Online Real Estate Technology

Consumers are more likely to read and act upon online advertising than they were a year ago, according to an Opinion Research Corporation consumer preference survey sponsored by Adfusion, a division of ARAnet.

Online Ads Score Better in 2010
Every type of online advertising scored better with consumers in 2010 than a year ago, according to the survey. Consumers say articles that include brand information is the type of online advertising they’re most likely to read and act upon, compared to banner ads, pop-up ads, email offers or sponsored links.

Article-based advertising was preferred by 53% of respondents who said they are “very likely” or “somewhat likely” to read and act upon the material, compared to 51% a year ago. Coveted demographic groups are even more likely to express a preference for articles. According to the survey, 66% of people 25-34, and 60% of those making at least $75,000 per year, say they are “very likely” or “somewhat likely” to read and act upon article-based advertising. Pop-up ads were least likely to be read or acted upon.

Respondents also said they were “very likely” or “somewhat likely” to read and respond to:

• Articles that include brand information: 53% (compared to 51% in 2009) a year ago.
• Email offers: 51% (compared to 47% in 2009).
• Sponsored search engine links: 40% (compared to 39% in 2009).
• Banner ads: 28% (compared to 25% in 2009).
• Pop-up ads: 19% (compared to 13% in 2009).

Search Frequency Increases in 2010
Frequency, or how frequently consumers conduct internet searches for products or services they read about in online articles – increased from about 50% a year ago (saying they initiate a search “very frequently” or “somewhat frequently”) to 57% this year. Younger and high-income people showed a considerable propensity to conduct a search after reading online articles. Seventy-two percent of 25-34-year-olds said they were likely to conduct a search for products or services based on an article, up from 66% a year ago. And 70% of those making more than $75,000 per year expressed their likelihood to perform a search – 13 percentage points higher than last year’s 57%.

Online Ad Spending Growth Weak in ‘09
Increased consumer receptiveness may help boost online ad growth in 2010, which in 2009 was anemic, according to Nielsen research. Internet ad spending only grew 0.1% last year. As a possible mitigating factor, the only other ad spending categories that reported growth last year were Spanish-language cable TV (32.2%), cable TV (14.5%), and free standing insert (FSI) coupons found in printed newspapers and magazines (11.5%).

I’ve written about this topic before and it is one of my pet hates, small business owners who pay webmasters to build web sites for them and then are never given access to the files or the “engine room” of the site to be able to make on page SEO changes and more importantly get the site better rankings on search engines such as Google.

SEO is not set and forget, because you need to constantly make changes and massage pages on your site.

It’s my opinion that you the business, owns the web site, so take, no, demand control over your web sites destiny.

Well here is another example of control wielded by a webmaster and the hosting company they own. I’ve been engaged to do some SEO work on a very poorly designed site that caters to the holiday accommodation and booking industry, the site has never ranked for it’s keyword or category and the business owners have no access to any of the files that need to be changed to be able to optimise the site correctly.

Now it seems that in most cases when someone outside of these companies is asked do some SEO work, the webmasters controlling the site get very precious and uncooperative, is that because we might find out how poorly the site was designed and how badly ripped off you the site owner has been? I think so.

After identifying the keyword phrases we wanted to optimise the home page for, we needed to contact the web master to get access to the index and header files on the site, to change the title tag and the meta description tag.

Access to these files was not provided to the owner by the webmaster so on their behalf I sent an email off to the company requesting access to the files, I received a response and now I’m going to share with you what I received from this company;

“Hi,

everything I can find on the net advises against using it. I may remove it again after doing a bit more research – unless you can come up with a compelling reason to leave it there.

“The Meta Title (<META NAME=”title”…> Some say that having this tag on your pages will give you a boost in the Search Engines Result Pages (SERPs); however, according to my testing while both Yahoo! and MSN index this tag the results are inconsistent. And as such, it is impossible to conclusively determine the Meta Title Tag’s effect on the algorithm.

Recommendation: Either use with caution or don’t use. While the Meta Title Tag seems to be favored among the SEOs in India, the SEO boost as a Google Meta Tag it is supposed to give is nonexistent according to my testing.

Personally, I don’t use the tag as I see no benefits and have seen some instances of lower ranking in using it. “

Huh, I’m sorry but you will make these decisions!!

This response just goes to show how much of an understanding this company has of what elements of SEO are important, the title tag has a very high value and one of the more important aspects of on page optimisation, yet this person is making a statement that he sees no personal benefit of its value and he will make the decision as to whether to allow access to the tag, so I ask the question, Who owns the site?

If this web design company had done the SEO of this site properly in the first place, it would not have been necessary to hire an outside SEO company, but to make decisions about what access we can have without consulting the owner of the site has me shaking my head.

My recommendation to you is check out what you have access to and what you don’t, and then demand that you get complete control over your web site, after all you pay for it.

If you are looking at getting a web site redesign, I would suggest you get someone who knows SEO to look over the site first to make sure that it is search engine friendly, changes to the design before it’s built can save you time and money getting it to index properly with all search engines.

Not all webmasters are like this example, these guys pray on you because you don’t have enough knowledge to know better and that is where they win.

There is a post script to this story, the web company has refused to allow the Tittle tag to be changed, they will not give us access to the files on the site, even though the owner has given us written permission. The result is we’ll redesign the site, fire the hosting and design company and start again, all so unnecessary.

Over the past 3 months I’ve conducted approximately 50 SEO audits on real estate web sites and I’ve duly sent off to the respective web site owners 25 page reports on what they can do to improve their web site, and with most of the web sites in question, improve their rankings on either Google and/or Bing, for those most commonly searched terms and keywords. While conducting these audits, several  issues have become more than clear to me, (1) most of these web sites have been very badly optimised to start with by the web developer, and (2) some owners do not have access to their web sites header files and have to pay their design company every time they want to change a piece of code.

How about that for being held to ransom, who actually owns the site, well let me tell you, it is not you!

Click here If you’d like to read an article on Who Really Owns Your Real Estate Web Site.

One web company just outright refuses to provide the owners access and insists on charging them every time they want to change information, which makes it very hard to actually optimise the site.

SEO is not set and forget, and sometimes each web page needs to be massaged to get it to rank, well just imagine the cost if you were charged every time changes to content and coding were recommended. Of course this is the point of this exercise, to get as much revenue out of you as possible and given that most of the real estate offices I’ve done the audits for have no idea about web site design or SEO, you are easy pickings .

So how do you avoid being fleeced forever by these companies? Firstly make sure you have total access to all the files on your web site, so that if you need to make changes to your site it can be done via your back-end administration page, that is total control over your HTML title tag and your meta description tag, also make sure that your CMS does not generate dynamic URL’s, these are much harder to rank on search engines, static URL’s are really what you need. Make sure that you can change the wording on all your pages and that you have control over your images including adding alt tags and correct descriptions, these are an important part of on page optimisation.

Make sure when your site is launched you get a search engine submission report and also get what keywords they have optimised your content for, 90% of the sites I’ve audited have been optimised for the clients name, have you ever wondered how many times your brand was searched on Google for instance?  Your web site needs to be optimised for the key searches that relate to the industry and your location. Remember, Google indexes web pages not web sites so the more pages your site has the more chance you have of having your pages rank for different keywords. Try and have at least 300 words on your home page, search engines love text, so image heavy home pages are harder to optimise.

Where ever possible add a blog to your site, better still add a stand alone blog on a different domain and link it to your site, WordPress.org is one of the best blog platforms to use and search engines love it, adding engagement objects such as video is an absolute must, videos produced by you and uploaded on a regular basis will be indexed and ranked very fast, and getting a search engine to visit your site more often because of frequently updated content means higher rankings. Google looks at the freshness factor among other things.

You don’t need to be a web design expert, you just need to  make sure you are in control of your own site and your SEO and don’t have to keep putting your hands in your pocket whenever you want to change something, so take control back from these pirates.

The real estate industry needs to really start to take action on this and fast.

Google and Real Estate

For those of you who are interested in Googles ultimate goal for its real estate listings service, they have finally announced their plans for the service. In New York, Sam Sebastian, the company’s director of local and business-to-business markets has told the Inman technology conference that Google’s recent refinements in the real estate space, which include creating “place pages” for individual listings, don’t mean the search engine giant is moving to create a national multiple listing service.

He said the recent refinements have improved the quality of traffic the search engine delivers to advertisers — including big brokerages that Google is out to sign up as clients.

“Agents have always been pretty engaged” in buying keywords and targeted ads from Google to drive traffic to their Web sites, Sebastian said. “But the big brokerages that can really do this in scale, and work this into their marketing programs — that’s where I think the future is.”

Since Google got into targeted advertising, agents and small real estate offices have been “very entrepreneurial” in taking advantage of its ability to deliver potential clients, Sebastian said.

“They could compete with the big boys, and we were building a good set of users,” Sebastian said. Then third-party listing aggregation sites emerged, packaging and selling the leads traffic to their sites generated to brokers and agents.

Google got into the listing game itself, through its Google Base service, which accepts listings from agents and third-party aggregators.

Aggregating listings is not nearly as controversial as it was when third-party aggregators started cropping up more than a decade ago, Sebastian said.

But Google has captured the attention of the real estate industry in recent months by creating individual “place pages” for listings and making it easy to find them in map-based searches

Place pages, Sebastian said, were originally created not for real estate, but as a way to give local merchants a presence on Google. Place pages pull content from around the Internet, such as reviews, photos and other information Google has tracked down, organizing it in one place.

When the implications for real estate became clear — that Google, in theory, could amass a database of every property on Earth — not everybody in the industry was thrilled with the idea.

“We got a little bit of hemming and hawing,” Sebastian said. Some wondered if Google was taking the first step in building a national MLS, he said.

But the sites providing the information indexed by Google are finding that the quality of traffic the search engine delivers to their site has improved.

The plan was not to take business from real estate brokers, but to provide a better user experience, Sebastian said.

“It’s not some evil plan we have in Mountain View (Google’s headquarters in California), with millions of folks talking about how we want to take over the real estate markets,” Sebastian said.

Asked about reports that Google has been talking to real estate search site Trulia.com about an acquisition, Sebastian said he could not comment. (A Trulia spokesman told Inman News in December that the company “does not comment on rumors or speculation.”)

But Sebastian did say that Google is likely to continue acquiring one to two “small and nimble” companies a month, a pace it’s kept up for the last 18 months.

Source: Inman News

Real Time search on Google

Ok, if you been putting off starting a blog or using social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, it’s time now to think again and very seriously. With the launch yesterday of Google real time search, it opens up a world of opportunity for bloggers and social media users to get their efforts at the top of the search rankings, Google now pulls information as it happens from sources such as friendfeed, Twitter and Facebook as well as blog posts and news feeds.

This is essentially Googles answer to Twitters and Facebooks search engines which provide up to the minute updates on trending topics, and it was a natural extension for it to be applied to search engines, after all they are trying to give you the best response to your search query.

Real time search will enable information to be delivered as it happens, by clicking on “Latest results” or selecting “Latest” from the search options menu to view a full page of live tweets, blogs, news and other web content scrolling right on Google.

You can also filter your results to see only “Updates” from micro-blogs like Twitter, FriendFeed, Jaiku and others.

Latest results and the new search options are also designed for iPhone and Android devices when you need them on the go, be it a quick glance at changing information like ski conditions or opening night chatter about a new movie — right when you’re in line to buy tickets.

So there you have it, create your blog and start writing, and by creating good quality content on your blog or social media network, you might just end up in the number one spot on Google.

It’s the freshness factor that is also important when it comes to getting your information ranked high on Google and now with real time search, you can get fresh up to date information on trending or newsworthy stories as they happen.

If you’d  like to start a blog and don’t know where to start, visit Blogging for Business Packages and get started today.

Last week during a webinar that I participated in with Michael Sheargold and the Real Estate Results Network, I suggested that every real estate office should create a digital media strategy that covers at least the next 12 months. Technology is changing so rapidly for real estate agents and without a plan or strategy in place you’ll find it very hard to keep up. I’ve had some agents talk to me about what should be in this digital strategy, so to help you lets go through the basics of what you should include in your document.

1. Web site SEO – First and foremost in my mind is having your web site search engine friendly. Local search queries continue to increase as does 3+ word keyword searches.

Yellow Pages book usage is decreasing and Internet searches increasing, so that makes it vital that your site appears on the first page of Google. You need to also consider how your site performs, Google are planning to use site speed as a ranking factor and therefore how quickly your site loads will be a consideration. Image heavy sites without alt tags and optimising your pages for relevant keywords needs to be considered.

During the webinar, one industry specialist wrote a comment ” Do you really think that principals or agents actually write their own copy?”  No I don’t, but they need to make sure that what is written on their behalf is search engine optimised and written for the web, not copied from a newspaper. Make sure that you get access to the coding on your site as well, you pay for it, you own it, not like I have encountered recently with one web company attached to the number one real estate portal, they have a very arrogant attitude to you the customer, so if in doubt walk away, there are plenty of web design companies that will help you.

Search Engine Marketing should not replace your web site SEO, use SEM wisely and don’t double up, if you’re on the first page or rank highly for a search term, don’t waste money on Adwords,use them in areas that you don’t rank, remember, Google ranks pages not web sites so you can effectively optimise each page on your web site for keywords.

2.Social Media – Include this into your 12 month plan, small business is lagging behind their big brothers in using and integrating social media into their business. Your customers have embraced social networking and it is becoming the trusted adviser, so you can’t afford to neglect it any longer.

One of the reasons slowing the integration is a lack of knowledge about social media by small business owners, in my mind you are better to try and work with social media than to ignore it, so jump in and have a go. Plan it slowly and use the major sites such as Facebook and Twitter to start with, you can use this as your guide, POST. This stands for:

• People – What is your target market?

• Objective – What do you want to achieve from using social media?

• Strategy – How will you go about communicating with your customers? Status Updates, Coupons, Discounts etc

• Technology - What are the main sites you’ll use to communicate your message? Facebook/Twitter

That at least will help you plan your strategy, also remember, Podcasting, Vlogging and YouTube are powerful tools in getting your message across, plus Google loves video, so use this to your advantage

3. Blogs – Create a blog and add it to your web presence, it allows you to add the personal touch to your on line marketing. ComScore’s research indicates that blogs reach over 48% of the online population in the Asia Pacific region, social media 56.1%.

Blogs are a great way to communicate with your customers and are a great customer service tool, remember though you need to make sure that your content is fresh and relevant to the target market you are aiming at. Google loves blogs because of the constantly updated information they provide and will index them very quickly as well as give them a high ranking, sometimes even over a higher authority site. WordPress provides a great platform for you to use and I’d recommend the self hosted option as you can use your own domain name and you have much more flexibility.

4. Internet Marketing – Make sure that you have your office details listed with Google business, use different keywords or categories so that you rank on different search pages in your area. Be very selfish with where your links go, you might think its great that your business comes up number one under a realestate.com.au listing in your area, but think where the customer goes when they click on the link, to you? no they go to the portal so make sure your web site ranks on that first page.

Audit your listing on the portals and start to implement good keywords in your copy, remember you’re writing for the web not a newspaper, so think about how people search and what keywords they use. Get those from your own office, you have a wealth of information at your disposal, so ask your staff what words or phrases consumers use when  they contact your office, find the most frequently used and start to weave those into your articles or listing copy.

Don’t leave out of your listing valuable information, Google uses a completeness filter on Google real estate, so the more information in your listing the higher the rank, makes sense really doesn’t it.  

5. Technology – Make sure you stay informed on technology that impacts on how your customers find you, Augmented Reality and QR codes are examples, be aware of the impact they are having and factor these into your strategy.

I hope that helps you in planning for the next 12 months, having this in place is a good start in improving the way you market and communicate with the online consumer, it also improves your businesses “Future Fitness”  for digital marketing.

New research out today highlights the growth in local search rates in the Asia Pacific region with Google continuing to dominate as the preferred search engine particularly in Australia with 83% share and New Zealand with 80.5% share.

This really does demonstrate that you need to get your web site up to scratch when it comes to getting a high ranking in the search results, make sure your site ranks highly for those keywords or phrases that your customers use, and if you don”t know what they are then please ask me and I’ll do a free SEO audit on your web site for you.

The study found that 38.6 billion searches were conducted in the region in September 2009, with searchers averaging nearly 88 queries per person during the month. Google Sites ranked as the top search destination in Asia Pacific, commanding more than 44 percent share of searches performed in the region.

Google Sites Captures Largest Share of Search in Asia Pacific

In September 2009, Internet users in Asia Pacific conducted 38.6 billion search queries, an increase of 33 percent from the previous year. Google Sites was the top search destination with nearly 17 billion searches performed on its sites during the month, accounting for 44.1 percent share of all searches in the region. Baidu.com Inc. followed with 8.2 billion searches (21.3 percent share), while Yahoo! Sites grabbed the #3 position with 5.3 billion searches (13.8 percent share).

Searchers in the region averaged nearly 88 searches per person during September. South Korea’s NHN Corporation, which owns search engine Naver.com, saw the most prolific search intensity among the top 10 destinations with an average of 81 searches per searcher. Searchers on Google Sites averaged 59 searches per person, while searchers on Lycos Sites averaged 51 queries.

*Excludes visitation from public computers such as Internet cafes or access from mobile phones or PDAs.

Local Players and Global Brands Compete for Searcher Loyalty Across Markets

An analysis of top search destinations across the 10 individual markets in the Asia-Pacific region currently reported by comScore revealed various search brand preferences across markets. Google Sites was the search market share leader in six of the markets including Australia, India, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand and Singapore. Yahoo! Sites captured the majority share of searches in Hong Kong (58.9 percent) and Taiwan (65.4 percent).

Although multinational search brands led many of the markets in the region, the popularity of local brands was evident in both China and South Korea. Baidu.com Inc. led as China’s top search destination with 63 percent share of searches performed, while NHN Corporation captured 49.3 percent of queries in Korea, leading the market as the top destination.

*Excludes visitation from public computers such as Internet cafes or access from mobile phones or PDAs.

The report is compiled by ComScore,a leader in measuring the digital world

Get Your Free Web Site SEO Health Check

Last week I wrote an article on this blog about the importance of an SEO strategy for your real estate web site and in talking to a number of agents recently, it is one of the most neglected areas of Internet marketing by real estate offices.

Your web site is your link to the on line property searcher and making that web site not only be found on the web, but making sure it ranks in the top 10 results on Google and Bing for the terms that people search should be high on your agenda.

Some facts that you’re probably not aware of and published by the Commonwealth Bank about searching, reveal the way of the future when it comes to how consumers search on the web. Last year 75% of people did not use Yellow Pages, so where did they go to research business? to the web of course. Over 80% of consumers use the web to research purchase decisions and products, and that is why your web site needs to rank well on Google and other search engines including Yahoo and Bing.

How much do you spend per year on promoting your business on Yellow Pages? why not divert some of that into making sure your web site is performing as well as it should. It is a known fact that Google continually update their search algorithms and your web site needs to be constantly tweaked to make sure it is search engine friendly and searchable by search engines.

Don’t take it for granted that your web master will have set it up correctly, in my experience most of them don’t, so make sure it performs for you, their were over 16.6 million searches last month for the term real estate in Australia and if you don’t rank, you don’t get the business. Don’t think that getting your web site optimised is expensive, because it isn’t, and the return on your investment is worth every penny you’ll spend on SEO.

To help you find out how your site performs I’ve organised for SEOBOSS, an SEO Optimisation company to give your web site a SEO health check for free, they will analyse your site for the most searched industry keywords and then send you a report and a recommendation on how you can improve your site, what’s it cost? Nothing.

If you’d like to get  your web site checked then click on the link and SEOBOSS will do the rest. Give me my SEO Health Check

Over the past few weeks I’ve spent a lot of time visiting small business offices and conducting audits on their SEO optimisation and 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 believe me, there are a lot of them.

One area that comes up more often than any other, is SEO,  or search engine optimisation, and how a business can generate a better page ranking within their local region when searching on Google, Yahoo or Bing. 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 business approach’s this in Australia, PCMS Consulting an SEO company in the US, has released a comprehensive study on the role of SEO as a marketing tool in small business.

It may come as no surpise to find that most business owners 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, companies are overwhelmingly neglecting SEO optimisation and thus missing out on a considerable opportunity to boost their profits and drive traffic in today’s economic conditions.

Most searchers use keywords to conduct a search and not a brand name, therefore, even the most established companies need to optimize their websites to maintain their market position. Establishing the most searched for keywords that relate to your industry is vital to your web site performing well on the web.

Now lets look at the Australian result, in August last year, NSW based SEO company First Rate, released a report on the performance of small business web sites in the country, and the results were almost identical to the US result.

FirstRate found that, individual business web sites are failing to compete in the search engines rankings, they lacked decent natural search rankings,did not partake in paid search engine marketing for the most popular keyword search terms, and did not have good link popularity or page rank scores, as a result their web site traffic is suffering.

When you analyse the search trends or keywords relevant to your business on Google you’ll see the the popularity of each keyword.

There are lot of factors that you need to consider in optimising your web site, and these should  include link building, which 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 back links to that content within your web site.

Sites that are image heavy and text light,don’t have headings and subheadings or site maps 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 back links to that content.

SEO of your web site and it’s positioning in search engine results, is vital for you to compete in business today, because more traditional forms of marketing are no longer effective in driving leads, for example, in a recent Commonwealth bank survey, they found that 75% of people did not use Yellow pages in 2008, 58% didn’t use it the year before and 80% of consumers use the Internet to research purchases.

The other consideration is that Generation X&Y do not read newspapers,don’t use Yellow pages and most of their social interactions and shopping research is done on the Internet.

There’s lot to understand about keyword rich copy, back link 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 for information on SEO Optimisation for Small Business

One point to remember, is that 99% of your competition don’t know what their doing.

Mike Andrew owns and operates an Internet Marketing Consultancy on the Gold Coast in Queensland

Earlier this week I was a presenter at a training session in Sydney run by one of the major real estate franchise groups, and my topic for the session was “How to Market More Effectively Using On Line Technology” , or in other wards, how to write better copy to be found on the search engines such as Google and Bing.

The first part of the day focused on writing for print, and the presentation really was quite good, it focused on writing clean copy with no clutter and writing catchy headlines and avoiding cliche’s.

A lot of time and effort went in to focusing on the print side, how to submit your editorial, when was the best time to do so, what style of writing does the editor like etc, and then, when looking at the end result, which had been written up on a white board, I thought about how those headlines or keywords would research on the web. A lot of agents simply copy and paste their print copy onto the web, with no consideration of keywords, search phrases etc.

You really have no idea whether your copy or headline will have any impact on the property searcher unless you have a clear understanding of how they search on the web, what phrases do they use, what are the trigger words or keywords they search for, these are all the questions you need to answer before you submit your copy to the web.

It’s even more important today, with Google’s real estate section now publishing listings, because anything that is published on the web, will be indexed by search engines, so make sure you start to optimise your copy with keywords or phrases that target your market, if you don’t, you’ll end up not showing on the search results, or being missed by your buyers, and whilst those headlines look OK in print, they may not work on the web.

With 9 out of 10 property searchers starting their property search on the web, how much time are you going to spend on your research to get it right. So lets give you a few ideas on where to start: A really good place to start your research is in your own office and for a refresher please read my earlier post “Choosing the right Keywords for your Content”

The post I’ve highlighted will give you some really good ideas on keyword research, so next time you sit down and start brainstorming ideas for your headlines and listing copy, give some thought on how your buyer searches on the web and what phrases or words they use, if you do that you’ll have a head start on getting your property found on the web.