Geek Build 2012 Site #5 – Reinventing www.TopHomesForSaleCO.com
This post outlines the market, purpose and our thoughts about the direction the redesign of www.tophomesforsaleco.com. We would like to thank in advance the steering committee for their time and welcome any and all thought/feedback. For those of you who did not read our introductory post, this redesign project is a collaboration between John Stegner Jr. (me) and my parents John & Bonnie Stegner.
Primary Goals:
- Take this web site to the top 3 of Google for targeted keywords/phrases.
- Have a voice which is interesting and which establishes regional expertise and authority.
- Convert visitors to leads that contain both phone and e-mail contact information from multiple sources within the architecture of the site.
- Ultimately use the site as a tool to expand New Era Realty’s brand recognition and agent base in Northern Colorado.
Market:
The Northern Colorado Area has become more of a defined region in recent years and it is now being referred to as “NOCO” in many publications. NOCO is comprised of 3 counties (Weld, Boulder & Larimer) and runs along the Front Range from the Wyoming border, South to Longmont with I-25 regarded as Main Street for this geographic area. For those of you who like to look at maps, the Eastern boundary would be approximately HWY 85 and the Western boundary would be the Foothills up to the Red Feather area. The main focus for the blog will be the cities of Fort Collins, Timnath, Wellington, Windsor, Severance & Loveland (Larimer County). We have sold a wide variety of rural, urban, and mountain homes and land up and down NOCO, but the cities above are where most of our sales have occurred. If you look at this graph of closings and cross reference it with the targeted cities, we are trying to focus on about 41% of the NOCO market.
In addition to traditional residential transactions, we consider ourselves to be experts in the sale of farms, ranches and equestrian estates.
Vision/Strategy:
Our experience with other company web sites, such as www.denverloftsandcondosforsale.com has been that enough volume will generate leads. Given the large geography this site is targeting, we see the greatest challenge being selecting the correct keywords/phrases to target. So, we are looking for thoughts as to how and what to target. If we start covering every city name and popular neighborhoods with articles, we may get some good long tailed search rankings, but competing for the high volume search terms has to be the ultimate goal. Probably the most valuable phrase we could rank in the top 4 of Google for would be “Fort Collins Real Estate”, but that will take several years of consistent effort. Currently, a string of targeted blogs did get the site ranked for “Northern Colorado Horse Properties” on page 1. This has turned out to be a mixed blessing as the leads generated have been very difficult to close. Thus, we are really asking for help in this area.
Domain Name:
The site is young enough to still consider changing the domain name. One misadventure in web site building left us with these two options:
- tophomesforsaleco.com, created 5/25/10
- northerncoloradolistings.com, created 10/29/10
Google’s keyword research tool suggests that there are a lot of variations of “homes for sale co” that are searched for, typically using a city name in the phrase. However, as the usage of “Northern Colorado” becomes more common, the second domain name may gain in value and have less competition over time. Currently, our analysis does not show much volume around this second option. Thoughts???
Branding: Our typical strategy in the past has been to have fairly unbranded sites. If you look at our Denver lofts site as well as www.tophomesforsaleco.com, you will see that our company information is below the fold on the homepage. Thus, our strategy has been about steering our readers to properties and the IDX tool very quickly. The designs have been about maximizing conversion of visitors to leads, not building a brand. This being said, we have seen the quality of the leads from our blog sites to be much higher than just our IDX landing page sites. The company brand is about high quality agents who use the best technology available. We are selective as to who joins our brokerage. The founder’s objective turned into the company’s tag line of “Setting the New Standard in Real Estate”. Specifically, I’m wondering if we should continue down the path of a “stealth” site designed to generate leads, or brand the company and our NOCO agents more heavily. Thoughts on this subject would be greatly appreciated!
Finally, one point of discussion with respect to branding is our family’s extensive history in the area. We go back many generations in NOCO. John Stegner Sr. has served on the Board of Governors of Colorado State University. John & Bonnie were founders of a well know private school in Fort Collins. Bonnie’s father has a new school in Timnath named after him, Bethke Elementary (Bethke is Bonnie’s maiden name). For 50 years there were three well known Stegner dairy farms on the North side of Fort Collins, including John & Bonnie’s farm with over 400 head. Bonnie’s mother was a Realtor, making her a 2nd generation and John Jr. a 3rd generation agent in the area. Bonnie’s cousin is one of the largest real estate developers in NOCO. Etc…..with the other founder of New Era Realty (Brian Lehnerz) also being a native, the local knowledge that come from decades of living in an area has been a marketing point in our literature. However, we need guidance as to how and if we should leverage this history more heavily?
Content: Two quick questions as we are just getting rolling with an aggressive blogging effort. Would love to know:
- What is the minimum/maximum length for a blog post from an SEO perspective? Is there an optimal target length?
- What is the ideal keyword density for a keyword phrase in a blog post (in terms of SE ranking effectiveness)?
Conclusion: We hope that the questions above will be fodder for a fruitful discussion. Any and all thoughts and ideas are welcome. Hopefully soon we will be hard at work implementing the recommendations.
Note from the Editor: Not sure what Geek Build 2012 is? It’s building a few real estate websites from scratch publicly with the help of the Geek Estate Community and overseen by an experienced steering committee. Read more about Geek Build 2012 here, or view all posts related to Geek Build 2012 here.
**Geek Build logo designed by Dominic Morrocco at M Squared Real Estate.
Drew Meyers
Posted at 09:20h, 03 March“we need guidance as to how and if we should leverage this history more heavily?”
My answer is absolutely yes that you should play up your family history. Exactly how? Well, that’s what we’ll have to figure out..
John Stegner
Posted at 10:07h, 03 MarchThanks Drew! Looking forward to everyone putting on their thinking caps.
Daniel Beer
Posted at 11:14h, 03 MarchRegarding your targeted keywords, I would let Fort Collins real estate be a nice surprise one day in the future and instead concentrate on your community pages with good lead conversion tools on each. The big ones will come but you can actually capture higher quality traffic with community + homes for sale type keywords.
For the domain name what about something using NoCo since you say that is gaining in popularity. Something like nocomlslistings.com, homesforsalenoco, or nocohomesandland.com which may be better for branding. They are all available. If you would prefer to use Northern Colorado instead of NoCo then I like northerncoloradomls.com much better than northerncoloradolistings.com, which is also available.
You are in luck. Domain names like this have not been available in my area for years.
John Stegner
Posted at 18:59h, 05 MarchIn reflection, I hesitate to use “NOCO” as relocation buyers won’t know that acronym. Since my experience has been that some of the best internet leads are relocation buyers, I would rather use the domain to target a more general phrase. “Listings” seems too generic and not enough specific to real estate. By community pages, do you mean write ups for each city in the targeted area wtih resource links and information? Thanks for the ideas on teh domain names….the “northerncoloradomls.com” is a good one, but the “MLS” in our area has discontinued letting anyone have a IDX feed if they use “MLS” in the domain.
John Stegner
Posted at 12:01h, 05 MarchWow, I wrote a long note back to your comments Dan & it did not post…..trying this one to make sure it works before I rewrite the previous.
Drew Meyers
Posted at 12:06h, 05 MarchYou were stuck in spam. I just added you to the whitelist though, so you should be good now.
John Stegner
Posted at 13:13h, 05 MarchThanks Drew!
John Stegner
Posted at 12:05h, 05 MarchO.k., here are the key points from my reply that did not go the first time:
1) Relocation buyers are awesome web leads. They won’t know the term NOCO, so I’m thinking we stay away from it upon further reflection
2) “Listings” is too generic and does not have the search volume of other real estate terms.
3) The mls here won’t give you an idx feed if your url has “mls” in it, so variations like that are out.
4) Given the history for “tophomesforsaleco” do you think we should just keep it? There is a lot of volume for “homes for sale co”. I’m thinking we may be o.k. as is?
Daniel Bacon
Posted at 18:28h, 06 MarchFrom the perspective of SEO I don’t see a whole lot of value in tophomesforsaleco. “homes for sale” and “real estate” are two of the top terms for real estate searches and it’s next to impossible to compete on that level. “co” doesn’t really help locate you, and can be confused with being short for “company”. It seems the geographic area is so large that a meaningful domain for SEO is unlikely, since people will be searching for town names. In that case I would look more to branding and something people will remember and identify with. You can then leave SEO to your landing pages for each city, where you have total control. A URL like domain.com/loveland-real-estate can work wonders.
Greg Fischer
Posted at 18:26h, 03 MarchJohn – I can’t answer your specific questions above, but did want to comment on your current branding. It’s interesting to how minimal the branding is on your sites. This is cool. I’d be curious to gauge the consumer reaction to it. My gut is telling me that relocations would prefer less branding (they are focusing on viewing homes, not working with a company), while established residents staying in the general area may be more comfortable on a site where the branding was a little heavier (trust, rapport, etc). I don’t know. Have you gotten any feedback on this specifically? I am interested in this point.
John Stegner
Posted at 11:54h, 05 MarchGreg, we have found that if the site looks more like a “portal” and less like an agents site that users see the value to be higher. The register much more frequently on the idx because they are not committing to being contacted by an individual/company, but are rather just wanting to see the home in the idx. Thus, my “stealth approach” to date. Thoughts?
Ben Fisher
Posted at 07:56h, 05 MarchLooks like you have a solid plan going here. I think Daniel is right on track with the domain names. Brand yourself as the go to “NoCo” website in your area.
Others may disagree with me here, but I would not be focusing your blog posts on keyword density and length. Yes it sounds nice and would seemingly impact your SEO, but I would focus more on creative content that you think your readers would be interested in. Agents tend to keyword stuff when they think about optimizing their pages. Write as if you are speaking with a prospect looking into that area, and I think you will see some good results come from this. Just my opinion…
John Stegner
Posted at 13:17h, 05 MarchThanks Ben! You are rigth that you have to have a natural voice with good content. However, the keyword strategy will get you the organic placement over time that is necessary to generate leads and create value. I think we have it nailed on our loft, condo site for denver. Got the rankings and the interesting content. We were very targeted there, so trying to do the same here. Write intersting content, but still focus on a keyword strategy that will ultimately make the site the go to site. Have to think more about the NOCO acronym. Research it and see if anyone does use it in searches.
Daniel Bacon
Posted at 18:14h, 05 MarchI think an unbranded site like nocomlslistings.com, focusing just on properties, would probably bring in a higher number of leads overall, while a site like nocoliving.com, focusing on properties with a lot of lifestyle content, would bring in higher quality leads.
I’ve read that 300-500 words is the optimal length for posts, but I don’t pay much attention to that. Once you are above 250 shorter is better since people don’t like to read a lot on the internet. Write to the reader, not to the search engines…
John Stegner
Posted at 13:19h, 05 MarchI like the “write to the reader, not to the search engines”…..I think that works wonders once you have the organic rankings. I also agree that raw idx leads are much worse than the leads generated by a really good blog article. Thanks so much for the advice!
John Stegner
Posted at 13:31h, 05 MarchI’ve replyed to most of the comments/advice below. Thanks for the help. So far, I’m:
1) uncertain as to keep the url or maybe change it
2) going to try to figure out how to write good content while still target a keyword strategy….the consensus is that good content is more important and will generate quality leads over quantity.
3) In a perfect world we would somehow blend a “steath/portal” type look for those who are on the hunt and just want to look at homes….with a more rich branded feel that leverages the depth of area knowledge for those who are doing research and want to dig deep.
Anything else we should have picked up?
One last quick question for everyone. If I’m researching IDX solutions, do you have a top 5 that guys recommend? I’m going to switch out the current solution and I’m looking at enterpise/team solutions as well that a number of my agents could use. There are some really cool ones out there, but it would be great to have some recommendations to start my research with, rather than start from scrach. Metrolist shut down Diverse Solutions in this market wehn Zillow bought it…..I have used Wolfnet for years, but it has problems with the data it displays from the IRES MLS which feeds TopHomesForSaleCo.com…..so I’m all ears.
Daniel Bacon
Posted at 10:48h, 06 MarchJohn, the choice of IDX is one of the most important decisions for this project and I believe will be the topic of a future post. I’m very much looking forward to that discussion.
John Stegner
Posted at 19:16h, 06 Marchme too!!! I have actually tested conversion between wolfnet and diverse solutions. I’m very interested to see what else is out there that people like. I have so many usability issues with most of them. Would love to build my own, but i helped someone try(consulting on key usability features) and they spent $125K and it failed because the coding was outsourced overseas.
John Stegner
Posted at 15:28h, 05 MarchHey, I’ve been researching IDXpro today….anyone use it currently?
http://www.idxpro.com/
Drew Meyers
Posted at 12:05h, 07 MarchJohn-
Did you do keyword research so you know exactly (well, roughly) what terms buyers are using?
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
John Stegner
Posted at 14:01h, 07 MarchYes, we did use adwords and did a very detailed analysis with tons of different variations. We have our strategy outlined and will be hitting some of the less competitive ones hard at first and then working our way up to the more difficult ones to dominate. Essentially, we are using the city names in combinations with these terms:
And combine them with these:
Homes for sale
Real estate
Condos for sale
With a 7 city focus and 3 phrases, we have 21 targeted keyword phrases to ultimately be in the top 3 of page one for. Might take a little while. 😉 Along the way we will get some great longtailed results by writing a series of blog posts….such as the way we became so highly ranked for “Fort Collins Horse Properties”
Make sense?
John Stegner
Posted at 06:44h, 08 MarchDaniel, this was helpful….we will have to continue to discuss. Thank for the advice. -J