RealTown's RealTalk

Okay, so you finally got the courage to call up a reputable SEO specialist. You live in Denver, and you say "I'd like you to optimize my website, and I'd like to get to the top of Google using the keyword phrase 'Denver real estate'". Oops. You've already got five strikes against you (and you thought you could only get three).

1. If you are hiring an SEO specialist, why are YOU telling THEM what keyword phrases you want? Isn't that their profession? How do you know that "Denver real estate" is the best keyword phrase? In fact, it typically isn't.

2. Why are you going after Denver real estate, when there are currently 17,500,000 current websites that already have this in their websites? Do you really think that nomatter whom you hire you can beat out 17 million others who've been doing SEO long before you even thought of it? Yes this can (and does) happen, but it takes a while. More time than most agents want to wait. (Yes it can also be done with dirty black hat tricks, but let's keep it clean).

3. Do you really live in Denver? Sure, you tell others that live in Boston or Miami or San Diego that you live in Denver. But that's only because you're not sure they would know where Cherry Hills is (which is a suburb of Denver). Well news flash: your prospects moving to Cherry Hills most certainly know where it is and are searching for it much more than "Denver".

4. Did you know that many times using a slight variation of a competitive keyword phrase can actually be not only more popular, but much less competitive as well? These are the keyword phrases that a good SEO specialist can isolate for you.

5. Why focus on just one super competitive keyword phrase when that is NOT where the money is? That's right. Popular keyword phrases are not where the money is. A culmination of "minor keyword phrases" are the road to wealth. For example, when doing a seminar in San Diego, we looked up a suburb called Encinitas. You may have heard of it. However at the time, Encinitas real estate was NOT the most popular keyword phrase. Encinitas CA real estate was. Plus it had 3 times as many requests on Google, and 1/4 of the competition. Also, when you added up all the minor keyword phrases such as "Encinitas homes for sale", "Encinitas CA homes", "Encinitas condos", etc.,the sum of the minor keyword phrases was 3 times that of just "Encinitas real estate" alone.

I could go on and on, but you can see that getting started with good Search Engine Optimization requires a good base of the right keyword phrases. If you decide to hire someone to do this for you, please don't tell them what keyword phrases you want. Of course Denver real estate is what we work towards. But it is not the immediate goal. Getting found under dozens and sometimes hundreds of minor keyword phrases is the goal. Getting you found under Denver real estate is just icing on the cake.

Randy Eagar, CRS
President, WebsTarget SEO
www.WebsTarget.com
(800) 277-1316

Why must people use words like "deception" in the title of their articles?

More importantly, some peole don't know that SEO is like a suitcase being lifted. Think of it this way: your keyword phrases that you choose to go after are the handle. As they rise, everything in the suitcase rises with them; all your content and meta information. The result is that you get found on over 500 individual first page search results within about 4 months. You design what you want in the suitcase, we raise the handle. As such, we choose the handle, and it is always the most popular iteration of real estate related search for the city or town.

Additionally, why can't people differentiate between "some" and "all?" Our company knows Cherry Hill is a suburb of Denver. Our people live all over these United States in addition to those who staff our offices. We carefully research all iterations of what will help our client.

Folks, any would-be expert who falis to differentiate between 'some' companies and 'all' companies is not the most reasonable person in the world. Some might even think such a person couldn't differentiate between oats before they are offerred to the horse and oats after the horse eats them.

After all, all oats are the same, right? Just as all oats aren't the same, all companies who give you assistance in SEO aren't all the same, either. Please read RIS Media this week and learn about Judith Picker--a real SEO success.

Best regards

Mike Parker
mparker@theblackwatercg.com

Lou said: "The best internet location gets you the most walk ins. Main St is first page, the question is how do you get there. In a small town all the brokers are on the first page, in a place like Denver, half the first page is taken by Realtor.com, homes.com etc. and you will not push them out except by PPC."

Lou, I agree with most of what you said. In fact you make my point precisely. We would never optimize just on one location, but several . . . including the competitive location, because we know that we can get that person to the top of Google over Realtor.com, homes.com etc. Just take a look at "Denver real estate" (without the quotes) in Google.

Realtor.com (with all its resources) occupies only the number 6 position and Trulia.com is number 10. Homes.com is not on page 2 or page 3. So guess who has all those other top positions in the organic rankings pushing out Realtor.com? Those who use SEO. I know, because I know most of these sites. Personally, I would much rather be on the first 2 pages of the natural/organic rankings that the first page of the PPC. You have good success because it is a numbers game. I'm not against PPC, I just put my money where the odds are best. If there are 100 people looking at the first page, the Penn State study shows that I'll get 82 of those viewers click on my SEO page over the PPC page. The ideal is to have both.

Show me a study that shows that the average searcher is using PPC more than natural rankings and I'll do your website for free. So far all studies lean heavily in favor of people feeling much more trusting in the organic side of things.

Finally with regard to accumulating as many 1st page rankings as you can, read Chris Anderson's book on The Long Tail Theory.

Randy Eagar, CRS
WebsTarget SEO
www.WebsTarget.com
(800) 277-1316

Actually, the best way to do this is to have a perfectly optimized CMS (content management system) which builds perfectly optimized pages and sundicated a feed that originates from your website, makeing you the authority source for that topic. You can ranks for <city><state>real estate and other competitive searches: it is only a matter of time if you are regularly (at least once per week) posting topic-relevent real information containing the desired words in the titles, H! tags and keywords tags of the posts, and also in the body of the posts for relevence. this can all be automated so that the pinger is doing the distribution: so that one the thing is setup and syndicated properly, no outside promotion is necessary, the thing grows and ranks more and more from you just posting as we all are here. That is whay everyone, including Realtown, wants to give you a free blog and encourage you to use it: you are typing the content to bring them traffic. An example is my little blog. Less that two years old, it ranks above Active Rain and Realtown here: in spite of the difference is size and reach between me and them:

real estate social media Google Search

real estate social media marketing Google Search

realtor smo Google Search

realtor sem Google Search

real estate social media advertising Google Search

You can have your cake and eat it too, longtail, and broader searches; and, if I am in the market to list or buy property, the guy who has the rankings will get my business:

Reated Case Study and real life example:

Case Study: Two weeks old and on first page of Google already!

Lou Frey wrote in part: Logical research starts with the broad proposition
(Denver) and works to the finite answer (Aurora). It doesn't start with the
result. Informed research may start in the middle (Cherry Creek)
My premise is that people who use the internet to find an agent are
basically ignorant of the proposition and start at the broad context. If I
look at my own key word searches over the last 10 years, Santa Fe Real
Estate and Santa Fe NM real Estate are 90% of the hits. The rest are a waste
of time. If there are 17,000,000 web pages, then SEO will only make the SEO
people rich, not the realtor. Spending the money on PPC will have far better
results because you will be on page 1.

---

Lou, I would add to this very true analysis: In Rhode Island, one could have
a prospect looking for a property within 50 miles of their work location in
Providence (this has happened recently with one of my agents) -- 50 miles?
All of Rhode Island and a good chunk of Southeastern MA fit this radius.
What someone would not know who has never lived in RI is that such a commute
would soon become unbearable in RI... people soon get used to the fact that
the state is tiny, and so find that living even 10 miles from work is
"far"... so an SEO person doing work for a RI site would need to know this,
and optimize for the fact that people will start broad, but will look
narrowly rather quickly... this is especially true of course for people who
already live in the area. I know people who live near me in Newport RI that
have only left the island 'once' in their 77 year lives... and that was
during WWII when they were in the Navy... to get these folks to drive even a
few miles off island by crossing a bridge is often unthinkable.

Accommodating this is difficult at best, and requires multitudes of key
phrases... I am not sure how, but this seems to be something that should be
accounted for in SEO work... or at least in PPC...

Have a great day!

Best regards,

Paul Silver
Focus Professionals, Inc.

@Mike Parker said:

"More importantly, some people don't know that SEO is like a suitcase being lifted. Think of it this way: your keyword phrases that you choose to go after are the handle. As they rise, everything in the suitcase rises with them; all your content and meta information. The result is that you get found on over 500 individual first page search results within about 4 months. You design what you want in the suitcase, we raise the handle. As such, we choose the handle, and it is always the most popular iteration of real estate related search for the city or town."

I had a phone conversation with Mike a couple of months ago about this topic. It's true too.

We have been using them for almost two years for our (wide area) primary keywords and at the time I noticed that I was not targeting a few other important search phases, like duh, 'pocono realtor' (which is a different phrase than I refer to in another post about ppc).

We were about page 20 for that one because I somehow forgot to put in on the home page. After I fixed that in a few places we climbed to page one after a few weeks.

The other topic of the conversation was the 20 municipality pages I added years ago. I recently did a lot of grunt work and added map graphics and a list of subdivisions with a pointer that would show you where they are on the map.

Much to my surprise, we rank really high for the plain search for the municipalities (without "real estate") and also for a lot of the subdivision names where they are not dead common names.

I wasn't even trying for it, it just happened and I don't think it would have happened without the "handle" getting lifted.

Malcolm Waring, Realtor, e-PRO
Pocono Homes