at first, but if you are serious about SEO as a realtor you definitely want to go through these steps or you’ll waste countless hours down the road.

In our next lesson we’ll look at some additional tools to gauge your competition before making final decisions. Also, don’t worry – we’ll do a deeper explanation about matching keywords to pages on your site in a future lesson.

Questions? Just follow me on Twitter. I’ll follow you back and post answers to any questions that come in either directly or here in this blog.

Posted in How To, Lead Acquisition, SEO for Realtors | No Comments »

Adding an RSS Subscription Button to a WordPress Blog

January 12th, 2010

It’s been a while since I added an rss button to a blog. I’ve gotten to a point where our web developer now does it in a custom template in our sites, but since we don’t have a site yet I figured I wouldn’t bug him.

Surprisingly, I was able to manage it myself in a few simple steps after finding this great tutorial on the remarkablogger site.

He guides you through the process of getting a FeedBurner account (now owned by Google) and installing the plugin that let’s you add the orange rss graphic to WordPress. When visitors to your blog click on your orange rss logo (like the one you see at the top right of our blog home page) they go to a page like the following where they can add your feed to their google home page or subscribe through whatever reader they might use: http://feeds.feedburner.com/webleadprofessionals/iptw

Even if you don’t use WordPress as your blog platform, you can still sign up for a FeedBurner account and they provide instructions on getting set up on most other platforms.

Good luck! Hit me up on Twitter to let me know if you add a subscribe link to your blog.

Rob

Posted in Blogging, How To, Real Estate Marketing | No Comments »

SEO for Realtors – 2

January 12th, 2010

Real Estate is a competitive field BUT there are still fantastic opportunities to dominate your market online.  Doing so, however, is not the result of a massive one time effort, but rather an ongoing process of building your search engine rankings a little at a time. With that in mind, we’ll have a little homework for you in this lesson so you can begin on the right foot.

One of the biggest mistakes realtors make with SEO is to be too broad. For instance, if you’re in San Diego, it’s unlikely you’ll turn up a the top of the search results for searches on “San Diego Real Estate Agent” any time soon. However, if you target “La Jolla Real Estate Agent” or “San Diego Military Relocation Specialist” you’ll be able to get on the first page for Google’s results much, much faster.

With this in mind, take a moment to answer the following questions:

  1. What is the larger market I’m serving as a real estate agent?
  2. What are the to few smaller markets that I’m serving?
  3. What is my area of specialty (i.e. relocation, first time buyers, luxury homes, etc)?

With the above, be selective and list out no more than about 15-20 locations and areas of expertise in total. In our next lesson we’ll teach you how to determine which 5-10 of these will bring you the most benefit to optimize for.

Until next time,
Rob

Make sense? Questions? Follow me on Twitter and message me to let me know your thoughts. I ‘d love to hear from you.

Posted in Lead Acquisition, Real Estate Marketing, SEO for Realtors | No Comments »

SEO for Realtors – 1

January 12th, 2010

Welcome to the first lesson in a multi-part series that will teach you how to maximize your website and online presence to get the most traffic you can through Search Engine Optimization.

One quick detour, however, before we start in on SEO. Before you begin SEO, you first want to make sure your site will “convert” visitors to leads when they do come to your site.

With this in mind:

  1. Make sure your website shows a suitable level of professionalism. If a client came to your office and you had stacks of old fast food wrappers and disorganized files all over your desk, they’d think a lot less of you. Your web site can hurt you in the same way. It doesn’t have to be the flashiest web site in the world, but it does need to look reasonably professional.
  2. Use your site to guide the visitor to the next step in the engagement process. If you met someone in person you’d suggest how you’d like to follow up and the web should be no different. On your pages, have a call to action that explicitly asks them to do at least one of the following:
    • Call you.
      • Sign up for notifications or listings.
        • Fill out a form to contact you.
          • OR – whatever it is that is you want them to do next.
          • Sell the benefit of their next step. Explain how your notifications will give them, without obligation, the most current listings in their desired area. Tell them how you’ll send them an appropriate guide or information when they contact you. Let them know why it will make their life better when they take that next step!

          Make sense? Questions? Follow me on Twitter and message me to let me know your thoughts. I ‘d love to hear from you.

          Cheers,
          Rob

          Posted in Lead Acquisition, Real Estate Marketing, SEO for Realtors | No Comments »

          Winning on the Web – Top 5 Tips for Real Estate Agents Webinar

          January 8th, 2010

          Wondering where the best opportunities on the Web are? Attend this educational online seminar to find out the most practical tips for Realtors.

          We’re using a new online meeting service called MingleVerse to host this Webinar. To sign up simply RSVP at http://mingleverse.com/mingles/646/

          The best news? There’s still a lot of low-hanging fruit online for Realtors. It is definitely not too late to assert yourself as a leader in your field in your market.

          We’ll make this seminar a short and sweet 15 minutes and then hang around to answer questions and discuss online marketing for real estate agents.

          This educational seminar will be presented by Rob Cooper of Web Lead Professionals, who has spent a decade successfully marketing online throughout the US, Canada, Europe and Japan.

          Here’s some feedback from past seminars:

          “Robert took complex concepts and made them practical and accessible for the mixed group of professionals he had to reach that day. I would highly recommend Robert in his capacity as consultant or instructor based on my experience.” R. Quinn

          “Rob Cooper was a very good speaker. I got a lot of new good and easy ideas for continuing to develop my business presence on the Web.” M. Henigman

          “ Rob gave an awesome presentation. I picked up some great suggestions.” L.A. Fuglsang

          “Thanks to Rob for pulling out all the stops in getting the group excited and ready to take the next step in their marketing plans. I would attend another of Rob’s seminars in a heartbeat.”

          “The positive energy during the workshop sessions was amazing. Thanks for the many tips, Rob!”

          “I thought the seminar offered tremendous value and appreciated Rob’s excitement and knowledge in the subject.”

          “Rob is a very good leader -really helped me to get a fix in what I need to do -in a
          practical way”.

          “Great seminar, with lots of insightful comments”

          “Great Job! Hope to be able to attend more of these”

          Posted in Real Estate Marketing, Webinars | No Comments »

          Online Advertising For Real Estate Professionals

          January 8th, 2010

          Welcome to WebLeadPros, a collaboration of Rob Cooper and Alex Glassey. We’re currently creating THE industry-leading advertising program for Real Estate Agents.

          We launch in mid-February, but in the meanwhile we’re blogging about online marketing tips, and doing online marketing presentations.

          Rob and Alex

          Posted in Lead Acquisition, Real Estate Marketing, Web Lead Professionals | No Comments »