Google has recently developed Favourite Places on Google, which incorporates the use of QR Code technology to help customers get information about businesses via their mobile phones and drive visitors across to the reviews on their site.

Whilst the use of QR Codes hasn’t really taken off as yet, they should start to become more and more popular now that Google has jumped on board.

With Google’s Favourite Places, the reviews that appear on Google about a real estate agency will also continue to grow in importance.

Google have said that “We have not yet made a decision about plans for this program beyond the U.S.” but they have already expanded the service into Vancouver, so it looks like it could end up coming to Australia some time soon.

Businesses don’t have to pay anything to become a part of Google’s Favourite Places, but they must have signed up for a free account with the Google Local Business Centre.

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When Google ventured into real estate listings many of us thought it would signal the end of annual fee increases being charged by the likes of realestate.com.au and domain.com.au. I mentioned how it will eventually force these organisations to change their business models and build simpler, smarter platforms and I still do!

Despite making it clear that it will take time, some industry heavies quickly began commenting on how little effect Google was having on sites like realestate.com.au with increased share prices /revenues traffic figures. The most vigorous of these was writing on just about every single notable real estate blog (including his own) how it wasn’t making a jot of difference, I thought at the time, it was pretty short sighted from a person who should know better!

I also made it clear that it will take time for Google’s impact to occur. Only when Google Real Estate has similar volumes of listings and only when they include the searchability of these listings directly within the search engine will it begin to have an impact on the majors.

Now it seems Google is stepping it up a gear……..is this an aggressive phase for Google?

During a session at the 2010 Inman Real Estate Connect conference in New York, Sam Sebastian, Google’s director of local and business-to-business markets, was quoted as saying “We’re actively looking to acquire one to two small real estate companies a month.”

Read this again………
“We’re actively looking to acquire one to two small real estate companies a month.” This statement speaks volumes of just how important Google thinks real estate is to their overall search strategy. It tells me they really do think it is one of the most popular search markets. Many people are talking of Google purchasing the likes of Trulia, Roost and some other independent companies. Personally, I think they will buy into products that compliment and drive traffic to their search and real estate website rather than buy other search engines and portals, they will also more than likely delve into products to compliment their Andriod operating system and new phone offerings.

Life without Realestate.com.au and Domain.com.au?
One thing is for sure, in a few years the real estate landscape will be completely different. Once Google has comparable listings and if it is confident it has a faster way to search then all that needs to happen is for consumers to become aware and use the systems and things will get tough for the portals.

Realestate.com.au and Domain.com.au continue to provide a decent service to agents, however it is the control that agents are wary of – no one likes having monopolies or duopolies, it only serves the few and each and every time hurts too many businesses and stifles innovation. Google’s involvement in any major industry allows a fair price to be charged for services, forces innovation and will make companies like Realestate.com.au and Domain.com.au offer better support and services for their money.

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A few months ago a client of mine received an email from a web application called myhousehunt. The site was scraping property listings from the major real estate portals and populating a portion of each listing on their website. They were then allowing property seekers to build a timetable for open inspections which could be printed or emailed to the user’s phone.

When i first looked at myhousehunt I noticed it was displaying listings from REA and Domain. I thought this was unusual as I doubt they had permission from either portal to do this. I recently visited the site and noticed they explicitly state that:

“MyHouseHunt will search for properties currently listed on Domain.com.au”

So it appears Domain have given the green light while REA in typical style, have unleashed their lawyers on the scraping site.

I’m always puzzled why REA will never share their content. What threat does a site like myhousehunt have on a real estate portal, in particular REA? Nothing, they display a few details of each listing with a link back to the original property on REA. All this will do is strengthen the REA brand and drive traffic back to their portal increasing those UB’s they’re always talking about. Thumbs up to Domain for embracing applications like this as it encourages greater innovation and the creation of cool and useful real estate applications.

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Google has beefed up its map search considerably with basic natural phrases now added. In the past a user has to select real estate, now all they need to do is use basic search terms in mapping.

Here is the official Google press release from Google.

Around half of the Googlers in our Sydney headquarters are software engineers, working on some really cool things – Google Wave, App Engine, Google Docs, and of course, Google Maps.

Recently, some of us have been working on a particularly interesting project that combines Google Maps and search technology – we’ve been trying to work out if your search query in Google Maps means you’re interested in having current real estate listings returned to you. It’s nice to get to work on some ’search’ engineering down here! Read the rest of this article »

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I recently wrote about using Google Insights to compare the relative strength of each real estate brand in Australia. I showed how you could compare each brand against each other and how you could also see the strength of each brand across the states.

When I shared this, it was in fact the second way I had found to independently compare the major brands around Australia. As I chose to explore the first option a bit more before writing about it I shared here about the Google Insights method.  It’s now time to share the first method I found which uses Google Maps Real Estate and approaches it on a completely different basis.

Realestate.com.au and Domain will have you believe that Google has only a small percentage of the total number of listings.  From my experience that is not the case and Google has far  more listings than domain and much closer to Realestate.com.au. Back in August I actually spent a bit of time analysing the matter for an article on our agency blog about the subject. In our area at least the numbers were very close.

The one group of real estate agents that  are all featured on Google Maps are the major real estate groups. Now using Google Maps, or even the maps sections of any of the portals you could always view all the properties in an area, but there was no easy way to determine which listings belonged to which agents. Ideally each agency should be in a different colour much like different coloured pins on a large wall map.

In a little know addition to Google Maps you can now plot multiple searches on the one map.  To show you how to do this I have created a video comparing some real estate major brands first in South East Queensland and then scroll  down to the  southern states.

Very soon to be released on the market is a free online tool that will take this concept to a local level and allow you to plot individual offices against each other. You will be able to view the property your agency has in one colour and listings for sale each of your competitors have in other colours.

*****UPDATE*****

I was just sent this update on the mapping service I referred to above. This will go down to the local agent level and allow  you to identify hot spots and opportunities and will provide excellent market intelligence for the agents that use it right.  I believe the service will be free with possibly some advertising on the side and your settings can be saved so you can look at it live any time you want.  More details when it launches and I think that is goign to be early next week.

In case your interested we (Nerang First National) are the green, LJ Hooker Nerang is the Red and Ray White Nerang is the blue. There are about another 7 other agents in the area but ourselves and Hookers are the dominant market players.

Click to Enlarge

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SEO Series

This article is the third in the series. The first article introduced the concept of SEO and focussed on the initial tasks and housekeeping to prepare your website to improve its SEO and monitoring that improvement. The second article concentrated on Referral Building and how to increase the authoritative value of your website. This article will concentrate on the very important task of keyword research. Read the rest of this article »

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When Google releases new products or updates to existing products they usually do so with very little warning. One day it’s just there. Google recently announced that it was going to release major changes to their search engines.

Unlike other updates which Google has completed a preview of these new search results can be found at www2.sandbox.google.com and the new change has been nicknamed Caffeine

The results are for the US but you can manually add &gl=au to the end of the query string to get Australian specific results. Now it goes without saying that this is obviously not the final version as they would have released it if it was ready. Read the rest of this article »

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Whilst there has been a great deal of discussion on the Google Real Estate launch here in Australia there may be an even bigger blow by the internet giant about to be delivered to our industry.

In March this year a strange thing happened in the US when searching on Google. Websites that have never ranked on the front page for highly competitive keywords started to climb the rankings and replaced sites that seemed entrenched in the top 10 results. You might think this happens all the time but it doesn’t. Getting into the top 10 results for a competitive keywords takes a significant investment in SEO.

Using our industry as an example, ranking well for such highly prized keywords like real estate, property, homes for sale and other is not a very easy thing to do and the first thing you notice is that realestate.com.au is first for all three searches. However what a lot of people don’t realise is that out of the 30 results across all three searches very little of them are taken up by any of the major real estate groups or their members.

Obviously some of the other portals were on the first pages for all three searches and they fill another 13 of the the 30 positions. This means nearly half of the premium spots are filled with what I call minor sites with very good, or very lucky SEO.

To give this some perspective the private sales website, PropertyNow.com.au ranks a very commendable 4th position for the term “Real Estate” for pages in Australia on Google. This is behind major industry heavy weights that don’t even rank on the first page. In fact only the First National corporate website is the only group that appears on the first page as it comes in at number 6.

Using Google Trends to display their respective search traffic (http://bit.ly/qXF0k) we see that Propertynow.com.au is punching well above its weight. In fact it does not even show on the graph against Ray White and LJ Hooker even though they could only manage pages 2 and 5 respectively on the Search Engine Results Page.

In March Google rolled out what has been now called as Google’s Brand Update in the US. What happened was well known and popular brands started to appear high in the search engines results replacing those smaller sites that have elevated their position due to clever SEO work.

In the past week Google has also rolled out these changes to the UK. This article has a great explanation of it all here –  http://www.seobook.com/google-branding and for a recent update on its rollout in the UK you can read this http://www.blogstorm.co.uk/google-brand-update-hits-the-uk/

It seems natural to assume that major brands are going to get a boost in search engine rankings at Google for Australian searches so pretty soon we are going to see a shake up in the traffic generated to the major real estate groups.

This spells trouble for the FSBO sites and other smaller property portals. Those members of major real estate group can probably see the upside of this article… but on the flipside I am sure the independents and those in smaller franchises and groups are probably seeing it in a completely different light.

When you start doing suburb and regionally targeted searches then the impact will really be felt by the independents and those in real estate groups not identified as being an industry brand. If the offices aligned with major real estate groups start to get a boost the traffic to many independent’s website might start to slow up.

In spite of recent pressures on the major portals, something like this MAY make the role of the major property portals even more important especially for the independents which I believe make up the majority of the agencies in Australia….. Well that is as long as Realestate.com.au and Domain.com.au actually get the benefit of this change.

Nobody actually knows what Google is going to consider as a brand and how it ranks those brands. It is certainly possible that Google may not consider portals or data aggregators like realestate.com.au and domain.com.au as brands under real estate at all.

If google determines exactly what is an industry Brand based on what people search then all the portals may be in for troubled waters. Whilst they generate a lot of traffic very little of it would would be generated on searches by the public actually searching for them or about them. This post looks at the relationship to Google Brand Updates in the UK and what people actually search for http://bit.ly/1ap0Iy and if its right then the portals might be getting nervous.

To prove this I used Google Insight for the top two portals of realestate.com.au and domain.com.au and Ray white and LJ Hooker and you can see very view people actually search for the portals by name. See this http://bit.ly/mLNqx

If on the other hand they base it on how many visitors each website gets then you would have to think they will be considered as the industries top brands. One thing is for sure, there is going to be some nervous people at the portals until we find out just which side of the fence this is going to fall because this is the last thing they need.

Major real estate groups seem to be the only guaranteed winners and independents as the only guaranteed losers. With the UK update just released it will be interesting to see if any of the UK portals start losing traffic as this might be the best indicator of how the change will effect us once it arrives, as it surely will.

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At 3.00pm today Google launched their new real estate search mapping tool which allows real estate agents to publish their listings for free and the public to browse listings.

The site has a number of new features. Users of the site can search for listings in a particular suburb and then refine the listings down using the various option, the map reloads and only the listings appear with your search (as little icons on the map). Users can then review property information via map pop ups and then go directly to the agents listing from there.

Currently there are a number of listings driven from Homehound, Harcourts and other groups, however Domain and Realestate.com.au have yet to send their listings through the free service from Google.

You can send feeds via the API or from a variety of Feed types and research this by clicking here. Talk to your feed provider about getting your listings on Google, its free and it should bring your business some pretty good leads as Google Maps has some pretty good research tools already built in.

Business2.com.au will write a review in next few days. Below is the press release from Google Australia.

Google today announced the addition of a real estate search feature to Google Maps in Australia. The new feature allows real estate agents, franchise groups and portals alike to upload their listings directly to Google Maps at no cost, making them more easily discoverable by the millions of Google Maps users in Australia.

Increasingly, people are starting their search for a new home online – Nielsen research shows that 87% of Australian home buyers use the internet to research properties*. Google saw more than 35% growth in real estate-related searches from Jan/Feb 2008 to Jan/Feb 2009**.

“We know that many Australian home buyers already use Google Maps to help their house-buying and renting decisions, especially driving directions and Street View, and by making real estate listings available right in Google Maps we can drive qualified buyers directly to listings,” says Andrew Foster, product manager, Google.

“It’s a simple and free way for real estate companies to make their listings even more discoverable, and have them seen on an easy-to-navigate map.”

Real estate agents can visit http://maps.google.com.au/realestate to find out more information about how to work with Google to have their listings appear on Google Maps.

The new feature lets potential home buyers enter a city or suburb and see available listings represented by markers or small circles on the map. They can then refine their search by price, type of property, bedrooms, bathrooms, and parking. The map will automatically update with relevant listings when panned or zoomed to another suburb, and when the search criteria is changed. Clicking on a marker or a small circle will provide more information about the listing, as well as the contact details of the listing agent and a link to their website.

President of the Real Estate Institute of Western Australia, Rob Druitt, said agents and property managers in WA would welcome the opportunity to have their listings searchable on Google Maps.

“The real estate profession, perhaps more than many others, has become strongly focused around IT and the use of websites over the last decade. The evolution of the internet has transformed the sector, such that buyers, sellers and renters are much better informed and have easy and quick access to images and contacts. Indeed, this is now the high expectation with property consumers.

“Agents are keen to embrace this, as they are always looking for new and different ways to increase exposure of their listings without runaway expenditure. The opportunity presented by Google can only help in this regard,” Mr Druitt said.

The original Google Maps prototype was invented by four engineers in Sydney: Lars Rasmussen, Jens Rasmussen, Noel Gordon and Stephen Ma, all of whom still work in Google’s Sydney engineering centre. All over the country, Australians use Google Maps to find addresses and local businesses, see satellite imagery, obtain driving directions, and create and share personalised maps, making it the most popular online maps site in Australia according to Nielsen NetRatings (May 2009).

Note: Google Australia will answer all reasonably related questions if you clearly include them in comments below.

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This article is the second in the series to help Australian Real Estate Agents improve their traffic from optimizing their website. If you have not read the first article in the SEO series I strongly suggest you start there instead and return to reading this article after that.

Referral Building

One of the recognized methods that Search Engines use to rank websites is by placing preference on what they consider authoritative websites. One of the key methods to assess your authoritative value is by analysing your website content, but we will discuss that in a future article.

The other way they calculate a websites authoritative value is by checking what websites link to you and to a lesser extent what websites you link to. The search engines understand that if popular well visited and quality websites who cover your website’s topic link to your website then there is a very high chance that you are also a quality website on that same topic. It conversely stands to reason that links from low quality off topic websites will provide no authoritative value at all, and in fact can impact negatively on your ranking. A link from a highly ranked website is like a “vote” and the more votes you get the better. The seo value or “vote” a website passes to another with a referral link is often coined “link juice”.

PageRank

Google uses a page quality ranking system called PageRank which covers the popularity of a page or website. PageRank is only part of the whole equation but it is a useful way to determine how popular a website is with incoming weblinks. Just remember as far as google is concerned PageRank is only one of the ranking factors of why your website is top of the list. A good PageRank (abbrieviated to PR) for an agency is 3 or 4.  Anything higher is probably an unrealistic goal given the traffic and exposure an indivudal agency can generate… but there is no harm in trying.

So one of the most important parts of improving your SEO strategy is to build quality referral links back to your website. These links back to your website will create a level of traffic in their own right but their real value from an SEO perspective is the “link juice” they pass to you allowing you to rank higher and get more traffic from the search engines.

There are several ways to build referral links to your website but the easiest quickest place to get your site listed on Interent website directories. That’s what we are going to concentrate on first but I will discuss other strategies of building website links later in the article.

Website Directories – Paid or Free?

In the early days of the web very few web directories charged as they all tried to build up their website’s content. Over recent years things have changed and now a few web directories have started to charge to list your site. They built up high PageRank rankings for their websites when free and  then changed a “fee” to websites to get themselves listed on a high PR site. Google recently applied a manual override to many directories “selling” links from their websites for what they considered as an excessive charge.

Even though paying a reasonable amount to get your listed is probably not out of the question, for my mind there are very few websites that are worthwhile paying for at the end of the day.  There is one major exception for that rule though and that’s Yahoo.

Get Ready

Before you start submitting your website some thought has to be put into exactly what information you submit. Other than your website address and email you are going to require two other pieces of information for just about all directories you submit to. You should prepare these for two reasons. Firstly its very important that you use the right keywords as it will help your SEO and secondly it will speed up your submission process when you can cut and paste the information every time.

Website Title

It is important to include your primary keywords in the website title but ensure you don’t include promotion terms.

“Nerang First National Real Estate – Gold Coast Real Estate Agent” might be acceptable but

“Nerang First National, the Gold Coasts Best Real Estate Agent” would not be.

Description

It is important to cover the range of services on your website. Different sites will allow different length descriptions of your website so create one default description and change it if you have it or you can create a small and a large version.

“Specialising in residential real estate services for the suburbs of Nerang, Carrara, Highland Park, Worongary and the surrounding hinterland of the Gold Coast, Queensland Australia. Website features include property for sale, property for rent, real estate guide, free advisory guides to download, local community and business directory, email newsletters, blog and more”

might be ok for a directory submission but something like

”Nerang property for sale and rent” would be very poor utilization.

Selecting the Right Category

When you submit to a business directory it is vitally important that you submit to the right category. Submitting to the wrong category will at best slow down your acceptance but at worst will mean that your submission is not even considered at all. Some directories are sorted by suburb or city. Some are just sorted by state.

I will try and make some recommendations along the way but do some research and make sure you place your submission in the best category. Some directories will even let you submit to more than one category so when you can maximize your exposure and select as many as you can. On the directory pages look for words similar to “add your site”, “add your url”, “add your business” or something similar

The Top Tips for your submissions

1. No words in CAPITALS
2. No promotional language – ie. Sydney’s Best Real Estate Agent
3. Remember to use keywords that buyers or sellers would use.
4. Read the submission rules and follow them.
5. Submit to the right category

Major Web Directories

There are two web directories that are essential in SEO and are the single most powerful things you will do throughout this whole series.

DMOZ or Open Directory Project

This is one of the most powerful web directory and your listing in the directory will provide you an instant boost to your SEO. Why is it so powerful? “The Open Directory Project is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors.”

This directory is used directly by nearly 150 other sites on the interent as their own directory. In simple terms you list once on DMOZ and if accepted you will automatically get listed on nearly 150 other high quality sites. Even Google itself rebrands the DMOZ directory data as its own Google Directory. Because of this sheer power and the fact that every single submission is checked manually by a real person, the directory is held in very high regard.

You are only allowed up to 30 words as a description so make them count. Browse to your geographic region first. Ideally submit your category into the real estate section of the business section under the locality but if one does not exist yet, just submit to the business section or even the locality category. Do not submit to state or national real estate sections as it will not be allowed unless you deal with the whole state and will just delay your submission.

Yahoo Web Directory

This is the only directory that I would suggest you pay the listing fee without question. Listing in the yahoo directory is very important SEO wise and like DMOZ every submission is manually checked. Unlike DMOZ that is a community maintained, the Yahoo directory is a business which is why there is now a listing charge.

Browse to the category of your local area and then add your listing to the real estate section if it exists or else just add it there

Other Important Directories to Submit To

Google Local Directory

For some search types (and real estate is one of them) Google includes a map section at the top of the page when you use their search engine. This information is populated directly from the Google Local Directory. The default data is now drawn from the Yellow Pages but DO NOT rely up on this. Creating your own listing is easy and will get you on the top of the list on the front page plus it puts more information in the directory listing.

ZoomInfo

This is a well regarded business directory and although US centric, most of the search engines are based in the US as well.

Other Directories to submit to include:

• Hotfrog
• International Real Estate Directory
• Property Listings Australia
• Come on Aussie
• TrueLocal
• Brownbook
• Start Local
• YourEstate.com.au
• HouseHunters
• Real Estate Guide.net
• Just Real Estate

Link Exchanges

There are many websites that will list you in their directory if you link back to them first. If it’s a good quality site and its about real estate then this may be worthwhile. Don’t bother unless it is about real estate. If you decide to exchange or swap link then you will first need to setup a links page on your website. Call this page, Links, Real Estate Links, Real Estate Resources or whatever you want but its purpose is to provide links to other real estate websites. Search “Real Estate Link Exchange” on google and you will find plenty of contenders.

Dont base your whole link building efforts on these exchanges but they are good to bolster your numbers.

Local Directories. Do a search on google to find local business directories to submit to. As an example searching for “Gold Coast Business Directory” and “Gold Coast Website Directory” identifies a number of local web directories that we can submit our agency website to.

Other Link Building Strategies

Here are some ideas for building other links back to your website, all of which will help your SEO.

• Include your link on everything off the net, especially if it is published online as when it is it becomes a link back to you. Things like job ads, print magazines, press releases and many more things end up online.
• Because Government (gov.au) and Educational (edu.au) domains are unavailable to just anybody, getting a link from them is very good for SEO and one of the best ways to get this is to sponsor your local school and get them to link to your website from the schools website.
• Get everyone from the same real estate network and the same area to all link to each other.
• Make sure you comment on blogs and forums and use your web address.
• Create your own blog. Other people will reference your blog posts either in their blog or will book mark it in many of the social bookmarking sites.
• Setup accounts on social bookmarking sites like Delicous and Stumbleupon and bookmark your own websites but don’t just stop there
• Create a Google Profile, Linked In Profile, Twitter Account for you and then a  Twitter Account for your agency, Facebook Account for you and then a Twitter Page for Your agency.  Each of these accounts allows you to link back to your website and to each other.

So Who Should You Link To

Since what sites you link to also improves your own authoritative value why dont you consider creating your own link section by linking to other websites about real estate and about your immediate area. Setting up a local business and community section on your website and a real estate guide will help find a home for these links. Government and education websites also have extra importance here so dont forget to link to those sites. Things like state industry bodies, local schools, universities, local businesses.

Dont go crazy and link to every single website you can find on the topic and dont link to everyone that links to you. Most experts agree that a link from someone that you dont reciprocate to is worth more than a link you do. Some seo experts suggest Site A links to Site B which in turn only links to Site C which links only back to Site A.

When you create your own link exchange pages you will get others contacting you to ask about exchanging links with you. Why not get a little proactive about it and set the rules on your page for how to exchange links. Something like these:-

If you wish to be considered for addition to this links page :

1. All websites are to be for sites on Real Estate, Property, Property Investment, Nerang or the Gold Coast
2. Links are not to include no follow attributes and if you remove your link so will we
3. Please create a link on your website that can be accessed through your homepage (no orphaned pages) with the following link “Nerang First National – Gold Coast Real Estate Agent – specialising in residential real estate services in the suburbs of Nerang, Carrara, Highland Park and the Gold Coast Hinterland including property for sale and property for rent”
4. Please send the location of our link on your website and the link text you require to linkexchange@nfn.com.au

WARNING ! Do not participate in a Link Farms or link building system.. ever..

A link farm is a collection of thousands and even hundreds of thousands of links to other websites through an organised link swapping. The links are not natural and each particpant has the same links page on their website with virtually the same links. This practice is frowned upon and you will probably get a negative impact on your SEO. Link farms certainly use to work when authoritative value was first introduced but now they do not.

At least one self styled Real Estate SEO expert is still pushing his link farm matrix as some magical form of SEO even though it has realy helped nobody else and all major search engines strongly warn in writing against participating or running a link farm. It is believed that a possible link farm trigger will be raised with search engines if you have any more than 100 links on page. If any page is even approaching this limit split it into multiple pages. If someone promises to give you hundreds or thousands of links for a price remember, if it sounds too good to be true… IT IS.

Link building should be done manually which is time and effort.. but you only have to do it once for the link work for you for years and even decades.

Next Article

The next article in the series will cover Keyword Research and working out exactly what sort of keywords outside of the “<<Suburb>> Real Estate” and “<<Suburb>> Property” normal ones you should be targeting.

Further Reading

The SEOmoz article Search Engine Ranking Factors is the results of a survey covering this very topic with 37 SEO Experts. It ranks common SEO strategies, how the experts rank each strategy and rates the agreement between them all.  SEOmoz also produce a fantastic “Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization” at . You can even download the guide and print it out for later reading.

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