Mediaboss Marketing

By Mark Toppenberg Print Article

In 2012, online real estate marketing promises to be more challenging than ever before for real estate agents and brokers. This is largely due to the sheer number of competitors that have been, or are finally becoming Internet savvy in their marketing efforts. While being an expert on search engines isnt attractive to many people, developing an overall strategy to win search engine placement on the web is now critical and should be a cornerstone in promoting your personal or professional brand and generating a steady source of ongoing leads. Organic search engine placement is a powerful way to gain dominance over your competitors in the single largest area where your customers are initiating the process of which home to buy or sell and deciding which agent to hire.

Understanding the basic principles behind how search engines work today can take you a long way in your online marketing efforts, primarily because you wont be chasing trends that have already been debunked or devalued. People who work in the search engine optimization industry basically have a place in business, because search engine algorithms change frequently and have a direct impact on how your web pages rank for money making keywords. Being proactive and making changes in how you optimize, design and create content around a web page in alignment with algorithm changes can really make a difference between transactions and no transactions.

In the past year, Google has made some changes that have a far reaching impact on search. Lets take a look at some of the most critical of these and go over some of the steps you can take to make the most of new opportunities and changes that can be made to mitigate negative results.

April 11, 2011 Global release of site quality algorithm known as Panda. If you havent heard about this, you really need to read on. This algorithm change was meant to weed out the overabundance of low quality, low content web pages in Googles index and a ton of sites took a big hit on this, even those whose webmasters perceived their content to be high quality and high value for the public.

This first rollout just blew up the search community. Industry blogs were on fire and SEOs were frantically watching their analytic reports to see what, if any impact the rollout would have on their clients sites. What was quickly discovered is that sites that were low on content and high on links and advertisements lost their ranking and therefore quite a bit of their traffic. Some sites were hit by friendly fire, but since this was an algorithm change, there was no possibility of appeal.

What this meant to a lot of owners of real estate websites was that a re-evaluation of their online content was in order. What many real estate marketers dont understand about this new update is all of the copied content (even from authority sources or library content made available to them by their website provider) was hurting them, badly. If you have analytics installed on your site, you can see if you were affected by analyzing your traffic graph since last April. If you do see a measurable drop in traffic, you can take steps to repair the damage by removing any content that is available across other websites or moving this material to a sub domain or another domain entirely, if you think its really valuable to your consumer.

SEOs have been preaching about quality content for years, but this algorithm update and its subsequent post rollout updates require that your content truly be something of value, not just the bare minimum to get by. You may consider providing a lot of Q&A focused content thats truly in depth. It should be content that cannot be easily found on any other real estate agents website. If you really want to help yourself, make sure to either write your own high quality, themed and valuable content or contract it out to a skilled writer. Either way, its no guarantee that youll be back ranking in the SERPs. The Panda algorithm update is an ongoing roll out so Google is tweaking it along the way to ensure their users have the best search experience possible.

November 3, 2011 Freshness Update announced. This is an extension of an earlier algorithm update to take advantage of trending topics and focus on how recent information is. What you can do to capitalize on this is to write content on your pages about trending real estate topics. There is a huge opportunity to have pages rank that might not otherwise if you write an article about a hot button issue that is getting a lot of attention. While a blog post may only rank for a short time, you could theoretically get a new subscriber and nice bump in traffic for a short while, and all the little mentions and social shares on Google add up.

January 19, 2012 - Google Page Layout Algorithm. This dictates that content should be above the fold. This essentially means that when a user first accesses your website, value added content should be visible immediately. Dont make your consumer scroll down or fight through advertisements or pictures or links to get to something that tells them about the purpose of the page on which theyve landed. This is a gigantic hint to agents and brokers that rely on a big, pretty picture to capture consumer interest or junk up their pages with advertisers. If Google doesnt like it, youre never going to have the chance to dazzle consumers with your take on an aesthetically pleasing landing page and you will lose your hard-won advertisers.

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Google’s Top Four Search Engine Changes: Why Every Real Estate Agent Should Care