5 Ways to Prep Your Website Before 2015

2015 is only a few weeks away. Crazy, right? While you’re putting your list of new year resolutions together, don’t forget to think about your real estate website. We’ve put together a list of tips to prep your website so that you’re ready to hit the ground running as soon as January 1 shows up.

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Long Term vs. Short Term SEO Keywords for Your Real Estate Website

SEO can be a little intimidating to the untrained eye. In fact, many real estate agents shy away from developing a full-fledged SEO strategy because they think it’s too complicated.

This idea couldn’t be further from the truth. A strategy that’s built around targeted long term and short term SEO keywords can give your real estate website a major boost in the search engine results pages (SERPs), and it’s relatively easy to set up.

In this post, we’ll tackle how to choose long term and short term SEO keywords for your real estate website, and we’ll also talk about how to begin using those keywords in the beginning stages of your content strategy. If you’re an SEO beginner, feel free to take a look at our beginner’s guide for real estate agents.

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Prepping Your Website for the Busy Season, Part 1: Market Research on Summer Traffic

[This blog post is part of a four-part series on how to prep your website for the busy season. Look for following posts over the next few weeks to make sure your website is ready for the rush.]

Ah, summer. The sun’s out, the weather’s warm, and flowers are in full bloom. It’s enough to make you feel like Julie Andrews in the Swiss Alps.

sound of music

That is, unless you’re in real estate. Then, summer is a certified mad house.

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Marketing with Visual Media

We live in a visual society. Don’t just take my word for it; look around you. TV commercials, art galleries, the family photos on your office desk… even graffiti tags. We come into contact with visual appeals every day of our lives. So why shouldn’t we incorporate visual media into our marketing plans? Every real estate agent out there knows the importance of the visual quality of a home and its community. In fact, it’s often said that a home buyer makes all of their first impressions of a home on the walk from their car to the front door. Knowing the power of these visual cues, why not take advantage of it?

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Off-Site Recommendation: Blogging

If you’re having trouble sticking to a weekly blogging schedule, read on. Regularly adding valuable, unique content to your site will benefit you now more than ever before.

Google’s most recent algorithms – Penguin, Panda, and Hummingbird – may sound cute and cuddly, but they pack a suckerpunch of power when it comes to planning SEO strategies. The company’s most recent algorithm updates are designed to aggressively attack the low-quality, spammy content that has overrun the Internet. SEO strategies that were once effective, like creating many similar pages with only a few words tweaked, no longer fly. (Does “keyword overuse” ring a bell, anyone?)

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Meet the Sites: Social Media Marketing

Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest, oh my! If you’re a real estate agent looking to market yourself for potential clients, you might feel like you’re looking down the barrel of the social media marketing gun.

Here’s the good news: 92% of home buyers used the Internet to search for real estate in 2013. This number is continuously increasing. With that in mind, it’s crucial for real estate offices and agents to have a significant web presence. But a simple website does not a web presence truly make. Carefully managed social media profiles do a lot for your business; they round out your online brand, vastly improve your visibility, and increase website traffic and lead conversions.

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What is SEO?: A Beginner’s Guide

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of marketing your website to search engines. Why do you care what search engines think of your website? You care because search engines are the matchmakers of the Internet, pairing every person who enters a search into Google, Bing, Yahoo!, or the many other search engines, with a custom list of every website that pertains to the keywords used in their search. You care because you want to be visible on that list.

So how do Google and its counterparts know which websites to show us when we do a search? 

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Another Way to Show Up in Search: Claiming Your Local Listings

As Internet marketers, we relish those rare moments when decoding what search engines want is actually straightforward.  This time, it is.  Search engines have been favoring local listings, and we know because, well, there they are- right on the first search results page, with a big map.  Since most Realtors concentrate on specific towns or regions, this is a perfect opportunity for real estate companies to increase their visibility for local searches.

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Google Cuts Keyword Data from Analytics: What This Change Means for You

Last week, as Google celebrated its 15th birthday, the search giant made two announcements that caught many by surprise.

One was that Google quietly switched to a new algorithm called “Hummingbird” about a month ago. This was a significant change that had (perhaps surprisingly) little fallout, so we’ll save that for another blog post and refer you here to learn more.

The other announcement that drew attention—and a big reaction from the SEO community—is that Google will soon be encrypting all search data in the widely used Google Analytics reporting platform. This means that detailed data about what organic search keywords were used to deliver visitors to your website will no longer be available.

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