Future of Search Article

Google Search is so important to marketing on the Internet. Questions come up in every Internet Marketing seminar I have ever been to about how to come up better on google search. Builders and developers are all asking the same question "how do I come up better on google?"

I read this article about the future of search on Google's blog recently.

Official Google Blog: The future of search

There is a lot to consider. Decisions are being made on how to design and build sites to get the most from the search engines. As search changes change, so should your strategy about how to interact with the search engines.

Search Engines - SEM vs SEO

The phrases search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) are often misunderstood in the new home marketing industry. SEM is a form of marketing that includes SEO, paid placement (PPC) and paid inclusion.

SEO is related to your website and how it is viewed by the search engines. Optimizing a website to get more quality traffic is the goal of search engine optimization.

SEM incorporates SEO as well as the pay per click model of advertising; bidding on keywords in the sponsor areas of the search engine websites. It may also include paying for links on high traffic websites or paying for guaranteed consideration. None of the major search engines will guarantee a rank in the organic search. They may not even consider your website for their ranking. Most of the sites offer a payment plan to at least guarantee a review of your website for inclusion.

You don't come up on Google?

Getting your site to show up on Google's organic search is important for your marketing efforts. In many cases, Google will find your relevant site and show it in their index for searches in time. You should be able to come up for a specific search of your site pretty quickly. For example, if your company or community name is included in your domain and the title and meta descriptions are set-up to reflect your company or community name, a search for that company or community name should return your website in the first few pages. If it is not showing, do a search for your exact domain name and see if Google even knows about it. If it doesn't, you may need some professional assistance. I have had clients tell me that their webmaster said it could take 4 to 6 weeks to get Google to index their website. Some web designers do a great job with graphics and design. Many of them are not designing sites to be search engine friendly. They are not offering services to get your site noticed and listed quickly.

It would be ideal to be on the first page of Google's organic search in the first position. Sometimes this is difficult, especially when you choose a name that has competition for the search. If you decide to name your website "Atlanta Real Estate", you are going to have problems getting that to come up on the first page of Google without a tremendous amount of time and money being spent.

Being indexed by Google and ranking high for desired keyword phrases on Google are different. For more information on getting your site noticed and listed, please contact MLC New Home Marketing for a website analysis of your website.

Search Engine Marketing 101

I ran across this article on Search Engine Marketing. Pretty good information about the search engine models. I agree with most of the article. I disagree with the multiple submissions to websites. I rarely ever submit to google through their url submission form. I think its much better for Google to find your site linked from a similar highly relevant website.

Check out the article by clicking here

Cost of Traffic Units

How do much do you spend to get a person to walk in the door of your sales model? I know that's a loaded question. In many cases the actual number is all over the place. A lot depends on how you categorize costs. What is included in that number? Most companies will agree that print ads, magazine ads, internet advertising, radio advertising, billboards, sign placement, and tv advertising would all be part of that number. This number is usually referred to as the media budget. How about creative costs? The creation of these ads are all cost associated with running the ads. Some companies include them, some include them in another part of the budget.

What about incentives? bonuses? giveaways? Are they put in the budget with the other costs of generating traffic or is that put somewhere else in the overall budget?

How about real estate agent costs? In most parts of the country Real Estate Agent Coop is a must. The Real Estate Agents have the buyers, so therefore they need to know about your product. Are agent lunches and Realtor events included in the cost of generating traffic? Do you figure in any extra commissions and bonuses in those costs? Its all part of the cost to sell homes.

Advertising on the Internet is CHEAP compared to most other forms of advertising. Are you doing enough to get your community exposure on the Internet?

Does your website generate leads?

This post is targeted toward the new home sales agent.

Are you getting leads from your company or new home community website? Before you answer that question, let me ask you the following questions. What is defined as a website lead? Do you ask everyone that comes in the door of the sales model if they have been to your website? If you get a phone call, do you ask that person if they have visited your website? If you are not getting any leads; walk-ins, phone calls, or email leads, your website may be the problem.

My first action would be to test the contact form on your website and make sure it works. I have seen a lot of forms that do not work or have the wrong email address plugged in for the contact. Sometimes the email service provider is actually blocking the leads. Next, make sure your phone number, address and driving directions are easily found on the website. See if the website is getting any Internet traffic. You may have to ask your manager or marketing director to get you this information. If the site is getting traffic, some website modification may increase lead generation. If the site is not getting any traffic, its time to review the Internet Marketing Plan.

Can't be found on Google!

Have you ever been frustrated with not being found on Google?

There are a lot of reasons why you may not be found.

One thing to consider, is your site completely designed with images or programmed all in flash? If it is, you will probably have a hard time getting Google to index your website.





Look at the image above, imagine it being a website.
You can read the text, but because of the way it was created google can't read it and does not know what to index in its database. As far as Google is concerned, it it simply an image and it will probably be ignored. If Google can't read the image, the text on the image will not help you get indexed. Text like this above should be entered as text and not shown as an image.

Other factors contribute to being indexed, this is just one thing to consider when having your website designed and built.

Hits and Visits - What do you want?

Do you understand your tracking reports?

Do you want hits? Do you want visitors? Once you get the visitors, do they stay on your site or just generate one page view and leave? Does your tracking reports accurately show you that information?

When you visited this page, you generated 1 site visit to this page, you show up as 1 Unique Visitor (UU) in the Traffic Log File. You generated 1 page view in the traffic log file. If you see the 7 images below, you generated 7 hits on the server just for those images, add all the images in the header, the page itself, and you will probably get over 20 hits just for this one page view.

If you come back to this page at a later date, you will probably show up as a repeat visitor, unless you are using a dyamic IP address like those used by the dial-up service America Online, then I will probably incorrectly assume you to be a Unique Visitor. With special software I can drop a cookie on your site and then I would be able to tell if you had been here before.

Depending on how you have your browser set-up, you may or may not generate the additional 20 plus hits on a repeat visit, if all of these images are in your temporary Internet Folder when you come back, the 7 images below may not need to be reloaded from the server, thus I would not see the additional hits logged to the traffic log.

Now the next time, your webmaster says you are really getting the hits, ask him how many visitors you are getting.

Should you bid on PPC ads?

PPC stands for Pay Per Click - You pay every time someone clicks over to your website from your ad.

A lot of home builders and new home community developments are showing up on google adwords and yahoo sponsored search. I am often asked is it worth it? "Is it worth it to pay $1 for a site visitor to my website selling new homes in a specific community?"

With all marketing expense decisions, you need to know the numbers. What is your cost per website visit? How many visits does it take to get a lead? How many leads does it take to get a traffic unit to the model? How many traffic units does it take to get a sale?

Let's say you paid $1000 to get 1000 visitors to your website and 10 of those people filled out a lead form and let's assume your on site agent was able to get 2 of those people to the model and 1 of them bought a new home from you. If the sale price of the home was $150000. Then you spent $1000 to get a sale...that's less than 1% of the sales price. I know a lot of builders that would gladly pay only 1% to sell out their subdivision. Many of them are spending a lot more than 1% on advertising costs.

The problem is the limited availability of searches and the bid strategy. Sometimes it is very hard to get 1000 quality visitors to your website for $1000 looking for the your product or new home. It may cost you $2000, you may have a location or product that is not in demand. Picking the right keyword phrase is a big challenge.

If you are building condos in atlanta, simply bidding on the word 'condos' may not be cost effective. 'condos in atlanta' may be be too expensive. Bid on the keyword phrase 'new homes flowery branch' and you could probably get traffic for only $0.50 a click, but with so few people searching that phrase, it would probably take you an entire year to get 1000 people to click on your ad.

How about 'Intown atlanta condos'? You will probably get good quality traffic to your website, but if the search is only being performed 200 times a month, you can't rely on the search engine to help you sell many homes. With the scenario above, it would take you 5 months to get 1 sale.

My recommendation is to get someone to help you with this type of marketing. It is not a waste of time or money and could get you some incremental sales at a very effective cost.

In the Beginning...Consider Internet Marketing

Are you involved in the marketing of new home communities? Unless you are bound to a certain name of the subdivision or project, my recommendation is to think about Internet Marketing of your project before you lock into a name.

Generic names or often used names are going to be hard to get your site to come up in the search engines. Often used names are probably already registered so getting a good domain name will prove difficult.

Do a google search for the community name and see what comes up. Most website design firms try to stay away from Guaranteed Results on Search Engine rankings. Some general good practices and proper planning should make it pretty easy to get your website to come up on the page for the community name.

Example Searches on Google; Talley Street Lofts - Carpenter Village

Is your Website Search Engine Friendly?

You may not even know that your website was supposed to be friends with the search engines. If you want prospects to easily find you when they go to search engines, like Yahoo, Google, and MSN, then your site needs to be optimized. These search engines rank your website and the pages within your site based on a changing set of criteria. Knowing exactly what they are looking for is quite often very difficult, and often an ongoing activity.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of adding code and tags to a website with the goal of achieving a high rank on a search engine search results page when a prospect uses specific terms or phrases to find what they are looking for. Being search engine friendly is simply having a site that the search engines can find and index based on their own criteria.

There are typically 2 types of results on the main search engines; paid results and organic results. Getting listed at the top of the paid results is easy….pay more money than anyone else for that keyword phrase. Getting listed at the top of the organic results is not impossible as some Website and Internet Marketing companies claim. It could sometimes be cost prohibitive to spend the time and money it takes to achieve a top ranking.

There are some steps that you should take to make sure that your site is search engine friendly. One of the most important things you can do is to make sure each page within your website has a title that reflects the content of the page AND matches the search engine phrase you want to found when a prospect does a search. This is only one small and easy technique to get a higher ranking, but to get consistent results, you need to have an expert help you improve or maintain your rankings.

Your Website. Is it Working for You?

“Do you have a website?” Back in 1998, that was THE question I asked to home builders and developers before I pitched advertising services on the Internet. Internet Marketing was very new to the building industry. With the exception of a few national builders and some of the bigger local new home groups, very few companies were taking advantage of this extremely cost effective means of reaching new home buyers. Today, most home builders and new home marketing professionals have accepted the fact that they need a website to have an effective marketing program. Unfortunately, many of those websites are not doing their job --- They are NOT working for you, and, in fact, may be working against you.

Does the creative message on a print ad influence a homebuyer’s decision not to visit the community? Maybe the color, the layout, the copy, the lifestyle photos; something about the ad just turned them off from wanting to learn more about your new homes and new home neighborhoods. What about your community entrance and sales model? How would uncut grass, an unclean sales model, or trash at the entrance and throughout the neighborhood affect your sales? An improperly designed or poorly managed website has the same effect. There are a lot of websites out there with poor navigation, a lack of information, or even worse, outdated information. Some are just plain ugly. Many home builders and developers lose sales due to the image that their website is projecting, especially if their top competitors have better websites. Remember, home buyers look for ways to reduce the number of communities they visit. You can not afford to be scratched off their short list because of your web presence.

A lot of companies build websites and more are getting into the business every day. If you think you need to look at your website strategy, I would like to offer a few things to consider during this process. First of all, make sure you work with a company that has worked with real estate companies in the past. If the company does not understand your business from the start, how can they help you sell your product? In addition, many builders and developers do not have experienced internal staff members to manage an effective website project. They may underestimate the challenges and time required of their internal resources and project team. You may want to consider hiring a consultant that can effectively act as the project manager and coordinate all the internal requirements and development, while keeping the project on time and within budget. With a consultant focused on your project, it will be easy for them to stay focused on your project when internal company resources begin to be pulled in different directions.

In all circumstances, however, it is important to accurately identify the goals and business requirements of the project. Specifically, you need to define the process, document the goals, requirements, and process completely in the initial stage of the project. This will allow you to get your internal team and the web design company all on the same page, working toward the same goals, and focused on the end product.Getting an effective website defined, built and launched is only the first step. Next you will want to look at ways to increase your leads and drive more traffic to your website. You may have heard of the term SEO. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Check out my next blog for some more info on SEO and how it can help you.