Seth Godin writes another incredible post explaining how utilizing SEO can be much more than trying to own mainstream keywords and delves into the territory that I live in, the territory that I have used to grow BlueRoof.com for three years now. Utilizing SEO as a way to strengthen your brand and help people find you when they are trying to.
When someone is looking for a good real estate buying experience in our area, many of them have heard of BlueRoof.com and the BlueRoof experience from their friends or family members. And when they Google us I want them to find us- and that is the only way I care about SEO for my particular website. I don’t pack keywords and links into my site because people don’t want to use websites that are pack with keywords and links- they want a great experience that is all about THEM, not about getting people to ME…
So, I have to pay for my Google ranking with Pay Per Click. And that’s okay because most of the traffic that comes to our site now is referred traffic- traffic that we have very worked hard to earn by offering the best experience we can to our clients. Helping them find the right home and negotiating and educating and working for the client above all else.
I want to own the keyword BlueRoof and the keyword BlueRoof.com and even Blue Roof (with a space), but not because I want to get any traffic, because I want to help those who are already looking for us to be able to find us easily. That is the best traffic because they already want to work with us and we want to help them.
Utilizing SEO to get new business can obviously be a good thing, but landing on the front page of Google for any good keywords can be very difficult. It’s important to build your own brand and putting some focus into that might be the best strategy you can take- it’s worked well for us.
April 29, 2009 at 11:32 am
Seems like there’s a fine line, doesn’t it? Every business is different and has different clients with different needs. Identifying and targeting those are the real tricks!
May 2, 2009 at 8:23 pm
When I did my site my self and my blogs, I was interested showing what I do and have done. It was as I got into it I realized that there is two kind of sites. If you have really something special to offer, you want the people looking for that to find you. If you want support for your work, that is another question. It can be both, however it will limit the SEO capability. I do understand you. Your site supports what you do. That is strenthening your brand.
May 4, 2009 at 6:51 pm
I noticed the blue roof site is not the same. Are you changing your brand?
May 5, 2009 at 6:47 am
Josh,
We continue to make upgrades to BlueRoof.com , with mobile search and many back end features for our clients, but the brand, our service and team, and our commitment and concepts are all still the same.
June 23, 2009 at 11:21 pm
I must say, your site looks almost fun, ha ha ha. It’s loading took a tad longer than most sites but I can see where you are going with the whole “experience” subject. Branding is probably the most fun part of marketing being you get to see compounding results long after any advertising campaign. Had fun visiting your site, much luck to you!
October 5, 2009 at 8:51 pm
A few months ago, a realtor stopped into my office and asked me if SEO was right for them. I surprised him with my answer. I said, “I’m not sure, let’s find out.”
In general, SEO works best for people that are selling really expensive items. This is because all things being equal, doing 100 SEO for something worth $1 generally only brings 2x as much traffic as doing SEO for a website selling things worth $10,000. The conversion rate for the website selling $1 trinkets is going to be lower then the one selling a $10,000 service, but not by as much as you might think. The conversion rate depends on the
• quality of the product
• quality of the website
• competitiveness of the pricing (or at least perceived competiteveness).
So, to give you actual numbers… If we did SEO for a website that sells $1 widgets, we might get them 10,000 extra visitors/ month at the end of the first year. This might sound like a lot, but you can only expect them to sell widgets to two to five percent of the visitors. So, they’ll make $200-$500.
Let’s consider the people selling the $10,000 product. They might only have a 0.5% conversion and get an additional 2,000 visitors/ month at the end of the first year. I’m being quite conservative here. 2,000 visitors x 0.5% = 10 sales/month, or $100,000/month in revenue. Pretty amazing, isn’t it. If you want to do SEO for your website, you need to find an expensive item to sell.
What’s the most expensive item that the average person sells during their lifetime? It’s their home. The realtor isn’t generating $200k in revenue every time he/she sells a home. The realtor might be generating $10k in commission revenue. But still, the numbers are impressive. As a realtor, you can expect a SEO campaign with e reasonably budget (around $5,000/month) to generate around $100,000/month in revenue. This works out to a return on Investment (ROI) of $20 in revenue for every $1 invested in SEO.
I finished this discussion and the realtor said three words. “Let’s do it.” He thought for a moment, and added another word “now”.
If you’d looking for a good how-to document that describes almost everything you need to know, then check out this PDF.: http://www.bergstrom-seo.com/resources/google-search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf. It’s a pretty long document (22 pages) but it tells you everything that you need to know about SEO. Good luck!