If you are a home builder or a realtor then your business is selling houses. You’re also somewhat uncomfortable around computers or people who talk about computers, and you know people are using the Internet to sell houses but you’re not sure how they’re doing it because every time someone sells you some new service to help you sell houses online it doesn’t work as well as promised.
How do I know this about you? Because four days ago I started looking for a townhouse in a certain city, and when I couldn’t find anything online after 20 minutes of searching that showed me what I wanted to see, I decided to perform an experiment.
That experiment was to put a post on my blog about my search for real estate in Herriman, Utah. In less than four days this blog has risen to a #1 ranking for the keyword search “townhouse herriman utah” in Google. It’s already listed as #8 for the broader search term “townhouse utah.” What does that tell me? That you realtors and home builders don’t know what you’re doing when it comes to marketing real estate online, otherwise it wouldn’t be so easy for me to get that kind of ranking that quickly.
Who should be ranked #1 for the keywords “townhouse herriman utah”? How about Garbett Homes? For crying out loud they’re advertising their townhomes in Herriman on their homepage as their featured development. Now any SEO professional knows that if your website doesn’t show up within the top 10 search results for a keyword term then in most cases you might as well not show up at all. Garbett doesn’t show up within the top 100 search results. They’re nowhere to be found online.
How does this happen? I’m guessing that some home builders are saying “Well, why should we promote ourselves online? Nobody buys a house online.” Yes, of course people don’t actually buy houses online (well actually they probably do on a limited basis), but people sure do a lot of research online related to real estate. What kind of person would spend hours driving around to look at 10 different houses if they can go online and eliminate half of them in a matter of minutes?
Garbett has a decent looking website, but how are people supposed to find it if it doesn’t show up in search engines? I found it because after I posted on my blog someone who already knew about Garbett’s townhouse development in Herriman send me a link to their website, but if it weren’t for that I still wouldn’t know that Garbett has townhouses in Herriman. I might think there were no townhouses in Herriman and I might start looking at Draper, Riverton, or South Jordan instead.
If yo’ure a home builder or a realtor, get smart. The hardest part is filtering out all the fluff people are trying to sell to you. It’s not that hard to get a good ranking if you know what you’re doing or hire someone who does. But do some research on your own or hire someone who knows how to get you ranked, because if you’ve got the best website in the world but no one is visiting it then you’re just wasting money.
