Archive for Sam Chapman
Insider Insight: Who Cares About Me?
· Comments
This guest post was written by Sam Chapman who markets in Austin, TX
Many real estate agent websites have an “About Me” page on them, but does anyone ever read it? Most people go to real estate websites and don’t look at anything initially except the property search page. That is why agent sites need to have a really good property search feature. However, some recent experience taught me something about the About Me page and other pages on my own Austin real estate website.
I have worked with three sets of buyers within the last 6 months and all of them chose me to work with partially based on my About Me page. The story went something like this with all of the couples: First, they were all 40+ years old. These are people who have bought and sold homes before and who understand the value of a REALTOR®.
They all found my website, registered to look at home listings and were on and off the site almost daily for about 2-3 months. When they had narrowed down the area they wanted to look in, they started jumping to other pages on my site such as the ones about schools and recreation.
One of the most interesting things these folks did was start learning about me. One of the ladies told me that she liked the section on my Meet Sam Chapman page entitled “Some Things Most People Don’t Know About Me.”
I added this personal trivia because I didn’t want people just looking at education, affiliations and the like. The first part of the page was a short bio, but the things most people don’t know about me made me more human to these people.
One of the buyers told me that she read that I was an Eagle Scout and that gave her a trust factor. Another family with kids read that I had been a substitute teacher and loved that. Another thought it was very cool that I had jumped out of a hot air balloon from 10,200 feet outside of Fairbanks, Alaska.
When an initial likeability and trust level was reached, the buyers called or emailed me. That started the relationship that they felt they already had even though we had never talked before. From there, two of the couples purchased within 30 days.
My point is simply that although most people will just look at the property search page, others, especially the more mature ones, will want detailed information. Some will even want to know who that agent is. So if you are an agent with a real estate website, get a little background on yourself out there for the people who want to know you.
A Note from Kathleen: Sam’s post reinforces a couple of my philosophies. First, I’ve always said that the goal of a real estate website is to get visitors to adopt it as their real estate research headquarters. That obviously happened with the visitors in Sam’s examples - they started with the home search, then came back for more over time.
I’ve also always encouraged agents to have an effective “about” page on their sites. You’re not there when your visitors start to wonder who you are. You need a marketing message that explains to visitors why they should work with you as opposed to another agent. Sam’s idea of the “things people don’t know about me” could be a great addition to your marketing message to get more personal with those visitors who want to know!
Using Images to Optimize Your Website
· CommentsThis guest post was written by Sam Chapman who markets Austin Real Estate
If you have a real estate website and want to attract buyers, you will probably have visitors from outside your area. I have attracted many buyers to my Austin Real Estate website and I have yet to sell a home to a local who found me on the internet. Most visitors are from outside of Austin and most of these are actually from outside Texas.
So one thing I have done in order for people understand Austin was to create several photo albums on my site. If you want to do this, take your own photos - respect intellectual property rights and never use anyone else’s photos without permission.
When you load photos, make sure to add appropriate alt image text. This is the text that shows up when you hover a mouse over a photo on a web page (if the alt text exists). Search engines can recognize that an image is on a web page, but can’t tell what it is. Alt text gives the search engines an idea of what the image is showing. The other important thing about alt image text is that it gets your keywords on the page.
Another thing you can do is upload photos to Flickr.com. When you upload a photo, create a good title using appropriate keywords. Write a good description using keywords and use appropriate tags. If you do this well, you can optimize the images to be found for your search terms. You can even point to a page on your website using html with the link embedded in appropriate anchor text.
The links from Flickr are nofollow now, but that’s not a problem. I doubt there would have been much link juice. However, if your images are good and get found, you may get clickthroughs to your site and that drives traffic. Click to see one of the Lake Travis photos I just posted. You will see the title, tag, description and embedded link back to my website. By the way, if you click on my Lake Travis Photos link, look around a while. The Lake Travis area doesn’t look anything like what people expect Texas to be like.
One thing I noticed is that if you use html to embed an address in anchor text, Flickr sometimes does something strange when you save the description. It replaces the http with a #. You need to go in and edit that and save again in order for the link to work. Otherwise, anyone clicking the link just stays on that photo on Flickr.
After your images have been on your website and Flickr for a while, some should be picked up by Google Images. The pages the images are on will show your web address, but it won’t be a live link. However, if someone clicks on an image, it sends the visitor to your website - more traffic.
So get out and take some photographs and get to work!
When a Google Sitemap Hurts Your Rankings
· CommentsIf you’re doing real estate marketing online, you need good rankings in the search engines. One of our contributors, Sam Chapman, wrote about the fact that he had fallen off the first page of Google for his main keyword. Luckily, his website is strong enough that the activity on his site wasn’t really affected.
I got an email from Sam the other day. He’s figured out how to retrieve his high ranking on Google for his main keyword phrase!
And, it’s a pretty weird fix.
When Can a Google Sitemap Hurt Your Ranking?
Sam wrote, “I had a Google sitemap warning in the Google Webmaster Tools. It stated that my RSS feed had too many tags and that I should fix and resubmit. The thing that both puzzled me and troubled me was that I first saw the warning a few weeks after falling off page one for my most coveted search term - Austin real estate.”
Sam tapped the resources at the REW forum by publishing a post asking if anyone knew anything about that error. One of the other REW members posted a link to a blog post that discussed merging two blogs into one.
The owner didn’t mention getting an error message, and his merged blogs were doing OK, but he was frustrated because his pages weren’t getting indexed very quickly. The answer came from another REW member, whose advice was “Delete your Google Sitemap.xml file and make the search engines crawl the site from scratch.”
Once the file was deleted, the owner of the combined blogs saw his indexed pages increase dramatically. So, Sam decided to try the same thing with his website.
Within 10 days, he was back on page one of the Google SERPs for his key real estate marketing term, Austin Real Estate.
The Morals of the Story?
- Having a site map on your real estate website is a good thing. And, in most instances, submitting a Google sitemap is a good thing, too.
- You may or may not get an error message in your Google Webmaster Tools when a site map is confusing the search engine web crawlers.
- There may be times when some issue with your Google sitemap can negatively impact your rankings, and you’d be better off deleting the site map.
- If you have submitted a Google sitemap, you better check your Google Webmaster Tools periodically to make sure that there are no issues you need to be aware of!
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.
This guest post was written by Sam Chapman.
Your Primary Keywords Don’t Drive the Majority of Traffic
Most good real estate webmasters understand that the majority of traffic driven to their sites is not from their most key search terms. For example, the terms Austin real estate, Austin TX real estate, Lake Travis real estate and Austin real estate blog generated only 13% of the visits to my site in September, 2008. That percent would be higher if I eliminated the statistics for visitors who didn’t use a search engine to get to the site, but still, this is pretty interesting.
Use Long Tail Search Terms to Increase Traffic
So what is my site found for? Long tail search terms. If you don’t know what the concept of the long tail is, here’s a good article on the subject.
Some of the long tail terms I get found for are Hamilton Pool, Austin MSA, Circle C homes, Apache Shores real estate and Spanish Oaks. The latter three are all Austin area subdivisions. Getting found for Hamilton Pool is OK, but it nothing compared to being found for real estate related terms.
The Power of Community Pages
Now that you know about the long tail, let me share something about how you can generate long trail traffic. I set up a main page on my site called Austin Neighborhood Listings that links directly from my home page.
On that page are links to neighborhood specific pages, categorized by geographic area. Each page has a few paragraphs of content talking about the neighborhood and then framed IDX search results showing homes specific to that neighborhood. The content before the IDX search frame is critical, as search engines can’t do much with information inside frames.
Here is where things get interesting. Remember that my main terms result in about 13% of page views? More than 10% of the page views on my real estate website are these neighborhood specific pages.
Not many real estate agents optimize for specific neighborhoods, so this is a great way to get long tail traffic. Visitors also navigate to the neighborhood pages from the link on the home page so this is also a great way to make your site more sticky and keep people on it longer.
Adding neighborhood pages can accomplish several things:
- It can give you pages about specific neighborhoods, which human visitors love.
- It can give you more pages of unique content, which search engines love.
- It can give you great internal links to neighborhood pages with appropriate anchor text, which is good for human visitors and search engines.
- It can give you the ability to generate long tail traffic, which is great for you.
In case this tells you anything, I am getting a listing in Apache Shores this week from someone who found my Apache Shores Homes page last weekend.
In order to frame the listings, you need to have a good third party IDX provider that allows customization of the IDX link that will show homes by neighborhood. The IDX vendor also needs to be approved by your Board as a third-party vendor. Check with your Board to see who the approved vendors are and check them out.
If you can do what I did, start building neighborhood pages on your real estate website. You’ll be happy that you did. If you want to see what I am talking about, visit my Austin real estate website.
