The beauty of B2 is that we are all here to help (well most anyway) in some shape or form. I must admit that only after reading the commentaries here did I begin to grasp exactly how important SEO is to our business. Thanks to all who have contributed.

The internet sales – is one of our main points of difference and I can tell you it is worth its weight in gold! Currently we have 1,300 approx tagged pages on the website and we have set a target in the short term to get it up to 2,000.

Peter, has presented me with the perfect strategy (I will tell you over the phone)

Also, our staff love the Agentpoint system – it is so easy to work where the staff were able to apply it without one single lesson. Now that tells you something I would suggest that all agencies have a good look at it.

Cheers

I am not missing Peter’s work at all but somebody has to start with an original scope for the site, approve the concept and most of all pay for it.. Custom sites are never cheap which is why far too many opt for a templated site that provides very little result. In fact many people don’t realise just how little their templated sites generate in traffic against a good customised site with good SEO. If you have the skills in house they are an investment in time and if you dont have the skills they are an investment in $$$.

The best asset you have is all your newsletters. If you take advantage of them properly, and it sounds as though you are, then that will bring your some quality traffic. The most under-appreciated thing often overlooked by many agents is SEO… They cant see it so they dont value it. By all accounts your investment in SEO will pay off in more transactions soon enough.

My suggestion to use the Hitwise top 200 as a way of finding other good sites is for inspiration. As an example from your site I love the way you are declaring what sales were generated from your newsletter both buyers and sellers. I had seen that number on your website before but never took much notice in it however now I understand the concept. I think you explain it better now, or maybe my brain was working slower when I looked at it in the past

Either way, I will take that inspiration away and hopefully do something similar ourselves.

Cheers

Mate in all fairness Peter and his very talented team deserves all the credit for the creation and design. It is way out of left field and munching vigorously on a diet of Google being the special diet we have it on. Still a fair bit to go with minor critiquing where I must admit a really enjoyable experience from start and all the way through the entire process.

I will have a look a Hitwise Top 200.

Cheers

There are quite a few RE websites that don’t follow the cookie cutter approach of the groups or major website design companies. Finding the gems out there can be tough because of the sheer number of templated ones around.

The easiest way I find to is to get a hold of Hitwise’s Top 200 list. Delete all the portals and real estate groups and associated sites for Real Estate and extract all the individual agent sites and anybody who remains is going to have a good site, at least traffic wise. A crappy site with traffic will easily out perform a glamour site without traffic.

SEO can give you huge traffic. Over the past month it has delivered us around 46% of total traffic. (see http://nfn.smugmug.com/photos/419524767_aoRfy-X3.jpg)

I love the new site you and Peter have put together.. Very nice and fitting of your market place. I agree with Greg, your best asset is your newsletter. It is obviously a huge driving force in your office.

Cheers

Glenn

Once you get these articles going on these keywords we should probably look at some ways that you may be able to make your site rank higher than REA on these keywords…I’m sure you’d enjoy that…I know how much you love REA.

Thanks to everyone who is helping to improve this industry for all of us working in it.

Cheers!
Angelina Shamrock, Broker
Founder & Co-creator
angie@flashgalleryhomes.com
http://www.flashgalleryhomes.com
http://activerain.com/flashgalleryhomes
http://flashgalleryhomes.wordpress.com

Your comments have been most helpful – in this weeks edition I will use and (tag – Mosman real estate agent). As you would have noticed Peter is now running, hosting, and developing our online platform. I must admit that we are having lots of fun as we are one of the first agencies (that I am aware of) to move away from what I classify the: Ken and Barbie websites that look good and fail miserably with SEO.

I have actually been writing our weekly newsletter since September 2000 so we have roughly 1300 pages of content and I think that so far Google are up to approximately 700 pages (so a bit still to go). I have no doubt that sometime soon that we will be numero uno on our relevant page searches as we are the only agency in our area pursuing and using these technologies relentlessly.

It is all about a balance and when I look at our Google Analytics we have a good balance.

Referring Sites – 40.69%

Direct Traffic – 39.52%

Search Engines – 19.79%

Still much work to do and I must admit I find changing the dynamics of the website to being more of a working ute – very exciting. As I believe this is the direction that our industry is headed just that some are faster than others to implement new strategies moving forward. Although very few agencies would have nowhere near that content that we have available for our website which is why I call it a ute

I also believe that given the online dynamics required to dominate SEO agents will be forced into online newsletter platforms.

When I first spoke about this with Peter we wanted it and he was one of the few that I found fully understood (and knew millions times more than me) about this very subject.

We are educating ourselves, our markets and our industry for that matter. I am not saying that our online direction is 100 per cent right because only time will tell. But, I am not interested in paying for Google Adwords as our preference is to organically grow our businesses with the online applications made available for our industry to utilise.

I prefer to use the catch phrase – catch us if you can

I see your Virtual Realty News has been going since 2002. With content sitting on your site like that & being updated regularly, like it is… how could the competition compete with that for SEO ?

You are so onto this SEO already Robert…The only thing I could recommend to you is to write your next few articles for VRN specifically targeting the major real estate related keywords like “Mosman Real Estate Agent” an obvious keyword that potential clients will type into Google.

On this keyword your site already appears twice on the first page & ranks just below realestate.com.au links.

By doing these articles your site will appear even more times on the first page of Google organically for these type of keywords .

Currently, once you get past realestate.com.au links, there’s only 4 other agent’s ranking on that first page organically for the ‘Mosman real estate agent’ keyword.

With your page ranking & with good SEO within your article content meta tags & title, description, etc you should be able to push these agents onto the 2nd page simply by writing 4 seperate articles SEO’d on this keyword.

Your goal over the next few weeks/months should be to try to get your competitors pushed onto the 2nd page of search. Then they will have no choice but PPC.

This is what I mean by technology savvy agents being able to create daylight between the number 1 agent & 2nd place.

Agents appearing on the later pages of Google search will rarely get considered – Pages 3-4 is like the abyss of Google – where very few searchers ever go.

I hope this helps Robert. Cheers Greg.

Content is King – have you had a look at how much we carry on our website?

Cheers