One of the most frequent questions that website owners ask their SEO is the list of keywords for which they have managed to get rankings for their customers’ websites. The next question that follows is whether the SEO company or the SEO consultant will be able to provide a list of references that they can contact. If that is what you have in your list too, then it is high time that you strike them off and try to review the skills of your SEO professional and his or her ability to come up with strategies that will help your website.

Past Rankings and References Are Futile

You must know that as a company or as a consultant who wants to win your contract, if you were to ask some one about the keywords for which they have ranked websites, they are very unlikely to show you their failures. Moreover, success stories presented out of context of the customer requirements will make no sense. No company or no SEO professional will share their customer requirements when they share the success stories as they are bound by non-disclosure agreements.

Search engine ranking is a very complex factor and each website is different. It is just not the SEO professionals efforts that bring success or failure of a website’s online presence. The nature of the website itself has a lot to control. So all rankings cannot be considered equal. Rankings on the first page or #1 rankings in the top search engines do not tell anything to us as far as the success of your real estate website’s SEO is concerned. Success stories should always be accompanied by the effectiveness analytics and no SEO company will share with you this information. Therefore, your questions on past rankings do not help you in any way in identifying your SEO consultant.

Coming to the next question that people ask, it is about references. What do we hope to find out by asking for references? By asking for references we are hoping to find out about the quality of the services offered by the company by talking to their past customers. No SEO in their good senses will list references that will put them in trouble. You can be 100% sure that only happy customers of the past will be supplied to you as the list of references. So here again, you will be just wasting your time asking for the list of references and contacting them. Contacting references will make sense if you are going to track them by yourself and contact them.

It is interesting to note that every real estate website owner understands these dynamics well and not that these are new insights. Despite our understanding, all of us find ourselves asking these questions to our SEO companies before hiring them. If these are not the right questions to ask your SEO company, then how should one assess their SEO company before hiring them?

The best way to hire your SEO company

Before you set out to hire your SEO company, you must make sure you understand your needs first. You must have a basic understanding about SEO only then you will know what to expect of your SEO company and what results mean with regard to SEO. In other words, you should be a well-informed customer. After educating yourself about the basics of SEO, you should start taking to the SEO companies to learn about their understanding about the real estate market, the competition involved in the real estate industry etc. They should be capable of understanding your business model to effectively promote your website online. Rather than asking about the past rankings and references, you can ask them about the strategies and tools that they would be using to promote your website.

However, this does not mean that it happens to all the SEO techniques. Even today good number of old SEO techniques work well. Amongst such techniques, you can list link request to build links for your real estate website. By making other websites and blogs to link to your website or blog, your ranking will be boosted even today.

One of the drawbacks here is that not many real estate webmasters know how to make proper link requests. Their faulty approach makes their request mails dumped into the spam mail folder. With a little bit of finesse in their approach, you can get links that will speak volumes for your search engine rankings. Here are some tips that will help you get better results.

Building Relationships – Try to avoid requesting for a link in your first email, first phone call or first meeting. Your intention should be to build a relationship with the webmaster from which you intend to get a link. If you have a blog, it will be much easier to establish relationship with other blog owners by leaving good feedbacks and comments in other blogs. You will also be able to interact with the other bloggers through chat and email. This should help you create a network of online friends. Once you have befriended them, they would not mind linking to your blog or website.

Subject line of your link request – If you make mistakes here, your mails are sure to enter the spam mail folder. So avoid subject lines such as “Link to my site”, “Visit my website” etc. This step is all the more crucial if you are contacting someone for the first time. Subject lines like, “About your blog, “name of the blog” will elicit the interest of the recipient.

Personal Greetings – Make sure to use the name of the person that you are contacting. Do not use a generalized mail with greetings such as Dear Webmaster or Dear Blogger, etc. It will work out well by personalizing the mail to the individual person that you are contacting. You should also give them enough information about yourself so that your mail will look genuine. Introduce yourself properly and give them the necessary contact information including email address, website address and phone number.

This includes introducing yourself (if you have not had previous contact) and providing multiple contact details (website URL, phone number, etc).

Highlight the Benefits – No webmaster is obliged to respond to your request in a positive way. You must give them something in return for linking to you. So list all the benefits of linking to your blog or website. Just to ask for free links without offering them anything in return will make you sound too rude. If your website or blog does not have anything in particular to offer them as benefits, then you can create some impressive content that will be of use to their visitors in some way and inform them of presence of such content in your website which they can link to and benefit. If they see by linking to your website or to your blog their website visitors will benefit in a positive way then they will be more inclined to consider your request.

For instance, if you come across a blog post that poses questions on a certain topic, then you can provide the required solution that are supported by facts in your blog and request the blog to link to your website or blog which provides a solution to the problem raised by their blog.

For readers interested in starting a real estate website, you could start with general niche research. Use real estate keyword research tools to make your task simpler. In case you are real estate website owner and are looking for ways to optimize your website, start by self-analysis. Internal analytics provide you with leads to push your website up the high traffic list. You could also analyze search referrals of a website, which attracts a hefty traffic. It can be quite a handful to derive results from the long tail but with the help of Google or other advanced analytics, you could majorly simplify the task at hand. Always top referrals should be your top priority. You should be patient here as if there is a likelihood of missing valuable keywords, which widely attracted traffic. The importance of keeping your real estate keyword research results well organized could not be over stressed upon. Tabulate them under different headers as per your preference and this will add momentum to your real estate SEO. I would recommend Excel as the tool for tabulation and organization. Once you are done with strategic placement of keywords, your job is not yet complete. You have to undertake a retrospective study of the keywords and make your present day keyword ranking list. By doing so you will be able to pick out words which are in the subsequent pages. If you detect frequently searched words in those pages, you must shift them to your introductory page and even better in the first 250 words. This will surely up your rank in the search list and optimize the existent website to generate more traffic. After all, the soul searching, you could optimize your site by analyzing your competitor’s research.

With all the real estate keyword research details in place even, it will be difficult in the current days of dry spell to attract buyers and sellers. Target the information your website contains towards educating the potential buyers about the incentives, which are out there. The media definitely hypes every leaking tap into a potential flood and makes your job difficult. With the economy on the run, everyone is happy and business will flourish without you having to put forth much effort. However, with the recession, we really need solid real estate internet marketing to make people buy what they would have, had it not been for the negative aura surrounding the industry. For starters, project yourself not as the best real estate agent around but as a humble one out there for their service. The client should get the impression that he is of prime importance in the interaction and not the money minded estate agent. Your getting business is not your concern, but your client getting the best deal is the end-all and be-all of your job. This key point is overlooked by many agents in their ads and is a big no in real estate internet marketing. Hence, it is wise to not overplay your accomplishments. Create special reports addressing issues of concern during these tough times and focus on how to solve these problems. You also need to address the varied worries and concerns of your potential customers. Have an interactive session, have a newsletter they can sign up to or run a service through which they can mail you their grievances. Active interest in the individual client will help you broaden your horizons as your publicity can be achieved by word of mouth also. In order to further push up your business you could opt for a real estate marketing consultant and seek his/her expert advice on real estate SEO and marketing.