SEO: Seek Expert Opinions

A little historical perspective before I start this post. In 1997 I registered the domain name Sitetraffic.Com. It was little sideline business that my wife operated. She amassed a great database of Real Estate related search engines (remember ired.com?) and added those to the crop of Yahoo's and other directories that were available at the time, and for a nominal fee, she would help with keywords and submit my client's sites to the database. I guess you could say she was a pioneer in the world of what is now called, SEO, search engine optimization. Because the landscape of that business changed so drastically, so quickly, the need for her services diminished into the world of bots and crawlers, automated processes. She still uses the domain today, same clients, different business.

The Real Estate Tomato blog did an excellent post on SEO recently. It was followed up by Dustin at the Rain City Guide with some equally excellent commentary. This is a subject near and dear to me because I am constantly bombarded with the issue from Realtors and Brokers. It's hard to come up with an answer that they really want to hear and there's usually no time to go into the intricacies and nuances of the subject. I really wish there was a good single source to point them to that would approach the subject with point blank honesty.

I subscribe to one of the oldest Realtor list servs on the web and this topic comes up with great frequency. A recent thread was from a Realtor that was going through her second "SEO Company" and she was very upset at the lack of results she was receiving and one of them had actually skipped with her cash. My guess is that she had no idea what she was buying and no idea why, she probably just got sucked into a couple scams. Understanding search engines, click throughs, conversions, organic versus direct and dozens of other search related issues are something a real estate pro rarely has the time to research and understand. I would guess that most of them jump in without even analyzing the traffic to their sites ahead of the effort. Luckily the product I sell does an outstanding job of creating direct web traffic and improves organic search results tremendously. Our clients don't really care how it happens, they're just happy that it happens at all. We recently had the opportunity to view the analytics of a podcasting client's web site. Of the top ten referrers to their site, 2 were from podcasting specific directories and that's just the tip of the iceberg. So, from a web 2.0 perspective, it's a little easier to explain how blogs and podcasts are beneficial, but the issue is bigger than that.

I like to point people to searchenginewatch.com. It can be a bit confusing for someone that doesn't spend the bulk of their time immersed in the topic, but I haven't really located a great alternative. The real heart of the problem is web traffic in general, not just from search engines. It's a quality over quantity issue and that seems to be lost on so many people in the business. I guess its an emotional thing sometimes. Why isn't my site coming up in the search engines like XYZ company? Chances are that may not be doing XYZ any good at all. There's no way to know what the click through rates are for XYZ, there's no way to know if they are converting those clicks to leads. My next post is going to cover what happens with those leads once they are generated, it's was inspired by a "What the Heck?" moment I had when reading an article in a Realtor magazine. Stay tuned.

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