Real Estate Websites: Falling Off Page One
· CommentsThis guest post was written by Sam Chapman who markets Austin Real Estate
Ouch, That Hurts!
I fell off page one of Google for the term Austin real estate about 6 weeks ago. The same players are at the top of page one, but there is quite a bit of movement in 3-10.
I found something very interesting when looking at my traffic statistics recently:
- This year, from November 1 through November 23, my traffic showed 5,635 unique sessions. For the same time period in 2007, I had 6,345.
- For the term Austin real estate, I had 611 sessions last November, compared to just 89 this November.
- If I subtract the number of sessions generated from the term Austin real estate from the total sessions for both time periods, my traffic is only down by 188 unique sessions.
What does this tell me?
The Power of Long Tail Search Terms
It pretty much proves the power of long tail search terms, which I blogged about back on October 14. I think my traffic has actually increased in a sense.
This year has seen loads of buyers cut out of the market. Home sales in Austin are down more than 20% compared to 2007. Most of my clients are buyers from outside the Austin area. They find me on the internet searching a variety of terms.
So if the number of buyers has decreased, the traffic on my site should have decreased much more than it has, but it has remained relatively stable. This November, the number of unique sessions on my site is down just 188 sessions. That isn’t very significant considering the state of the market.
The Power of Blogging
When I take a really detailed look at my stats, I found that so far this November, 27% of the top 100 entry pages into my website are blog posts. That is serious long tail stuff.
When I look at the visitor navigation stats, the top page is the home page. The second page that people click from are blog posts. In other words, they start with a blog post and click over to the main website.
So falling off page one had me a bit freaked out a month ago, but not I am not quite as concerned now. Should I work on getting back there? Of course! But, it shows that the short tail (high traffic search terms), as powerful as it is, isn’t quite as critical as many people think it is.
5 Comments
December 9th, 2008 at 8:43 pm
Sam,
You make some great points about the long tail. Do you find that traffic from your blog converts well when going to your website? We found that if we can link a post or reference a particular portion of our website in the post the referral traffic will convert in excess of 10% in certain cases. What has been your experience with this?
Joey
December 11th, 2008 at 10:51 am
Joey – by conversions, do you mean the number of people who jump from the blog to the website? Or are you talking about registering to see listings? I can’t track the latter and besides my stats it is difficult to track specifically how people find me. I always ask and people usually have no idea the search term they used. Sometimes someone will call and tell me that she was reading my blog, but that is rare.
December 11th, 2008 at 11:11 am
Sam,
I agree. It is very rare that anyone I talk to can remember how they found me. How do you identify the conversions you described, Joey?
December 12th, 2008 at 5:55 am
hello Sam, thanks for your post. i agree that,if the number of buyers has decreased, the traffic on any site should have decreased, but it has remained relatively stable, which is confusing.
December 14th, 2008 at 6:09 pm
If Sam’s presence on the Internet was static, I think his traffic would be down.
But, he’s seeing the advantage that good SEO brings. He’s being found for lots of different searches, and he’s got an active blog that increases the number of searches he ranks for.
In that situation, even though I’m sure the number of searches in total is down, he’s being found for lots of different search terms. So, he’s getting a little bit of the traffic from a larger number of terms, and so his traffic is stable.
Does that make sense? It’s hard to explain!