How Important is An Effective SEO Strategy to Your Business

Over the past few weeks I've spent a lot of time visiting real estate offices and conducting audits on their internet marketing efforts. The point of the exercise is seeing how vulnerable they are to competitors or where the weakness's are in their on line strategy, and there are a lot of them.

One area that comes up more often than any other is SEO, search engine optimisation, and how an office or franchise group can generate a better page ranking within their local region when searching on Google or Yahoo. I'm asked this question more often than any other and I thought I would share some interesting research and information with you on this subject.

Lets look at the US market first and then come back to how real estate agents approach this field in Australia, PCMS Consulting a SEO company in the US, has released a comprehensive study on the role of SEO as a marketing tool, within the top 50 US real estate companies.

It may come as no surpise to find that most surveyed felt that an effective SEO strategy was important to their on line presence, yet could not convince the decision makers within the companies to allocate traditional marketing funds to promote their web sites with new generation SEO optimisation services.

According to the report, real estate companies are overwhelmingly neglecting SEO optimisation and thus missing out on a considerable opportunity to boost their profits and thrive in todays economic conditions.

Most searchers use keywords to conduct a search. The most used real estate keyword is "real estate", not a brand name. Therefore, real estate companies of all sizes can effectively participate on line. As a result, even the most established companies need to optimize their websites to maintain their market position.

Now lets look at the Australian result, in August last year,NSW based SEO company First Rate, released a report on the performance of real estate offices and franchise groups in the country and the results were almost identical to the US result. FirstRate found that, individual real estate web sites are failing to compete in the search engines with the large portals, they lacked decent natural search engine rankings,did not partake in paid search engine marketing for the most popular real estate search terms and do not have good link popularity or page rank scores. As a result their web site traffic is suffering.

When you analyse the search trends on Google you'll see the the popularity of each keyword search in each state including the spike when the last interest rate decrease was announced.

There are lot of factors that you need to consider in optimising your web site, and these should include link building, this is often overlooked by businesses, but is now a vital element in gaining higher search engine rankings. High quality links need to be formed, to benefit the most from linking, and just as important is the creation of "Deep Linking", links that point to sub pages within your web site, search engines are likely to rank these pages higher when they have high quality external links pointing to them. Creating good organic search results should be part of your strategy along with using paid SEO.

So how much of this can you control yourself? Write great content, a lot of SEO falls within writing great content and building authoritative backlinks to that content within your web site.
Sites that are image heavy and text light,don't have headings and subheadings or sitemaps that search engines can't crawl won't fair well.

If you write frequent relevant content that incorporates keywords and phrases that searchers are looking for, your site will be found. This is where blogging and social media can help in the creation of good keyword rich copy and the building of backlinks to that content.

The other point to remember is that 99% of your competition don't know what their doing.
There's lot to understand about keyword rich copy, backlink and reciprocal link building and web site optimisation, so if I can help demystify this for you please ask, just send me a comment on the blog or email me from here mikeandrewonlinecoach@bigpond.com

Is 2009 the Year of Video? - Research Says Yes

Here we are 19 days into 2009, and there are lots of interesting news & blog reports about the growing usage of the net and what tools are becoming popular with on line users.

I've been looking at various trends with technology this year and I've mentioned Twitter and other social media tools that real estate agents can get on board with to communicate and share information with consumers searching on the web. One of the tools I've been pushing for awhile is video, and readers of this blog will know, as I've mentioned so many times in the past, I'm a big fan. Not just of property video tours, but video as a tool to provide market updates, create and build an agents profile, share information with other like minded people, training etc and the list goes on.

I'm predicting that 2009 will be the year that more and more of the real estate groups will integrate video into their marketing mix and we'll start to see more video tours on properties, and once main stream marketers start to utilise this medium more aggressively, that will open the flood gates.

A recent survey conducted by Permission TV revealed that over 400 senior marketers from advertising agencies & the media in the US will significantly increase implementation of their on line video initiatives in 2009.

The Key Findings of the survey were:

More than two-thirds of respondents (67 percent) identified online videoas a primary focus of their 2009 digitalmarketing campaigns, versus socialmedia campaigns (41 percent), search (34 percent) and podcasts/webcasts (32 percent).

In Q2 of 2009, more than half (52 percent) of respondents expect to be implementing or extending an online videoproject, whereas currently less than one-third (32 percent) are doing so.

Nearly 60 percent of respondents consider interactive video experiences to be the next evolution for online video. Also, 62 percent believe that non-linear, interactive storytelling will become the most effective medium for marketers. o Links to other videos is the most widely needed interactive capabilities for respondents, followed by graphic overlays, user comments and user-defined contents paths.

Respondents expect their 2009 digitalmarketing efforts (33 percent) to be least affected by budget cuts, followed by traditionalmarketing (24 percent), tradeshows (21 percent) and guerillamarketing (14 percent).

A majority of respondents (63 percent) are most likely to invest in a branded content/video destination next year. o Viral video (39 percent) and interactive experiences (38 percent) follow as the second and third priority, while only 22 percent plan to invest in simple syndication.

When asked how online video will enhance customer engagement, a vast majority(71 percent) stated it would help build brand awareness.

Driving lead generation was the second largest objective (47 percent), followed by enhancing loyalty/retention programs (44 percent) and converting customers (41 percent).

Here's a graph with the findings:

















Some additional Findings:

More than two thirds (64 percent) of respondents reported that strengthening relationships with existing customers and/or prospects is the primary goal of online video initiatives.
When focusing on respondents from the traditional and digital/interactive advertising agencies, more than 90 percent are overwhelmingly confidentin their ability to recommend online video initiatives to clients.

Digital/interactive agencies expressed more confidence in recommending online video to clients compared to traditional agencies; however, traditionalagencies claim more responsibility for driving online video initiatives than digital/interactive agencies.


Video in 2009, should be a high priority along with using social media in your marketing mix, but it won't be good enough to start a blog and then not target it correctly or post one piece of content and expect it to generate good quality leads, or make a home made video of very dodgy quality and then expect that to be viewed by the masses. No, all that will happen is you'll end up on a blog like this one on what not to do.

Social media including any public communication tool like video, needs a comprehensive strategy attached to it, so that your agency or business can really capitalise on it's strengths.

Understand the target market you are aiming at, be aware of the way the consumer uses social media and play to it's strengths, be very aggressive in syndication of your social media communications or projects and make it part of your broader marketing initiatives.

Social media will not be for everyone and it does take time to work at it, if you are not sure about how to put this strategy together or are not aware of what social media you can use in your business, then contact me. I'll help you put together a comprehensive communication plan that encompasses all the tools on the web, to drive leads and open up new doors for you and your business.

Source: Permission TV Survey December 2008

US Airways Crash Appears on Social Media

Remember my post back in November about the impact of social media in the Mumbai terror attacks?, Social Media - Leads the Way on Mumbai Terror Social media again proves popular in the distribution of news and information to the general public.

This time the The Coast Guard and National Transportation Safety Board has posted a video of the US Airways Airbus flight the crashed landed into the Hudson River. The Board has used social media platforms for awhile now to provide a distribution link for the viewing of major incidents such as this one.

It should come as no surprise to anyone that social media, as a distribution medium has grown in popularity in the past couple of years, given its speed and ease of use and its ability to syndicate and distribute information via RSS feeds etc to great numbers of people.

It goes to show that if you are not using this medium as part of your distribution strategy, wether it be for your brand or product or information, that you should seriously consider integrating it into your communciation strategy for your business and On Line communication strategy. If you are not sure on how to do this then contact me, and I’ll assist you in the set up of the strategy for your business.

Here’s the video of the plane crash, the aircraft comes into view approximately 2 mins into the video:

Tracking Your On Line Reputation & Social Mentions

Back in October I wrote how to set up Google alerts to monitor you and your brand on line,heres a reminder of that post, On Line Reputation Management - How To Set Up Google Alerts For Your Business , and looking at the growth of both consumer ratings sites and social media sites in Australia it seemed a good idea to revisit this.

Setting up Google alerts to monitor your brand will give you lots of valuable information on what and how your brand is being used on line. I have an alert set up for this blog and of course use lots of social media sites to help me promote the blog, so I like to know where and when I’m mentioned. I get about five mentions a week across the web on who uses my name and links to me, and thankfully to date, it has all been positive, but to me having a monitoring strategy in place is now so important to any business owner not just real estate. Well you can now add a new site to help you monitor your on line brand it’s called social mention and here’s the link for you to do some research. http://socialmention.com/

Social Mention is a search engine that scans user generated content such as blogs,bookmarking sites and comments. You can search on all social media sites by using keywords, phrases etc. I entered the search term for my blog, mike andrew’s real estate tips & technology and got a search rank of 35/100 and a result which indicates at least one mention every hour, I’ve been as high as a rank of 80/100 or 1 mention every 10 seconds, you can also set up RSS feeds for a particular search term and follow your mentions on line.

Below you’ll see the search result for mike andrew’s real estate tips & technology.
























Mike Andrew Real Estate Search Result

My recomendation is to set up your Google alerts and then add social mention, this will then be able to track your blog,bookmarking and comments etc on the web.
As always let me know if you need futher information on this.

Twitter.com - What's It All About

Just got back from Adelaide yesterday and over the course of the week, I’ve been chatting and presenting to lots of real estate principals and sales people and I talk about social media and other tools they can use to communicate and create cut through in a very cluttered market. Well they looked at me like I was a real live alien in their midst when I mentioned Twitter.

I’ve been using Twitter for awhile now and have posted about it a number of times including this post Hackers Strike at Twitter.com and Barrack Obama , I use it as an instant communication tool to let my followers know what I’m doing, reading, listening to etc as well as promoting my blog,podcasts and video updates. I’ve started to pick up a nice following, as well as following a number of like minded people and their travels and interests on the net.

I can’t get out of my head the image of me standing there and talking about Tweets and Twitter and trying to explain to them what the concept is, well I’m hoping it might just get a little easier from now on, given the growth that Twitter has gone through in 2008. Mashable has reported that Twitter.com has grown 752% in the last 12 months, that’s massive growth in the popularity of the service. Twitter had around 500,000 unique browers at the start of 2008 and finished the year in December with 4.43 Million Unique browsers.

So for those that don’t know what Twitter is, here’s a quick snapshot, and of course the best way to find out about the site is to sign up and follow me:

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users’ updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.

Updates are displayed on the user’s profile page and delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends (delivery to everyone being the default). Users can receive updates via the Twitter website, SMS, RSS, or email, or through applications such as Tweetie, Twinkle, Twitterfox, Twitteriffic, feedalizr, and Facebook. SMS available only in the US,Canada,India and the UK at this stage. So there you have it.

This still leaves Twitter behind the giants Facebook and Myspace, although interestingly enough , Neilson Online have reported that Facebook just finished the year ahead of it’s rival Myspace in the US, more on those stats in a later post.

So after this post, when I’m back in Adelaide next week, I’m hoping that I won’t come across as the Klaatu of real estate. If you’re interested in following me on Twitter here is the link: http://twitter.com/mikeandrewre

New Iphone Application Makes It Easy to Find Out How Lethal Your City or Suburb Is

Ever wondered when visiting a new city how safe you were, or when you’re looking for your dream home and find one in what looks like a great suburb, but you don’t know how safe that suburb really is? If this is you, then here’s an Iphone application that is just made for you।

Lethal is a new Iphone & Ipod touch application available through Itunes। The application draws on information in various data bases which has been compiled from government and academic sources. The app uses a lethal index system which tells the user how dangerous that area is. There’s a “Wildlife” index, a “Crime” index as well as “Disease” and “Disaster” indexs.

This application is ideal if you want to know what strange animals, or “beasties” might be lurking near you when you go out walking or if you want to check out how safe you are in your current suburb, this little beauty will give you the score। If you are travelling or sightseeing and start wondering how safe you are, this unit uses GPS to find you and then let you know how safe you are in your current location.

Unfortunately, this application will only work in the US at the moment, but if you are planning a trip to the states, this would be an absolute must have before you leave

Just imagine the impact this would have if launched in Australia on property searches or suburb choice।

The application is available at a small cost from Itunes and I’ve included a screen shot for you below: