Effective Web Sites

As of late in the Real Estate SEO business everyone has been saying the same thing "We need to cut costs, and we need to maximize our Return on investment!"

So when we tell our clients that the efforts for Optimizing for Google will be X dollars, and Optimizing for MSN and Windows Live (now both are BING) will be another X dollars, with Yahoo also costing X dollars resulting in 3X dollars for roughly 97% market share on the desired search terms well it sounds all good, but the question that always comes next in these tough economic times is what can we do for half of that number? This is when we start to talk about the ROI on this equation?

The way this conversation typically goes is this, “well when you look at the fact that the X dollars spent on Google yields approx 70% of web search, while the X dollars spent on Bing yields approx another 16% and the Yahoo X dollars spent will yield yet another 11%” the resounding response is simply, can I spend 1X for 70% and leave the rest?

So with the Bing Yahoo Search deal that has been reached does this change anything? Well yes, first we need to state the obvious, it will be a reduction of SEO efforts by 33% to yield that 97% of web search mark which is very good news, secondly this newly unified 27% market share that is now available as a single target for SEO is made up of a large number of searchers very desirable to those in the real estate world and this is a very important factor to consider.

When we look at the demographics of web searchers and the search engines the results are quite interesting as they relate to Real Estate as these are homes, commercial buildings, businesses and land being marketed, not the latest iPhone, Software Package or MP3’s.

Based on the analytical data we've gathered from the Google Analytics data we have gathered on our real estate clients web sites and third party demographic analysis charting that MSN and Live search likely due to having been the default search engine has on the primary market share of most home and office computers enjoy a very strong demographic of users often considered to be less computer savvy, typically older (30+), believed to be less likely to simply be surfing for fun but rather at the computer for a specific task, which to us geeks means boring in relation to marketing to impulse buyers, but when it comes to the reality of marketing properties these users are the users who are surfing for a purpose and are typically financially established. Looking at this demographic profile and considering it with the data we’ve analyzed directly from the real estate client sites we've analyzed we have seen that they have generated a greater percentage of high quality leads than visitors coming via Google (while the sheer volume difference makes up for the quality difference).

So where does that leave us ROI wise? well with a tight budget there is definite value in Google natural search results, but looking into the quality vs. quantity issue there is clear value in Bing (former live/msn) even without the Bing Yahoo deal, but once the integration of Bing results into Yahoo Search (when it happens you will just see a little "powered by Bing logo at the bottom) you would be out of your mind to pass up on marketing towards what is possibly a nearly 30% market share of higher quality traffic (in relation to real estate lead generation on your site), in fact we will have to wait for the hard data to prove it but we suspect that 30% will generate as many or more quality leads as Google’s 70%.

So where is the smart agent looking for ROI for his search engine optimization dollar? Google and Bing both, currently with Bing at least with the tools and techniques we utilize results are coming quicker, likely due to less targeted SEO efforts being done towards it, however as with any new engine there will be changes and shuffles in the algorithm so the plan needs to be longer term, we recommend at minimum quarterly reviews of your sites progress and activity within Bing, plus adjusting and analyzing and sudden significant shifts either positive or negative.

And the typical question of when should I start optimizing for Bing? The answer is now, simply put Bing is a relatively clean slate, and it's hard to imaging it not calculating how long the sites been indexed in its algorithm in the same manner that Google does. You don't want to be sitting there next year wondering why you are on page 2 behind those whose efforts began today.