Delta Media Group News:

Part I: Search engine optimization; Suffering a slow real estate business death? How to implement a turn-around

Part 1: Search engine optimization in Web sites

Monday, July 24, 2006

By Sean Cutright
Delta Media Group

A recent article on Inman Real Estate News walked through 11 signs your real estate business is slowly dying, and you, possibly, with it. Highlighted among these signs are the obvious: your work ethic, customer service, mastering and studying sales dialogue, keeping up with technological hardware and marketing yourself.
 
But underlying amongst the 11 are five signs that are indirectly out of your control. Among these: search engine optimization of your Web site, responding to leads as quick as possible and never letting one sit for more than a day, bringing good leads off your Web site and converting those to closed transactions, and publishing E-mail news letters to keep relationships with your clients.

Of course you can modify some of these on your own by simply adjusting your work ethic and commitment to your job. Take those five minutes spent on ebay when you first get in the office and instead use them to see how you can better communicate with your customers. Check out the market trends instead of the sports scores. Spend less time looking at your personal E-mail and more time making sure it’s your business E-mail that’s drawing all the attention.

But sometimes no matter how much time you put into these things, your results just don’t seem to match your work ethic, which can often lead even further to you questioning why you got in this business to begin with, or if it’s what you want to retire from. Often, the first tendency is to blame oneself in this situation, or evaluate your own bad luck or if you were ever cut out for this business. These daggers though can often relate less to your direct work ethic than they do to the technology you’re working on.

Example: You can attempt to improve your organic search engine optimization by constantly customizing your site and editing metatags, looking for the solution that works best. You can also throw money at the problem by paying for pay-per-click ads, though these often aren’t the best strategy either. They are not a sure problem solver, it’s easy to lose your search engine placement when your competitors outbid you, and even not-so-web-savvy customers can tell the difference between an advertised link on Google and a traditional one.

The easiest potential solution to the problem is make sure when purchasing a Web site that it is built to maximize search engine optimization from a design and programming standpoint. This assures from the start that you are running on a well-built system, which will only prosper further if you optimize metatags and pay per click on search engines. The easiest and most efficient way to assess whether a Web site is built to cater to search engine optimization is by performing a “site” search on Google. To do this, go to Google.com and in the search bar enter “site:url.com” for whichever URL you are researching (do not leave any blank spaces in this search and do not use a www. in front of the URL.). The number of results you receive represent the amount of indexes Google has hit on your system. The higher the amount, the better your chances of good search engine optimization. Swap in different URLs to compare the search engine optimization of competing Web sites.

Search engine optimization is a great way to get your Web site found online, but now that your customers are coming across your site, you need to make sure you have good enough technology to capture them as leads and turn those into closed transactions, as well as keep a customer database to best maintain customer relationships. See next week’s article to learn more about this.

Sean Cutright is a professional newspaper journalist and graduated from Kent State University’s esteemed School of Journalism and Mass Communication. He currently serves as the Public Relations director and the Midwest account representative for Delta Media Group, the nation’s leading real estate Web site and Lead Management systems provider.