After finishing a CRS course on driving customers to your Website (SEO) and a local course on marketing online (SEO) I realized how much about SEO I didn't know.
After building my blog and my Website, it's much better to build SEO in than to retro-fit/jerry-rig it into your Website after.
With over 75% of home buyers starting their search online, over 80% of home buyers using the Web extensively in their home search and over 70% of home buyers finding their home on the Internet: You are who Google says you are. Or you better be.
And your site traffic and Google Page Rank tell the most about who you are. Do you know what the Google Tool Bar is? Do you know it gives you the Page Rank of the Website you're on? Do you know your Website's Page Rank?
Keywords are Key. You should understand keywords, even before you tackle selecting a domain name. 80% of the words in the dictionary are now "every-word.com".
Several years ago we were all told to go out and register: JohnJones.com. Now we're told to start with a geographic location (remember, "location, location, location") and build from there to your niche.
At WebHomeUSA.com, we use the home's address to create the home's domain name. I thought we were optimized for the street address. But do people search for a home by its street address? Or do they just search on a home's address to find driving directions?
As I checked our Google rank for address searches, Trulia, which uses the street address in the domain for their home Web-pages, was optimized even more for the address. Trulia often appeared number 1 on the first page of Google Address Searches. To paraphrase Mel Brooks: "It's good to be Number 1". (By Hitwise statistics, Trulia's unique visitors grew by 3x to almost 1.7MM/month, from 12/06 to 12/07. The largest percent growth for any of the top Real Estate Websites.)
Right below Google's info about the home, including a map and directions, is the Trulia link to the site. Wow! But since the street address contains the Street Name, the Zip Code and the Town, Trulia is also optimized for these search terms as well. Lo and behold, when I Google searched these terms, Trulia was right up there as well.
Today the street address, the street, and the Zip Code Searches. Tomorrow the City/Town/Village Search World!
In a comment to a recent post about Trulia and Zillow, Rudy, Trulia's self-proclaimed Social Media Guru, said they do take SEO very seriously at Trulia. And so far they've been very happy with their results. Interestingly though, Trulia has found the fastest growing area is not from the Search Engines, but from direct and returning users.
For ad-sale-model Internet businesses, total traffic, total visitors, total page-views, total clicks and market share are king. Those are the numbers which really matter.
Online home-sale-model businesses are much more interested in unique visitors. You can only buy one house, no matter how many times you visit or how many pages you click on.
Does anyone still fear that a Media company, selling ads to advertisers, will become a Real Estate company, selling homes to Internet visitors?
Do we need to bar Google, Yahoo, MSN, Zillow and Trulia from Real Estate? Just as we bar Wells Fargo, Countrywide and Citi? Did banks kill stock brokers after they could sell stocks? Or life insurance salesmen when they could sell insurance?
Why be the next RE/MAX of Real Estate, when you can be the Google of Real Estate?
Happy Searching.
Posted by: Cliff Jacobson
Adapt Or Die!
WebHomeUSAblog: The Blog of Online Real Estate Marketing
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