Archive for Sam Chapman
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.
This guest post was written by Sam Chapman who
markets Austin Real Estate and publishes the Austin Real Estate Blog.
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I was looking through my website stats today and noticed something that I had not seen before. It was the graph of visitor loyalty.
Website Stats: Visitor Loyalty
This basically measures how often people come back to my website. The majority of visitors use the site once and don’t come back. Many of these visitors probably find the site in a search for some long tail terms, those searches not related to real estate.
Finding a website about Austin real estate rather than Hamilton Pool photos, for example, a visitor would probably look at the page I have for that subject, leave and not return.
People who visit the site 2-4 times, and that is a fair number of visitors, may find the site when searching a subject that returns a blog post and they may revisit my blog a couple of times. Of course, these visitors could be looking for real estate in Austin and for whatever reason not come back.
These might be people considering a move, real estate agents in other areas just checking Austin out, real estate agents who are studying my site to get ideas for their sites (yes, they really do this) or people just studying different markets for whatever reason.
The Thing That Caught My Eye
The thing that caught my eye was the number of visitors who spent time on my site 15 to 50 times. When I compared this year to months prior to May, 2007, I noticed a big difference in the frequency of people spending time on my site 15 to 50 times.
Then it hit me. May of 2007 is when I switched from the Austin Board of REALTORS® IDX search to the WolfNet IDX search. The ABoR feature isn’t a great search feature (no offense intended). WolfNet is more feature rich and is more user friendly.
The WolfNet search also allows visitors to save searches to come back to later and also to save listings as favorites. These features provide a stickiness factor that wasn’t on my site before.
The number of people visiting my website more than 15 times after implementing an improved IDX search was up over 5 times compared to before. That is a huge number. The number of leads I have gotten since implementing a better IDX feature and the quality of these leads is also up.
Moral of the Story?
If you are a REALTOR®, you absolutely must have a website. If you are a REALTOR® with a real estate website, you absolutely must have a great IDX search.
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If you’d like to see your guest post (and links to your site) on this blog, contact me today!
A Message from Kathleen: If you read Sam’s last post here about how he quadrupled his Internet leads, you’ll know about the changes he made to his website that had such amazing results. Now, he’s back to let us know how that increase in leads has translated into business. And, you’ll see some of my comments in italics.
I put a call to action on every page of my Austin real estate website in the top right corner. It contains a link to an MLS map search, my contact information, a link to email me, and a link to my blog.
I did that at the very end of November, and immediately started getting more calls, emails and registrations on my site than ever before. Since I started tracking on February 1, I have received 143 phone calls and emails, and have had over 800 registrations on my site. OK, but what about conversion?
We all know that most Internet leads don’t convert quickly. But, at this point, I have one listing, four homes under contract and one closing as a result of internet leads since February 1. I am also working with four buyers who should be under contract by the end of August, and I have two $1 million+ referrals out that should close this summer. Not bad!
For over a year, my site’s ranking on the search engines has fluctuated from #3 to #8 and everywhere in between for the term Austin real estate, #3 or #4 for Austin real estate blog, between #3 and #5 for Austin homes, #1 or #2 for Lake Travis real estate, and up there for a whole bunch of long tail results. My short tail makes up around 15% of results.
So part of getting the leads is a result of getting my site ranked well in the search engines, but before I made the call to action change, I wasn’t getting even 10% of what I am getting now.
- This is a great example of the power of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). You’ll notice that while Sam has evidently done a lot of work to rank for his main keywords, his long tail results (ranking for terms that are related to your main keywords) are also impressive. If the traffic from his short tail (main keywords) is only 15%, that means that 85% of his traffic comes from related keywords. This is a situation unique to doing SEO on a site - using pay per click, for example, will produce traffic as long as you’re paying for specific keyword placement, but you’ll never get traffic from related keywords!
- Another factor to keep in mind is the fact that Sam provides a map-based MLS search provided by WolfNet. While he had the Wolfnet search on his site long before his leads increased so dramatically, I believe that using a more sophisticated search may be contributing to his results.
- Sam is requiring registration after the visitor views three listings. The fact that 1) he has a map search tool, and 2) he can give his visitors some information before registration is required may have something to do with his visitors’ willingness to create an account. When I asked him about that, he described how he gets his search to work so well:
