seo and real estate June 19, 2008

so, lets talk a little bit about the real estate market. it seems to be a hot topic these days, with the economy in the shitter and the stock market loosing our hard earned dollars.

here in lovely Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, we can’t give houses away, which is a pretty sad turn since 3 years ago, our real estate agents had people calling them begging to pay top dollar for a 1 bedroom slum.

so with this information, one would image that real estate agents would insist on changing their marketing plan, unfortunately, that is not the case. many are pulling their budgets back, which means that is their marketing budget, they wouldnt dare trade in that land rover.

often times, when i talk with a Realtor about their marketing budget or their website which is a template provided by remax that has no chance in hell of being ranked even in the most non-judgmental search engines, the answer is “we are broke”.

so, how can we turn this around? how can we make real estate agents, who are notorious for not knowing how to operate their email let alone design and market a website, believe in the internet?

i have a friend who is in real estate, she has decided to kick ass on the internet will a full on ppc and seo program and she has closed 9 deals in the last 3 months, all internet leads.

of course, my friend is in her 20’s and is more literate than most.

in addition, there are plenty of specialized web design companies out there that all they do is push out templated designs with the promise of seo. their idea of seo is putting the same 5 keywords in the meta data on all pages and throwing a few alt tags in.

i feel that it is important to educate our realtor’s so they can stop being ripped off and start selling some f-ing houses!