August 6, 2003

Though increasingly tech-savvy, many San Diego real estate professionals may be missing out on the one ingredient that can mean the difference between success and failure on the Internet: search-engine placement.

A recent study by the National Association of Realtors revealed that about 70 percent of buyers turn to the Internet at the commencement of their search for a home. Of course, usually the first place they start is at a search engine such as Google or Yahoo! Inc (Nasdaq: YHOO - news).

When someone in the market for a new house or condominium types in the words "San Diego Real Estate" to a search engine like Yahoo, more than 600,000 more or less related Web sites hope to grab their attention. But only a dozen show up as the first results of a search, and those lucky few get most if not all the random traffic.

Getting optimum Web placement and ranking on these search engines is quickly replacing telephone cold-calling, flyers and free magnets as most important considerations for marketing a real estate brokerage. Thousands of dollars spent on a Web site could be wasted investment if it doesn't do the right things to place itself where a potential customer will see it.

Dan Smith, president of San Diego Internet Marketing Group, said a Web site can end up nothing more than a drop in an ocean without few important adjustments. "If there are 616,000 Web sites that say they can do the same things yours does, you can very easily end up wandering among them without getting any of the attention you were hoping for. You have to do it right," he said.

Doing it right can be simple, is sometimes time-consuming and occasionally outrageously expensive. Each search engine ranks its vast stockpile of URLs in different ways. Google's system, for instance, ranks Web sites mostly according to how many links and mutual connections a certain site shares with other sites and how many people actually take advantage of those connections. Those are the random, free listings.

But there's another way to get to the top pay for it. Google auctions off the most visible placements on its results pages. So if someone searches for "San Diego Real Estate," not only will they see the sites that seem to have the most far-reaching tentacles and exposure, but they'll get, say, a link to Kristie George's Century 21 brokerage.

George is a local broker and she pays; not a flat fee for being so highly visible on Google, but a pay-per-click tally that, depending on the ratio of people who click over to see her page to sales she eventually makes, can either be a wonderful investment or a costly mistake.

George says she doesn't know yet how it's turned out for her. She had been running a "sponsored link," as they are called, on Google for only a matter of hours when The Daily Transcript called her to see.

Smith, from the Internet marketing company, said that Tuesday the highest sponsored link for the results page of a "San Diego Real Estate" search was going for $1.46 per click. If 800 people decide to click on those sponsored links in one day, that translates to a cost of nearly $1,200 in marketing.

"If I get just one deal out of it, it's worth it," said local broker Doug Wellington of SellSmart Unique, which has an online virtual office Web site. Wellington occupied one of the top sponsored link spots in a search for "San Diego Real Estate" on Monday. He had no idea if he'd get the one deal, though, it had only been a few hours for him as well.

Such advertising is de rigueur for virtual office Web sites like Wellington's, some of which, like the Northern-California based zipRealty.com, can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to maintain a prominent sponsored link. Those companies have completely ignored traditional methods agents have used for decades to generate leads: cold-calling a customer's home, handing out flyers and putting a smiling face on a bus-stop bench.

Smith's Mission Gorge-based firm consults with people who are looking to maximize their presence and visibility on the Web. He said playing the sponsored-link game can be extremely rewarding and somewhat exasperating, too. "You have to always be willing to play ball. You could have set aside $500 dollars for Internet advertising and watch it disappear in a matter of hours if people start clicking on your site. So you have to have a comfort zone," he said.

Smith says there are various ways to take on the challenge of Internet exposure and the sponsored links are just one. Every Web site has a "title tag," a laconic description or multiword name of the site. Smith said picking the right tag can only come from a diligent analysis of not only the words that best describe a company or its mission, but of the competition's choices as well. Those few words are what search engines search for, and it can take a skilled professional or knowledgeable webmaster to "write the appropriate meta-code," as Smith puts it. Yahoo charges a base fee to a company to enter a Web site into its vast data bank from which it pulls search results.

But Yahoo also runs sponsored links that it accepts from, and shares the profits of with, the company Overture. Coincidentally, Yahoo recently bought Overture, whose revenues were the highest of any Internet search engine, according to a recent report in Economist magazine.

"Search engines change almost every month," Smith said. "You have to be pretty on top of things to keep up and make the changes you have to."

Smith said depending on how much money a client wants to spend, they can be right up there on top of the search engine results in a couple of hours or they might have to wait up to two months to see results come about by building a strong, far-reaching Web site.

You have to keep changing once you're on top, he said, or else they'll drop you. "That's the beauty of the Internet, though. If you put an ugly ad in the yellow pages, you're stuck with it for a year before you can do anything about it. On the Internet you can change things instantaneously."

He should know: Type in "Web Advertising Solutions San Diego" and the San Diego Internet Marketing Group comes up first.

Source: Yahoo News

        

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