You can succeed online without being a “techie!”

This post is an example of highlighting how being local is so important in SEO.

These two ladies have aimed at ONE simple target with their SEO, and so should you. Multiple markets defeat the ability of your SEO to work best for you. They target Amarillo TX Real Estate. They sell homes in Canyon and Bushlands TX, too, but they know that many buyers who end up buying in those towns don't really know about them when they start their home searching on line: they count on the searcher looking in the prominent city/town in the area; Amarillo.

SO should you. Instead of trying to gather every town in your marketplace in your SEO, gather the one where 80% of your business is currently from. Localism is everything in SEO, and it's everything in online marketing, too.

"Multiple markets defeat the ability of your SEO to work best for you."

Here I am going to disagree. If you have a template or custom web site where you or your webmaster can control the Title Tags and other SEO components on each primary page of your site, it is certainly possible to target each for a different key search phrase. The point to this is to get your site found and visited - whether the visitor finds you in the search results with a link that actually turns out to be to your Home page, your Buyer page or even your Contact page. You really don't care if visitors come in through your front door, side door, or even climb in through your kitchen window... as long as they get inside! You do have a navigation menu on each page, don't you? So it will be easy for the visitor to figure out how to get to the other key sections of your site once they have come in. The point is getting them in!

Think of it like fishing. All of the other agents in your area are down at one end of the lake, bashing their boats into each other, trying to cast their fishing lines out for just one type of fish. You can be down at the other end of the lake with 5, 6, 7, 8 or even more fishing lines out reeling in all sorts of fish.

While many agents will be stuck with only going after 1 type of audience because their template only allows 1 targeted phrase for the entire site, you can have the capablity of targeting multiple audiences. By using this technique, it is possible to achieve Top 30 or higher rankings organically for more than just 1 search term or phrase.

This is certainly how we do it at Summit Web Design where I have many of my clients ranking high for 2, 3 or even more search phrases even in major metropolitan real estate markets.

Well, difference is what makes the stew spicy, they say.

While parts of your point are quite valid, it is the execution of the concept that is sticky. For example, most search engines (and Google, in particluar) limit their title tag character length to a very moderate number of characters, and recommend even less. It is thought, for example, that the ideal title tag for Google should not exceed 120 character with spaces.

Thus, the reality is that one IS limited in their choice of targets. Nonetheless, we ROUTINELY have clients appearing on 250+ first page search results across the three major search engines. How? It's a combination of proper optimization and all things that entails, plus the synergy of the search engines after optimization is fully indexed and shoppers are finding one's site regularly.

The best example I can give to explain this synergy is this: Go to Google and enter "for Realtors" in the search bar. Blackwater comes up number one; NAR comes up number five. The search is 25,900,000 competition deep, yet there we are.

Our site is NOT optimized for that phrase, but over time, the engines find us there because so many people find us under longer phrases that contain that term.

And so it is with proper optimization: it grows to be more than simply one's initial targets. To use your fishing analogy, when you are hunting for Tuna and you cast your line into a school of them, you might also catch another kind of fish, but overall, it is far more likely that you will catch fish in the school than outside it.

Stick with small target areas, modify them with meta tags, use text based link ads and allow synergy to work. Also, being top 30 is no good: one must be top ten. Hardly anyone goes past page one. Similarly, just being found on two or three phrases is also no good: they should be your primary targets, but unless you are coming up on more than a hundred related real estate searches, your SEO isn't doing the job for you.

It takes time, effort and experience to deliver the best of SEO and I really believe that everyone should enlist professional help. The reason is simple: NAR says that 84% of residential real estate sales begin online. Seems to me that one must be found, first, to have a shot at them.

I couldn't agree more with what Mike said about keeping your Title Tags short and focused by doing some good keyword research to determine what to target. And it is very easy to keep them to about 120 characters.

But I disagree. Someone is not always so limited in a choice of targets to go after. Most real estate agents list and sell in more than just 1 city, town or county. For example, here in Northern Virginia, right outside Washington, DC - where most agents cover well over 800+ square miles of territory - there are the cities of Alexandria, Falls Church, Fairfax, Manassas and Manassas Park, the towns of Vienna, Herndon, Clifton and Leesburg, the counties of Arlington, Fairfax, Loudoun, Prince William and Stafford, along with local names like McLean, Reston, Centreville, Chantilly, Burke, Springfield, Kingstowne, Mount Vernon, Lorton, Woodbridge, Dale City, Gainesville, Sterling, Ashburn and I could go on and on. Look how many could be picked from to target?

Mike also said, "being in the Top 30 is no good: one must be in the Top 10". Certainly that is the goal to shoot for! But in many major metropolitan real estate markets, the Top 10 organic listings in Google are being dominated by the listing aggregate web sites - Trulia, Zillow, realestate.yahoo, Homegain and others - who have crowded the little guy right off of Page 1. In some instances, a searcher would be hard pressed to find more than 1 "real" agent's site in the Top 10! (And guess what? We real estate agents are helping those sites to crowd us out by many of our peers putting links to those sites on their web sites to give them greater back link popularity - also important in Google's eyes.)

Studies have been done with real "searchers". Women usually won't go past Page 1 of the search results, just like Mike was speaking to. Guys and geeks usually won't go beyond Page 3. If a searcher hasn't found what they are looking for in the first 30 listings, they will usually start over with either a new search or go over to a different search engine. So if you are #42, you might just as well be #295! You are not going to get very many searchers arriving at your site.

And even though the thread of this discussion is "succeeding online without being a 'techie'", I too agree with Mike - to really gain such success, it might be far better for a real estate agent or broker to enlist the aid of a SEO professional rather than 'trying this at home". Gee, isn't that what all of us tell the amateur For Sale By Owner? "To be successful, you need to hire me to successfully market your property." ;-) Great web marketing takes a pro too!

Glad to see you posting, Win.

Fact is, the most successful agents online are those who zero in as local as they can. "Localism" is as popular a trend as we've seen of late.and one thing should be obvious to any casual reader: a professional agent is not going to be a "techie" in most cases, not do they have to be. Your point about FSBO's is one we use constantly to make our point that SEO is a discipline, not a hobby, and if one really wants to succeed in SEO, one should think about hiring professional help.

Watch RIS media in early January for a great story about an IT architect and database manager smart enough to know that SEO is best done by professionals in that discipline, and what that knowledge has brought his wife and himself (other than 83% of their sales from their website!).

Mike Parker
mparker@theblackwatercg.co
A Real Town Approved Vendor

www.realtown/blackwatercg.com

Ok I will need to chime in here. Of course the title tag should be seven words. What is being ignored is the issue of the site growing, and having many different pages, which rank for many related term. A tiny, templated website can only rank for one or two searches, while a growing, dynamic site can rank for many, many searches. It also matters how many syndicated and/or subscribed to pages point back to the site with proper anchor text. This is why originating an RSS feed from your website which links back with the proper matching words and is widely syndicated is so important. Nobody talks about this because it is complicated and not easy to explain.

If you type internet advertising consultant into Google,. you find my little syndicated blog socialmediasystems.com - you will notice it has a home page which is all about a pitch, with links to the informational blog. We are also able to rank for social media website design, a very tall and competitive search. We also rank for social media marketing system, social media marketing company, social media marketing agency, social media website...and on and on: but here is the biggest point: our site is so powerful that we rank for whatever we write about:

See Google search pre owned bmw santa barbara: our blog is now so powerful it can rank any term, related or not!

Of course you can succeed online without being a techy! Mike parker himself was not one until he was brought into Coracle, Inc. in sales management as CEO, now he is supposedly a consultant, and doing well at it because of his previous experience in sales.

I myself am self-taught, and have created a series of companies and millions of competitors (like Mike) with my formerly un-orthadox approach to Internet publishing.

The Internet empowers the individual, and, as the code becomes more and more standardised, it is the contribution that you make to the discussion that matters more than SEO. But you still need to format and distribute that contribution on the right way to be successful.

Israel Rothman, Click on Social Media Marketing Guru to view my profile.

If having over 1000 clients makes one "supposedly" a consultant, I am guilty as charged.

I take issue with anyone who says that a person acting on their own can obtain the results that a truly professional company whose niche is real estate (not used cars or any other unrelated product). can obtain.

Some people are tech-oriented and can do a lot to help themselves, without a doubt. That's why we make our booklets available (and since more than 3500 of them wre dowloaded last month, they are popular, to be sure!). However, I sincerely recommend that--for anyone with $185 a month in their budget--they consider professional help. It isn't about position on the search engines, only, it's about GETTING LEADS, and professionals can really hep you make that happen. You're not a FSBO and you would question the savvy of anyone choosing to sell their home FSBO.

Information Technology is just as complicated as being an agent. You shouldn't FSBO that, either.

Mike is correct. Anyone who thinks that they are better off trying to learn everything that the professionals who do this all day long must keep up with rather than to pay a small monthly fee and spend their time reaching out into their local community and networking with local businesses to sell Realt Estate, is not much of a Realtor.

The Realtors I know who are very succesful try everything, track the results, keep what works, dump the rest. Expensive but effective .

Israel Rothman, Click on Social Media Marketing Guru to view my profile.

Hi Mike!

We found this article and post, so we decided to chime in. We don't have a clue about being "techies", or what makes the technology work. Our original article was written last August, and it is the "gift that keeps on giving". It has been fun to visit with Realtors from all over the USA who want more information about what we are doing. If we knew what we were doing, we'd be dangerous!

We are not "top producers", because that is not our goal. But we are making a decent living, enjoying real estate and our grandkids (not necessarily in that order). The majority of our new clients are coming from our website. Most of the local agents that we talk to are amazed that so many of our transactions come from our website leads. We consider the money that we spend with Compass Internet Systems to be money "well spent". Whatever you are doing to get us there, keep it up!

HomeTown Girls - Debbie Moore and Karen Malone