Maureen McCabe may not be the best Realtor in Columbus- but she’s got the right idea when it comes to getting to the top of search- and building a community around her.
It seems so many Realtors are ready to spend a ton of money advertising in throw away classifieds section- when the web is global, pretty much eternal, and allows you to write as much about your listings- or your expertise- with no additional cost.
The real estate listings in the newspaper are typically nothing more than price and product ads- with a grocery list of “features” attached. Considering a home is the biggest investment most people make, it seems sad that this is the best that Realtors can do.
So- if you are shopping for a Realtor to sell your home- start asking them about how they plan to market your house online- who is in their “Network” – and how big their audience is? If they can’t tell you about the key search terms to their site (not the corporate parent)- or the number of unique visitors (not hits) and show you who links to their site- move on. These are the keys to having a successful web site- and unfortunately, most Realtors still don’t get it.
On Tuesday, we had a full day of seminars. Intro Blogosopher in the morning, and the first WordPress advanced in the afternoon. To showcase the power of categories in WordPress to gather ideas in several posts into a super post- I searched The Next Wave news blog for anything about the super hot agency “Crispin Porter + Bogusky” in Miami and created a new category of the same name.
We searched Google for any mention of The Next Wave when searching for “Crispin Porter Bogusky” and gave up after the 300 th or so reference (30 pages in). Today I added a post about “CB+P” to the site- and then went to Google again a few hours later. We were now number 7! And that is out of 176,000 results. A few articles above ours, was a great article about CP+B from Business Week– so we used the “Press-it” function of WordPress to add yet another post to the site.
The goal is to get to the top of Google, using real content, instead of nested pages, or paid postion, to be next to the hottest ad agency in the world. Of course, we think we’re the second hottest agency- along with half the agencies in America- but the difference is- we’ve figured out the secrets of search- and content management- and even Crispin hasn’t got that part quite mastered.
If you want to learn how to get your site, and yes, we’ll even teach other ad agencies, to the top of Google- without paying for it, you need to attend one of our seminars.
The 12 reasons why UK businesses don’t blog | Internet Marketing News and Blog | E-consultancy.com
Although it’s written for the UK market- everything in the article applies here.
If you think your website is working for you- and you don’t have RSS, some form of live interaction (commenting) with your customers, and a way to update your site at will- you need to take the Blogosopher course and wake up.
Using a blog content management system like WordPress to manage your site is the best way to optimize your site for search engines- and to make things happen.
Last month www.thenextwave.biz had 6,243 visitors. 370 of them spent between 30 minutes and an hour with us and another 326 spent over an hour. Thats 696 cold calls- can your sales force do that?
If you are looking at having someone “Optimize your site for Search engines”- think again- we had 1496 different key phrases used to reach our site. Thinking about buying search terms? Google delivered 75.1% of the links to our site- while Yahoo only delivered 8.7% and MSN another 6%. That could be a function of how well WordPress notifies Google- or it could be that people use Google a lot more than other search tools when looking for sites about advertising.
Have you spent a lot of time designing your home page? Don’t- unless it’s WordPress- our conventional entry page: www.thenextwave.biz/tnw had 1279 enrtries, and our news section- run by WordPress: 16,613 with another 3,503 coming in through RSS.
WordPress is the most powerful tool you can use to build your business. Come to a seminar and learn how to get this kind of response for your business.