My Top Prediction for SEO in 2015
With all the talk, double-talk, assumptions and guessing about what is what with SEO these days there are a few things you can count on no matter what happens with Google and other search engines.
You will not go wrong by drilling down into your niche, flying under the radar of the big 4.
Choose terms that their SEO departments are not going after. These big guys spend over a $100,000 a day for PPC and they want the biggest bang for their buck so they are not going to piddle around with terms that you can still make good contacts, closings and income from.
My top prediction for SEO moving forward is about branding.
I believe that just as I stated about 9 years ago that it was time to start building your own personal brand on the internet because Google is all about brand.
They have a patent for their Panda algorithm that specifically discusses the importance of ranking search results.
Then add on to that the fact that Eric Schmidt (when he was CEO of Google) stated that the internet is a cesspool and that brands would be who cleans it up.
Think about why the big 4 were able to capture so many top spots on Google page one for the very terms that real estate agents for years before the arrival of those “brands” were dominating by themselves. The problem was agents were driving their sites with IDX and home search results trying to be the search engine for the home buyers in anonymity which came back to bite them because that is absence of brand.
Moving forward into 2015 there are ways in which you can beat the big 4 in organic search using SEO and I predict that this will by establishing the following brands:
1. Your name or your name + real estate agent as a brand ( if you have a famous actor's name)
2. Your company name ( if you are the broker/ owner) as a brand
3. Your niche keyword terms as a brand
There was such a misconception in the SEO world about brands for years before Panda and Penguin, etc. The focus was on generic keywords and not brands. For years, that thinking was put into practice. I have always stated from the beginning of learning SEO that creating your brands online was going to be the way that you can set yourself apart from your competitors.
Those who followed this advice weathered the storm of Panda and Penguin and of the big 4 dominance on the SERPS.
If you are not one of those, it is not too late to start establishing yourself as a brand on the internet in 2015.
We started really working to dominate our company brand on the internet about 6 months ago. Before that for years we had some competing real estate companies who share the same name as our company: International Properties and Investments LLC. One of those companies had almost the entire page of page one on google serps packed in for them.
Today I looked to see how we are doing and to my pleasant surprise, in Google incognito window and logged out of Google, we have ALL 10 spaces on page one with our company name and platforms that have our company profiles.
- Our point 2 agent website is #1 with our Google local page attached,
- #2 is the brand new EMD (Exact Match Domain) site that I am in the process of creating which will become our branded main company website,
- #3 is a Yelp review about our brand, company name,
- #4 is our facebook business page for our company,
- #5 is our ActiveRain profile,
- #6 and #7 is our market leader website,
- #8 is our Google plus business page,
- #9 is our Pinterest business company name page and
- #10 is a YouTube playlist named for our company brand on my personal YouTube channel.
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