Category Archives for "Website choices for Real Estate"
Thank you all for all your wonderful participation in these free webinars that I am teaching a couple times each month! I love the questions and more so, I love to see how you implement the training in your businesses!!
This next webinar is titled: 2017 Website Best Practices
This webinar is for you if you fall in any of these categories:
We will go over the best practices for websites. This will be a live training where I will walk you through key factors and best practices.
The recording will be sent to you if you register for the webinar, as long as we don't have any technical issues with the recording.
The webinar is on Wednesday January 25 ,2017 at 3:00 p.m. Eastern Time.
Go now to register: Webinar: 2017 Website Best Practices
Join me for this new workshop: Discover 4 Ways to Get Traffic to Your Website
In this workshop you will discover:
You won't want to miss this Free Workshop so get signed up to reserve your seat now:
Webinar – Discover the 4 Ways to Get Traffic and Leads to your Website
This workshop is Wednesday July 27th at 1 p.m. Eastern Time.
You will also receive my Free Technology Resource Guide for registering for the workshop.
Join me on my workshop to discover the 7 most important questions you must ask before you buy or build a website.
7 Questions To Ask BEFORE You Buy or Build Your Website
Get on the workshop early to put your site in for a quick review.
You must be live on the webinar to have your site reviewed.
To sign up for the workshop- you need to get my Free Blueprint- “8 Pages You Must Have on Your Website” first.
You will need to know this information before the workshop.
Go here to get my Free Blueprint: “8 Pages You Must Have on Your Website”
https://katerinagasset.com/webinar-blueprint-8-pages-you-must-have-on-your-website
After you add your email to get your blueprint do NOT leave your computer. You will get taken to another website page which has the registration for the webinar information.
The blueprint will get sent to your email so make sure you check your spam box. It may be in there!
After you register for the workshop you will be sent an email sent from GotoWebinar with your registration link.
Thursday June 23, 2016
1:00 p.m. Eastern time
This is a live workshop and we will not be having a replay available. You need to be live in the workshop.
Website & SEO Creation | Case Study Update
When you are building your website you want to make sure your site gets indexed as soon as possible.
This gives you time to write your content and set up your posts and pages, optimized with SEO best practices.
If you set up your new website with the correct pages, menu, SEO all your images, get the right keywords down… you should see yourself on page 4 or page 5 of the SERPS within a few days if not sooner. This is a good signal that you are following good SEO best practices.
From there you start to refine your keyword content and narrow in on your target market.
We have been using Rhonda's website that I built as a case study for SEO best practices.
I started Rhonda's website the last week of December in 2015. By January 16th I thought to check her SERPS. It was not my intention to have the site ranking or indexed. It was right around this time there was a subtle Google algorithm shift which really helped agents, small business owners, and marketers to rise in the search engines against some big box competitors. If you were in my webinar: “SEO is Back with a Vengeance”, you will know what I am talking about.
To my surprise and delight her website was on pages 3 and 4 for her keyword phrases. We like to go after about 4 long tail keyword phrases at a time on a website because this will keep the site from becoming diluted to the point that google bots have a difficult time figuring out what your website is about.
We decided at that time to start using the website as a case study.
I finished the design on her website and added all the thin content in February and March.
She keeps climbing up the SERPS.
In April I personally wrote all her in depth content for her long tail keyword phrases. At that time we decided to add another page which are very specific to sellers with a specific keyword phrase we figured we could beat the big real estate boy sites with.
I just checked last night and her seller focused keyword phrases are in spots #1 and #2 on page one on Google now!
This is very exciting news. Does this mean that her phone will ring off the hook? No, not likely. Unless you are in a market where the real estate agents are not doing anything online, it will take time to get leads that are sellers looking to list. There are not as many sellers looking to list as there are buyers looking to buy. But the sellers you do get, are very well worth the effort of making sure you are positioned in the #1 spot on Google page one.
But she is beating out all those sites we all know and don't like:).
Her other keyword phrases have moved up to page 2 and page 3. This is also good news because as we add more content to the site and focus on ranking, her site will keep rising up the SERPS.
Having a great and awesome looking website is important but not the end all, be all. Marketing is an ongoing process. It is not a one time thing. You have to continue to add content to your website. You have to publish to your blog on your website often. The stats show that business owners who post articles 15 times per month receive much more business than those who don't.
Rhonda just had her IDX broker account approved by the MLS. We are going to be adding some IDX pages to her site and optimize them for SEO. We will then allow the site to stew a while before we check the SERPS again.
Once those are in place, we will add some more light boxes to the site that we can send traffic from ads to. This will also help with SEO because it will increase the traffic to the site. This in turn, will get her some buyer leads even though her site is focused on getting listings. This all takes time to gel.
Patience is the key.
We will then start to monitor the traffic. This includes checking analytics to see which keyword phrases are bringing traffic to the website and focus on building content around those terms as long as those terms are congruent with ‘money' terms, ( meaning- those most likely to buy or sell are the ones searching those phrases).
This is an exciting project and I am grateful that Rhonda has allowed me to use her site as a case study.
Rhonda is a Listing Experts Academy member who follows what she learns to apply the best practices for SEO and branding on the internet.
I have more websites I have completed and all the websites are climbing the SERPS. It is so exciting to watch each of my clients' websites climb and also receive compliments from sellers about how great their websites look and feel. Contact me for a list of references if you are considering getting a website built. My clients are happy campers! I do all the design work myself on your websites. I also make sure that you get weekly updates on your website progress.
Of course if you are a DIYer – I have a ton of free website building video tutorials over on my YouTube channel for you!
Congratulations to Rhonda, one of my wonderful clients. She hired me to design her a website. She is a member of my Listing Experts Academy and also a private coaching client.
Rhonda Fee owns her brokerage in Pleasanton California. She did all her avatar training which is in module 1 in Listing Experts Academy and then she hired me to help her with her keyword research just to make sure she was on the right track.
We discovered her avatar. An avatar is your ideal customer persona but it goes way deeper than general demographics. We really drill down. We were able to really narrow her niche to match her avatar.
From there I was able to take her logo as the guide to her colors and messege that will resonate with her avatar. It flows and tells her story in a way that will meet her avatar where she is.
It is so exciting to see all of the necessary pieces come together.
Check out her website at: http://HomeValuesPleasanton.com.
We have a webinar coming up on Wednesday: “Website Best Practices” to help you get your website on the right track.
Go here to sign up for the webinar: https://katerinagasset.com/2016-website-best-practices-webinar/
Here are some of the screenshots of Rhonda's Home page:
Thank you all for all your wonderful participation in these free webinars that I am teaching a couple times each month! I love the questions and more so, I love to see how you implement the trainings in your businesses!
This next webinar is titled: Website Best Practices
This webinar is for you if you fall in any of these categories:
We will go over the best practices for websites. This will be a live training where I will walk you through key factors and best practices.
As always, IF you register for the webinar and for some reason you can not make it to the live session, you will get the recording sent to you via email.
The webinar is on Wednesday March 30,2016 at 3:00 p.m. Eastern Time.
Go now to register: Webinar: Best Practices
I will go over why a ‘unique for you' website is important to your target market and your conversions and how you can benefit.
You can have the most beautifully designed website on the planet but if no one finds it, what good is it?
It is good for your own ego, but ego does not pay the bills.
You can have the same template site everyone else has- what good is that if you are not differentiating yourself in the market?
You can have a great website that is found, but it does not convert the traffic that arrives, what good will that do you?
Many people look at a website as a technology based calling card or business card.
Then there are people, like in real estate, who want to copy the website format that the heavyweights have or be like everyone else because that is what appears to be the norm in the particular industry you are in.
Overall, these are very poor reasons to have a website.
Some people say they want to have a website and the only reason they know is because that is what they are “supposed” to have.
I firmly believe that nearly all businesses and solopreneurs and entrepreneurs should have a website.
But they should have one for the right reasons. Those reasons will vary depending on your niche and the strategies of your business plan.
You first need to create your plan for your website. You need to understand how it will play a part in your marketing strategy.
You need to have a goal first. What is the goal of your website?
Don't put up a website, just because everyone else in your market is doing it.
Some niches don't need organic search because they drive the traffic from offline to their websites.
Others don't need organic search because they pay for Facebook ads or Google adwords which drives traffic to their sites.
In both of those instances you should have a landing page to drive that traffic to. If you are using Google adwords, there are a few more items you need specifically on your website in order to get approved for your ads.
For instance: if you are marketing to expired listings and are sending out a postcard to drive the traffic to your website- you need to send the traffic to a specific landing page or squeeze page on your website. Don't send then to your home page.
This is another huge mistake real estate agents and other marketers make – they send all their traffic back to their home page. Unless your home page is your landing page, don't do this.
For each type of call to action, you need to have a landing page or a pop up form that directs the visitor to what to do next.
In the case of expired listings, the visitor needs to be sent to a landing page on your website which is addressing the pain of having an expired listing, their house did not sell. Address this, loud and clear, and then have a very clear call to action.
If you are working with buyers you will want the home search fields above the fold of your website and a clear call to action. You need to then support that with community pages that address each specific neighborhood. But niching goes even deeper than this.
If your goal is to get organic search – that means you want people to find you on the internet and then go to your website- this is called SEO, search engine optimization, then you need to have an SEO friendly website. WordPress.org platform is great to accomplish this goal.
Who is your avatar? In my Listing Experts Academy we have an entire hour long module on doing your avatar research and defining your avatar. An avatar is targeting a specific person in your niche.
Before you ever hire anyone to build you a website you need to know your avatar.
If you are paying someone to build you a website and they are not having a strategy session with you about who your avatar is, you are wasting your money.
Even for paid ad traffic, you will need to know who your avatar is.
You can not be all things to all people. You must target your avatar very specifically.
There is no way that in today's internet you can be a generalist. There is no way you have the money to compete for the same traffic that Zillow and Realtor.com compete for. Get out of their lane. You can fly under the radar of the heavy weights.
Color is very important on your website. Here is an article I wrote about how to work with graphics on your website and social media.
Tips on color:
Here is a video with some samples of some of the websites I am working on to give you an idea of different niches.
There are specific pages that Google will require if you run adwords campaigns or adsense. There are also best practices pages Google likes you to have on your site which help to verify that you are a human and not a spam program creating thousands of websites at one time.
The only time these are not required is when you have a squeeze page. But even with a squeeze page – if you are sending traffic to it, make sure you have in small text under the optin box, your link to your privacy page and your disclaimer page.
For regular niche website you will need:
After you know who your avatar is, start the conversation.
Design every part of your website as part of your conversation with your avatar.
Look at this screenshot of one of the websites I designed. See if you can tell who the avatar is for this website.
The colors not only match the logo but they also resonate with baby boomers in Rhonda's niche.
You want to make things very simple and clean.
Overcrowded design no longer appeals to most avatars. You want clean lines, simple boxes, and lots of white space.
You also don't want your site to look the same as every one of your competitors.
So many times clients tell me, ” I like this website. I want my website to look like this one.” This is the wrong focus. Your website needs to resonate with you avatar not with you. Then your website must be able to include your avatar in the conversation. You do that through the use of color, design, and content.
I have YouTube tutorials on how to build your own WordPress website.
Text me at 561-502-1577 if you would like me to build your website for you instead. Not everyone is cut out to build their own website:)
Case Study- This is the case study of one of my client's brand new websites. When I build a website for a client the first thing we do is go over their keyword strategy and get to know their avatar and if it is a local business, their geo tags and terms as well as do a study on their competition. This session takes a little over an hour or so.
In this study my client, Rhonda is a broker and owner of a boutique real estate brokerage in a highly competitive market in Northern California.
We build websites as they are already published on a server and have wordpress installed. Then I take some time to come up with the best way to connect to the client's avatar, a study of color, design, focal points and call to actions.
I started this site about 3 weeks ago. As soon as I start the site I want Google bots to start crawling the site and I want them to keep coming back during the building stage. And they do.
Here is the WordPress Theme I use: Click Here.
This is what Rhonda's website looks like right now:
Within just a few days her site was indexed. It took about 2 weeks to get the site to be on page 1 and page 2 for her 5 sets of keyword phrases, we were only focusing on 3. For this keyword phrase, 3 weeks ago she was on page 2 for her brand new website.
[bctt tweet=”SEO is still alive and ranking on Google can still be done! “]Now one week later, she is on page one on Google! Check it out. If you like what you see, we can help you with a brand new website and hopefully your site will rank this fast too!
For one of the tougher competitive keywords she has spots # 2, 3 and 4 on page 2! This is so exciting!!! I love it when my clients get surprised like this. Even though I put a plan into place, I had no idea that she was going to rank this fast.
In fact, I was not even going to check the SERPS so soon. I can't really remember what we were discussing when I thought I would check the SERPS. It was a wonderful surprise!
So with the next website I am building– I thought, hmmm, maybe we can keep on this roll! And sure enough! We are! The next case study is having the same kinds of results which I will share in another post!
Within 3 weeks she has moved up the Google Ranks and all of her 5 sets of keyword phrases are now on page 1 on Google except one! Not only that since she is a real estate broker she has some pretty tough big boys to go up against like Zillow. However, we know how to beat them. We also know that she wants to get listings, so some of our target keywords are words that a sellers would type in to Google.
For seller keyword phrases we got her on page one on Google in the #7 and #8 spots – in just 2 weeks of doing that particular content on her brand new website. This is amazing for her since her old site did not rank for any of these keywords.
And in her niche, it is very competitive! We have some other heavy duty competitors with pretty good SERPS positioning. We looked for the holes in their SEO and flew in right under their radar!
Here is another tough keyword phrase that is popular to compete for and she was on page 2 last week and now is on page one on Google!
Text me to work with me at 561-502-1577. If you need references for further comfort, let me know, I have those too!
Text Me To Work With Me 561-502-1577Speed Hack Your Way to a Gorgeous WordPress Website- Free Webinar! No coding skills required. So easy a 5th grader can learn how to do this.
Join me for another Free webinar! I hope you are getting a lot out of my free webinars.
January 13th at 8 p.m. eastern time I will be hosting and teaching a free webinar.
Go now to register for the webinar: https://katerinagasset.com/wordpress-ninja-moves-with-thrive-themes
I am going to show you:
We only have an hour together so I will show you as much as I can in that hour.
We will have a short Q&A after the webinar if there is something in particular you want me to show you.
This is going to be an online live training so I won't have any slides. I won't be walking through any slides. It is all hands on live on the wordpress platform.
I will record the webinar and send out the replay but there is no guarantee that this will work. As always, we will have the recording as long as there are no tech glitches in regards to the recording. I highly suggest you be live on the call for this webinar.
I also advise that you access the webinar from your computer or laptop and not on a mobile device because I will be using my mouse and pointer over my screen and this does not always come out on your side in the best way. You won't be able to follow along so well on a mobile device.
I recommend you to open up a new window on your computer and have your wordpress site dashboard open in that window so you can follow along.
I highly recommend that you get Thrive Themes at http://KaterinaGasset.com/ThriveThemes. I am an affiliate and greatly appreciate you using my links to get your Thrive Themes membership. You don't need to have Thrive to attend my webinar but the tools we use are all in Thrive.
I am excited to share with you more of my speed hacks! I am all about the speed of which we can accomplish a task. Benchmarks are meant to be improved. The only way I can get all this done is 1. speed at task and 2. creating systems to delegate and 3. outsource my systems to my virtual assistant team. This is how you master your time and get things done.
See you soon!
In this article I am going to go over the what is working now when creating content. I will share with you what we are doing to get our content to rank quickly and get the Google bots to crawl our site often and index it.
Creating content should be at the top of your list of marketing priorities. Content creation has always been important. But since the Panda update which is in a constant roll out content creation has never been more important.
Google loves not just fresh content but also frequently updated content and also long content. You can also curate content with your added commentary and your own images.
Longer content is the new metric. We used to be able to write 300 to 500 word posts and they would fly to the top of the SERPS. That is changing. Also, searching behavior changes over time. Looking for answers to our questions is taking on a new meaning in search. We want to know in depth answers and how to’s not just a gloss over.
41% of businesses struggle with creating enough content according to Contently.
Our Wellington Chiropractor is on page one for many chiropractor terms but he was not on page one for Wellington Acupuncture which is another part of his practice.
Since we already have links going to his main website for chiropractic terms and I did not want to start a niche website just for acupuncture we decided to test out Google’s apparent love for long page content of over 2000 words.
I named a main page instead of a post the acupuncture terms that we want to rank for. Then I did the research for acupuncture and wrote over 3000 words of content on this page: Wellington Acupuncture Treatments. I added alt tagged imaged throughout the content for visual appeal, added bullets and sub-titles so readers can easily scan the content.
What Google research has found is that people who are really studying, researching, learning are staying on long content pages. Yes, they are still skimming and scanning but they are staying longer and tend to read more than average if the topic is relevant to their search.
So in this case, someone searching for information about whether they want to get acupuncture treatments or not is going to want to know everything about acupuncture in order to make a decision to call for an appointment or not.
Within 3 hours of publishing the page he was on page one for several geo tagged terms revolving around acupuncture. The phone is already ringing with patients who want to book acupuncture appointments.
The added benefit to writing long form content of over 2000 words is you can get an extra indexing spot in Google’s “in-depth” article index. That is something your competitors are most likely NOT doing!
It takes time and research.
My goal is to write one 2000 - 3000 word article each week.
A solution for you might look like this:
Add images to the page at one time instead of with each section to save time with the exception of your featured image.
You can also publish your content on week 1 and then add to it each week until you have the word count you want to achieve. This way you are only going back into your article to edit it, to save some time.
Personally I like to write my content at one or two sittings. Everyone has their own particular writing structure so follow what is best and most comfortable for yourself.
The biggest tip I can give you about content creation is to write first and edit last. If you suffer from perfection paralysis you need to get over it. Good is good enough. Struggling from sentence to sentence is going to take so long you won’t be able to write 2000 + word articles or blog posts or page content on your website.
Not sure how you are going to write to think of 2000 - 3000 words on one article?
Images will spark your imagination with more content you can write.
We process images way faster than we do text. Humans process images 60,000 times faster than text. That is a lot! Take lots of photos in your niche and also other things that you can use in your posts like:
Research shows that you should have one image for every 350 words of text you write.
You can follow the format I used for the Acupuncture page.
Add a video or a slideshow to your post, article or page for visual appeal and to interest the visual learners and viewers. Get on YouTube now- there is still plenty of room. Engagement on video is growing fast and furious. Don't miss out on this.
Read more about YouTube SEO and Periscope tips here.
Make sure to stay within one main keyword topic and its related keywords and use plenty of semantical terms throughout your content.
Google’s algorithm is smart but not no smart that it can read your mind. You still need to make it clear what topic you are writing about. Another perk to writing long content is that you have more areas and places within your content to sprinkle in your keyword phrases, their related semantical terms and topical relevant textual content.
To this point in this article we are at 625 words of content so far.
Here are some more ways to add more content to add to your article:
This technique also gives a nice visual appeal to your article along with helping you attain more credibility.
"When we talk about "content marketing," we mean the creation of storytelling material that attracts readers, viewers and listeners to a brand. Mashable
Writing in-depth articles which are quality rich and add value are more likely to get shared than short posts. Educating, informing and entertaining; these are the keys to getting your content shared across the social medial platforms.
Add quotes to your content articles, source your quote for credibility.
Answer questions. Make a list of all the questions that your customers, buyers, sellers ask you.
Gather your answers and write articles answering those questions. You don’t really need to create your titles in question format because the algorithms are now smart enough to know what question you are answering.
To write longer content write about more questions and answers.
Instead of the usual Top 3 or Top 5, change the content to Top 20 and Top 25, etc.
To a serious searcher, what do you think they would be more interested in, 3 or 20 things they can learn right now? Also, which one would Google like better?
Since Google is looking for “better” content it is natural that the math adds up to : longer content = better content. We know this is not necessarily true but to a math equation it is.
Check out this graph from SerpIQ from an in-depth study they did:
There is a perk you typically can get from writing longer content: more people tend to share longer content. This helps bring traffic to your site.
Keep a notebook, notes on mac or Trello with a running list of ideas to write about. Some of those you many never write about but the important part is to keep the list and keep on adding to it.
A huge time waster is sitting around trying to think of what to write your next blog post about. You can avoid this by keeping an ongoing list.
Take time aside each day - just 10 minutes will do- to get your idea muscle exercised. I like to keep mine in Trello. Here is a video tutorial playlist I created about using Trello to get organized and more.
Set a goal to come up with 10 ideas in those 10 minutes. 1 idea per minute.
Don’t judge whether they are good ideas or not. Just write them down. Of course some will be good and some will not be. The point is to get into the practice of writing them down.
Speaking of time, choose to write your content when you write the best. Some people write better at night and others early in the morning. Whenever that time is for you is when you set your time aside to write.
Make an appointment with yourself on your calendar to write and then don’t let other distractions get in your way. This is important marketing time. Your writing time should be sacred. Those around you also need to know this is your time to write, stop the interruptions.
You can also add more content by using words people who are seriously searching look up:
Add your keyword to the end of each of those words to create the layout for longer content.
Look at what your competitors are coming up for on the top 10 on Google SERPS in their lists and tip articles and do it better. Google your longtail keywords in Google’s incognito window. Check what content is ranking on the top 10 in the SERPS. Proceed to write a better, more in-depth article about the same topic. You may just outrank the competition using this technique like we did.
Add more detail to your content. Many writers in your space are not adding detail to their content. This can set you apart from the pack and help get you a spot on page one.
Go into detail on every step you write. This alone will add value and more words:).
Back up your claims with verified industry leaders. Most industry leaders publish all kinds of data, survey results and statistics.
Structure your content so that it is easy to read and easy on the eyes.
Before you publish your article make sure to apply the ‘Eye Candy’ test.
Is your article visually appealing?
Don’t make your content a wall of words. That is the fastest way to turn your readers off and they will click right off of your blog or website.
Easy ways to make your content visually appealing:
Some examples of these are throughout this post you are reading.
Make sure your content is:
People who read very fast stay on pages that have about 100 characters per line while those who read slow like to read about 55 characters per line.
Choosing a character count in the middle is best. Some tests show that 66 characters per line is best. Here are some results from some testing: http://webtypography.net/2.1.2
Also, setting your font size to 16 is now optimal. It is much easier to read.
Here are a few tips in capturing the attention of your readers longer:
Ask questions in your content. This causes the reader to hesitate and think on what you wrote.
Add your images and videos to your article or post so they peek “above the fold” encouraging the scroll.
Add down arrows for this same reason. People are curious.
The last step is to sprinkle your content with your long tail keywords and semantics of those longtail keyword phrases. Do this last so as not to stop your creative flow and the intent of your articles.
To learn more about writing with longtail keywords get started with Fast Track SEO.
Finally, make sure your article or blog page or page you are adding the longer content to is valuable to your readers. Make sure it is of high quality and relatable to your niche readers.
You want to write great content that your readers will stay on your page and read, then call you or connect with you to do business with.
By the way, I am now at 2010 words in this article. This is what it looks like to write a post or page or article with 2000 words.
If you would like to take this further ~ Text me to work with me: 561-502-1577