Duncan Wierman’s Blog

What Business Are You In Again?

Something which never fails to surprise me is the enormous number of real estate professionals who don’t seem entirely sure of what business they’re in. From the way that a lot of real estate investors do business online, it looks like many of these investors seem to think that they’re affiliate marketers.

You may be wondering why I say this. All you need to do is to have a look around at how a lot of real estate investors are running their online marketing efforts; it’s not only newcomers to the business either. Even seasoned professionals are seemingly being swayed by the idea that the methodologies employed by affiliates and other internet marketers are the right way to sell real estate.

Landing pages, hub pages, Squidoo lenses and other methods used by people trying to promote their products online have been adopted by real estate investors. To some extent, you can’t really blame people who haven’t spent a lot of time in the industry for thinking that there’s some merit to these techniques. Even many investors who’ve been in the industry for years but are new to the web have taken the same approach; it’s partially their inexperience with the World Wide Web as a business environment. However, you can’t help but think that these investors should really know better.

Again, you’re probably wondering why I’m putting things this way. The problem with the methods used by affiliate marketers to promote their businesses may work fine for them (or other solely internet marketing businesses), but it’s not at all the way you want to go to promote a real estate business.  The reason is a very simple one: these landing pages and other tools of the affiliate marketing trade look cheap. Cheap, of course is not the impression you want to make in the real estate business.

Now it is true that real estate is largely a numbers game; investors do need to make contact with as many potential buyers, sellers and other investors as possible. However, the way that you go about making all of these contacts matters. Being successful in real estate depends on looking professional. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t be so eager to do business with someone who uses affiliate marketing style landing pages and similar tactics. Again, it’s hard to fault people for trying, but when it comes down to actually closing a deal, most people are going to be much more favorably disposed to making a serious investment in real estate with someone who has a professional looking online presence.

It’s not that there is anything inherently wrong with landing pages; done properly these can indeed work for you – in a different line of work, that is. They’re just not something which gives a good impression of you as a businessperson, especially in real estate. There are better and more professional looking alternatives available which are easier to manage, save you time and don’t make you look like an internet marketer desperate to make a sale. Desperation is never attractive, especially when you’re in business.

There’s simply no substitute for a well designed, professional looking website if you’re in the real estate business. You could also have a blog, provided it’s not hosted on a free blogging platform (again, this just looks cheap) and has had enough work put into it that it has a professional appearance – you definitely don’t want anything which looks thrown together quickly. Just put yourself in the shoes of a prospective buyer or investor. Would you be likely to want to make such an important purchase from someone who’s using a Squidoo lens and a series of poorly produced landing pages (no doubt full of flashing ad banners and cringe-inducing design)? If you’re like 99.99% of the population, the answer is no. Keep this in mind as you consider how to take your real estate business online.

Better still is an integrated online strategy for your real estate business which includes a professional looking static website and a well designed blog which links to your main site. Rather than spending untold hours making dozens of different landing pages for your business, you can get much better results (and better SEO) by using your blog instead. By directing all of your geo-targeted traffic to one website, you’ll be able to build your page ranking much more quickly – and since your blog will link to your main website, you’ll see that page move up in the search engine page rankings as well.

What does this all mean for you? Steadily growing, sustainable targeted traffic for your business. It’s exactly what these other real estate investors who seem to think they’re in the affiliate marketing business aim for but fail to achieve: precisely because their own methodologies hamstring their efforts.

Don’t shoot yourself in the foot. Real estate may be a numbers game, but there are better ways of getting the traffic you need; prospective buyers and sellers who will see your website and perceive you as a reputable business who they can work with, not a fly-by-night operator they should run, not walk the other way from. Naturally, there are plenty of reputable real estate investors out there who are doing things entirely wrong – their online strategy makes them appear like unreliable partners. Don’t follow their example.

The next time someone tries to sell you on some sort of affiliate marketing style marketing strategy for your real estate business which promises to build you a “money funneling machine” or something of the like, just listen calmly and nod. Then counter by offering them a prime piece of real estate – there’s this lovely bridge over the East River you could sell them with breathtaking skyline views of Manhattan. After all, turnabout is fair play.

SIMS.. ROFL..

A recent e-book claiming that websites are a less effective means of promoting a real estate business than are landing pages (also known as squeeze pages). As anyone who knows their SEO methodologies can tell you, it ain’t necessarily so. There are a number of reasons why an actual website is a more effective tool to gather leads and generate business if real estate is your field. While a landing page can be properly optimized for the search engines, the long and short of it is that doing so means one thing – more work for the webmaster.

The book seems to be designed to convince real estate investors of the merits of landing pages largely to persuade them to purchase the author’s system. Since real estate investors tend to be far more savvy about real estate than they are about search engine optimization, it’s certain that he’ll see some level of success with this book and the (nebulously defined) system it promotes; at least until investors realize that they’re actually losing out on business by having adopted this ill-conceived approach to online real estate promotion.

While it’s hard to fault someone for going for easy money where they see it, investors should be advised that what they really need isn’t an entirely new approach to building an online presence – it’s simply making the most of the online presence they already have.

There are a number of reasons why real estate investors should choose to maintain a traditional web page rather than building a series of landing pages. For starters, real estate is a business where your image matters. Having a professional appearance is incredibly important; landing pages are something which are largely the province of fly-by-night internet marketers (though not always, we’re not trying to give landing pages a bad name altogether here).

You can think of it in this way: if you were looking to purchase a property, whether as an investment or as a new home, who would you rather do business with? The Realtor with a polished, professional looking site, or one whose web presence is more akin to the virtual take on a used car lot? In many cases, this appearance corresponds with the behavior of the Realtor; basically, landing pages tend to look cheap. Hardly the impression you want to give a prospective buyer or seller, is it? Of course it isn’t, so let’s move on.

One of the chief problems with using landing pages is that a single business will tend to maintain a great deal of these pages which are targeted towards slightly different keywords, especially when using PPC advertising to promote your business. The proponents of landing pages often characterize this as a ‘money funneling system’, something which is not entirely accurate. A better analogy might be a sky full of very dim stars viewed from a brightly lit city center. Those stars aren’t all that visible now, are they?

The point here is that landing pages are rarely terribly visible in terms of search results. Since the content of these multiple landing pages is generally very similar, one page often differing from another only in the main keyword used, search engines view them as duplicate content. What does this mean? It means that search engines largely ignore these pages – so they have little if any traffic or lead generation potential beyond the relatively small number of people who pay attention to contextual advertising.

Is this inherently problematic? Actually yes – all of the work which goes into building these landing pages which don’t tend to generate that much traffic, relatively speaking could have gone into promoting your main website and gaining natural traffic. This traffic of course increases your website’s search engine ranking which means even more traffic and a higher profile.

If real estate is a numbers game, it stands to reason that you’d want to actually work the numbers and maximize your traffic to a single source. Landing page proponents will tell you that a traditional website can’t target all of the various keywords that a landing page can. This, of course is nonsense. It’s every bit as easy (if not easier) to add a page to your own website which is optimized for the same keywords – and it actually builds the page ranking of your website, rather than detracting from this important task.

I’ll leave you with one other advantage that a traditional website has over  using only landing pages when it comes to search engine optimization and generating leads. Landing pages don’t tend to be re-index by search engines if indeed they are ever indexed in the first place! A website, by contrast has one possible application which makes it superior to landing pages in every way – it’s easy to deploy a blog as part of your website.

Blogging with Lead Capture Generation the best way to go.

Why a blog? Because it’s an incredibly easy way to add new content to your site and keep search engines coming back. This can help build your page ranking and your traffic faster and more sustainably than any number of landing pages ever will. In the time it takes to put together a single web page, you could add a page to your main site, put work towards other traffic driving strategies or get your site re-indexed by adding a new post to your blog; and you’d still have time to get yourself a cup of coffee, sit back for a moment and congratulate yourself on your business acumen while the people who favor landing pages are still uploading their page. It’s an easy call to make – websites win out over landing pages hands down.

UPDATED

Google Slap:

A term by online marketers about Google  introducing a quality score for the landing pages

Quality score criteria are:

1. Whether the landing page is part of a full website which minimally has to include a Contact-, an About Us- and a Privacy Policy-page.
2. Whether there is a complete navigation menu internally linking to each page of the website.
3. Whether there is a site map
4. Most important, whether the content of the page has a high relevancy to the  keyword