REAL SEO Tip

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Caroline Wethington

Group Organizer

Dec 16, 2008 10:39:09 AM

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In this group, we'll be posting some common reasons that even good SEO may not bring you the business it should, right out of our clients' files. You are still the most important component to your online marketing strategy and if there is one thing we have learned about this, it's that our client base that follows our direction about lead capture, community pages, deleting outbound links and the rest can average 5-15% of their unique visitors converted to leads. It doesn't take all that much traffic to make the leads flow. So then, why doesn't SEO always work for people appearing on the first pages of the major search engines? Here's what our experience shows as some of the most common reasons.

REAL SEO TIP: Maybe your site is optimized for the wrong targets

This happens more often than you might think. It happens when (for one example) an agent covets the high end neighborhood where she may not be doing business and instructs her SEO company to optimize her site for that coveted territory and not for where she makes her living; in this example, let's say for "Beverly Hills Homes for Sale" when she really sells homes in Burbank. In due course, our covetous agent is all over the search engines on the first page for that search, but the phone doesn't ring. Perhaps this will help explain why that is: a) The agent's office is in Burbank; b) Her telephone area code is 818 and Beverly Hills is 310; c) She is a member of no Beverly Hills civic or professional associations or social clubs; 4) She has no clients in Beverly Hills.

We tell clients to optimize for where 85% of their business comes from geographically, not where they want it to come from, unless they are prepared to physically be in that target market with all the accoutrements necessary to belong in it. Why? Because people looking for a home in Beverly Hills want a Beverly Hills Expert, not some agent from Burbank trying to crash their market! Don't be greedy; stick to where you can properly be the neighborhood expert. While good SEO will bring you buyers from all over, proper SEO is aimed at where 85% of your business is, today!

There's another common variation on this theme; where you choose the wrong phrase to optimize your site for and the traffic just isn't there. An actual example is "Historical Homes for Sale Long Beach CA." Too narrowly targeted can be as bad as improperly targeted; stick to broader use phrases, such as "Luxury Homes" or "Waterfront Homes" and you'll have more success than with a niche too narrow.

Good luck!

Social Media Marketing Guru

Group Member

Jan 7, 2009 8:41:30 AM

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

when I look for a Hotel I know to go to Hotels.com Expedia, I do not use Google search for that. The trend and race for the top of mind awareness for a niche, can render traditional SEO useless to reach a certain portion of the market; for instance everyone on MySpace, Facebook,Youtube, Mybloglog, etc..

The good news is that the profile buildind, group participation, and blogging that can be dome to reach these markets, can also effectively create excellent search placment. Example:

If you type: Real Estate Social Media Website into Google, You will find me line one and two, our client RISMedia in the middle of the page, but Active Rain, the largest and original social media website for real estate, and Trulia, for all their size, are not even on the first page!

This illistrates the power of effective social media marketing: conventional SEO very soon will mean nothing, as the code becomes more and more standardised.

Since three companies are paying for every click for premium listings at the top of this search, I would rather be me than them!

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