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