The online real estate game is changing and Google is making it very clear who the landlord is. A very popular article hosting site came up for sale for less that $2000 even though it still has some great traffic. Google graphs is going to help Google really fine tune the responses you get before you get them. No more "aggregator" or junk websites.
The article site that is for sale only makes about $30 a month from adwords, and it would take a shift to turn it into a subscription base given that Google is now downplaying the input from the article sites. May authors like me are sticking to the big pages like blogger and wordpress.org.
So what is a business to do? Real brick and mortar businesses are at a huge advantage right now where some individual people and online only companies are at a loss. Any solo or small business with a business address can build a solid following online or pay an SEO to to local listings for them. We have programs for under $500 a month that are very successful for our clients.
Who it doesn't help are people like Real Estate agents where 50 or 100 agents might use the same physical office address. The broker is the only one gaining ground. Individual agents are now double tasked with online work and social work to just keep up with the rankings and traffic for the office.
The timing couldn't have been worse for me as I made the decision to focus my business on the Real Estate industry and join my wife as an agent for Keller Williams Newport Estates. The fun part is looking at how all of this has changed marketing for Real Estate, a market that has been beaten down for over 6 years. We'll get it figured out, it just means I have to put in more effort than I expected when I started Real Estate School last fall.
For my existing clients, many saw some traffic improvements with very little additional effort on our part. We only had to make a couple of minor changes for law firms, auto service centers and the like. For the real estate work, we are taking on an entirely new direction. We don't know how it is working yet but one of the techniques we are trying is the billboard and newsletter style websites.
The billboard website is a website like www.newportcostamesa.com where there is a newsletter of the events for Newport and Costa Mesa. Then we are going to create a subdomain like AutoService.NewportCostaMesa.com and build a one page billboard for our Auto Service client in that area. For them it should work nicely. For realtors, we don't know how it will pan out due to the sheer numbers.
I'll let you know. In the mean time, if you get a Google Graphs page, let us know what you think!
