Today we welcome Joy Aumann, co-founder of Luxury SoCal Realty, back to the show to talk about search engine marketing for your real estate website – driving people to your website through search. We cover:
- What you need to have on your site to make Google reward it with traffic
- The value of having a niche for search engine marketing
- How to choose the right URL
- Why you shouldn’t require people to register on your site
- Why backlinks are so important and how to get them
- How Google SEM differs from social media marketing
- What to do with leads once they come in
Links mentioned:
You can listen to this episode here, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
TRANSCRIPT
Gayle Weiswasser:
Welcome to the Homesnap Snapshot, a podcast about digital marketing for real estate agents. I’m Gayle Weiswasser, the host of the show. In each episode we talk to agents just like you, who are successfully using some type of digital marketing to build their brands. When it’s over, you’ll walk away with concrete ideas that you can use in your own marketing to help grow your business. If you enjoy the show, please subscribe using whatever app or platform you’ve used to listen to podcasts. And I’d really appreciate it i. If you’d take a minute to rate and review the show. That helps us get new listeners. Now, let’s get to today’s guest. Today’s guest on the snapshot is Joy Aumann, who is an agent and co-founder of Luxury SoCal Realty. Joy, welcome back to the show.
Joy Aumann:
Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here.
Gayle Weiswasser:
We’re really excited to have you. And for those of you who are listening regular to the show, you will know that Joy was on in May, talking about Clubhouse. And she’s back today to talk about a different subject. But before we jump into the new subject, the question for you, I feel like I haven’t really heard much about Clubhouse lately. It’s not as hot and prevalent as it was when we talked. Is that true? Or is that just me?
Joy Aumann:
I think that we found it is very time consuming and that’s a challenge. You can go on and do a few Twitter tweets, like what I do for networking, I interact with different writers and you can be done in about three minutes. But Clubhouse is a commitment to, you have to get on there, be on stage, sometimes rooms last for one to three hours. It’s a big time commitment. So I think that moving forward, especially now with COVID being over, I think time will tell. But now with COVID being over, people are out and about more. And so it was interesting because when it launched, we were still on lockdown practically. So there was nothing- [crosstalk 00:02:03].
Gayle Weiswasser:
Right.
Joy Aumann:
So it filled that void. But lately, they’ve introduced something last week called Spatial Audio Technology. So what it does is it assigns a spatial position to each speaker on stage so that when they speak, the audio seems to be coming from their specified position. So that’s their newest technological update.
Gayle Weiswasser:
So it’s still audio, but it has a facial element to it so that you can kind of visualize who you’re listening to.
Joy Aumann:
Yes. They keep making improvements, but now many other platforms are also copying it, the whole premise of just audio only. It will be interesting to see how it turns out- [crosstalk 00:02:45].
Gayle Weiswasser:
Yeah. I feel like I saw a Facebook was launching something like that. I mean, saw it in passing or something.
Joy Aumann:
Yeah, no, you’re right. And I just saw another one too that I can’t recall what it is, but I was surprised, but they’re going into the audio too.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Okay. Well, I think you make a good point that it was a great fit for a quarantine lifestyle where people were home, they weren’t as mobile, they were sitting, maybe they were doing other things, but it was a great way of multitasking to absorb this kind of audio content through Clubhouse. So with people being back at work or life just opening up more, I’m back in an office every day. It would be very difficult for me to spend lots of time on Clubhouse right now. So I think that that’s a good point.
Joy Aumann:
Exactly. Yeah, exactly.
Gayle Weiswasser:
All right. Well, we’re not going to talk any more about Clubhouse today. We’re actually going to talk about another topic that has been covered on the show, but it’s such an important one that we decided it was worth having another guest come on and talk about it and especially somebody like Joy, who really knows what she’s talking about. So we’re going to talk again about Google search engine marketing or the notion of creating an online 24/7 digital open house for your business. So we’ve talked about this before, but it’s a complicated topic. And I think that it’s one of those things that maybe the more you hear it, the more you might absorb it and start to really understand it. So Joy, take us to the beginning of this and explain how SEM, which is the acronym for search engine marketing. How is it different from social media marketing, which is the umbrella topic that we usually have on this show and why is search so important?
Joy Aumann:
Well, there’s two things. So first I want to preface it. We’re going to be talking today, search engine marketing for your website. I know you had a recent one about an only a month ago, and you were talking about Google search engine marketing, and that was for your local business listing. So it’s Google My Business. So it’s a separate product and that’s actually a Google free product for anyone that wants to get an account. So today say we’re talking about search engine marketing that will code to your personal website, not your brokerages, not your team leaders, but your personal websites.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Great distinction.
Joy Aumann:
And I’m really passionate about this space. And it’s my one thing. I make every new member that joins my team read the book; The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results. Because when you pick a one thing, you go big on it. You put all your money, your time, your everything into it. And that’s what we’ve done with our website. And when it comes to real estate marketing, we’re doing the same thing in real estate. That’s six figure bloggers for fitness, finance, mommy bloggers, where they’re actually selling courses and products with affiliate marketing.
Joy Aumann:
So you sign up and maybe you do a subscription for thrive market and they get a commission for that, that sort of thing. Well, we’re clearly not doing that. We are selling real estate. We’re selling buyer and seller representation with our website. While you’re learning the journey, joining groups that are called six figure blogger or joining those tribes is not a bad thing because they’re learning to do the same thing you are. You’re just selling something different. They want you to come to their blog posts, you’ll click on a link that will then give them a commission.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Got it. Okay. So good distinction. We are talking about promoting a site rather than expecting people to find you via search through the Google My Business page.
Joy Aumann:
Yeah. So Google My Business, it works hand in hand, and it’s very important for your website. And it’s extremely important. All of our reviews now. We don’t care about Yelp anymore. All of our reviews go to Google, because that tells Google that we’re a legitimate business and those keywords help our website rank. So it works hand in hand, but you could be a business and just have a Google My Business listing, and really have optimized it and have phenomenal reviews and just work off of that. But we’re taking it a step further for real estate where we’re actually driving them to a website with homes for sale and articles on buying and selling.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Great. Okay. So you say that you get 15,000 monthly website visitors from people searching Google for real estate advice and tips, and also specifically searching for San Diego neighborhood and area info. So talk about how you achieve that. That’s a huge amount of traffic, and it’s obviously very interested traffic. It’s people who want what you’re selling. So tell us how you got there.
Joy Aumann:
Yeah. So when you get between 15,000 to 20,000 right now, depending on the month, and that number keeps going up, as I keep working on a site, you always get more in your hottest month. So for us in our area, that would be the summer months. I know in other regional areas, their winter is actually their high season. But our high season here is in the summer. And I explain it. It is like having an open house 24/7, or having a brick and mortar retail space in the busiest traffic area, in your town where you’re getting anywhere from 450 to say 650 walk-ins a day.
Joy Aumann:
And so how I achieve this? The first step is learning the science inserted in marketing, learning how it works, what are the different factors that influence ranking? And there are actually 200 of them. A lot of people don’t realize that. They think that you just do one or two things, then all of a sudden your website’s going to start to rank. So really taking the time, just like if you want to be an Instagram star, those people have spent quite a bit of time learning the platform beyond just the basic authority, not the post, it’s the same thing with the website. We don’t just pull up a page or throw up a post. There’s a lot of behind the scenes learning that goes into it before you can be successful with ranking.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Right. Okay. So talk about what do you need to have on your website so that you will get that kind of ranking and then get that kind of traffic.
Joy Aumann:
So real estate website platform, in general, many of them have numerous HTML error, what we call extraneous code, for example, references to different fonts that the website is not even using, a poorly architected page structure. So that might be something for a real estate agent just getting into this. They don’t quite understand, well, how would I even know these things? One of the tests I tell anyone to do is go to any market, San Diego, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Toronto, and run Toronto homes for sale, Miami homes for sale, Miami condos for sale, maybe NYC condos, that sort of thing. And you’re going to search for the real estate agents that are on page one of Google and or middle of top to page two, because unfortunately the top, top of page one of Google is dominated by Redfin, Zillow, realtor.com and Trulia.
Joy Aumann:
So usually we pick up that five, six position, but you’re going to notice that there’s a trend in who those website providers are, who those developers are. They’re going to see a couple of names and some of the big sites that are charging upwards of $10,000 and more, you’re not necessarily going to see those same names. So that’s a way to do that test depending on where the site is hosted. A lot of downtime from site maintenance or server issues can hurt your ranking. So if you’re using your buddy, who’s running their little website thing out of his basement, that can sometimes tend to be an issue when he’s using… we don’t know what server he’s using it, that sort of thing. And what happens is it’s really bad for your site. Your site can even be deindexed by Google if that’s not corrected.
Joy Aumann:
So a lot of times when an agent discovers this is happening, they do have to move through their website company. And then because more than half of all searches are done from either mobile devices or tablets, Google wants to see that your site is well optimized for those users. And now you’re going to get a Google penalty for not being mobile friendly. I have a very good friend of mine up in Orange county and she sent me her site. She’s been on it for years and years and years. I said, “You got to get off of this.” because the words are literally falling onto each other in mobile version. That’s the definition of not being mobile friendly. And you can’t even read anything. So RankBrain is a Google AI system and it helps Google deliver the content. So everyone kind of wonders, well, how does Google even know if I’m searching tips for selling a house?
Joy Aumann:
How does Google know what to deliver on page one of… So one of those things is what they call RankBrain and it’s their AI system. And so a website use ability, how easy or difficult it is to navigate around the website is part of RankBrain. And that’s going to be right on the developer. What are those websites look like and how are they used? So that would be the four things. I mean, I’m not just throwing five things up here to simplify it. And then the fifth time, and one of the big, big ones is site page speed, or page load time. It’s a ranking factor that’s calculated by your HTML code on your page. So what I would say is before signing a contract with a web developer, run their sites and their portfolio, and I’m going to give you these two sites.
Joy Aumann:
One of them is gtmetrics.com, G-T-M-E-T-R-I-X .com and developers.google.com. And you’re going to put both the homepage, maybe a community page, like let’s say, we’re going to pick on Los Angeles. So you’re going to put in the homepage for the site, you’re going put in the Beverly Hills homes for sale site page. So that’s the actual community page. And then you’re going to add, [inaudible 00:11:51], click on a property. And you’re going to put that list the detail page in. And what you’re going to find is a lot of the top real estate website providers that are requesting very large amounts of money to hire them. They’re running DV and apps on these page feeds, because they’re designed to show, they’re not SEO friendly.
Gayle Weiswasser:
So the lesson here is really invest in the backbone of your site. So it’s not just a question of posting good content or making it look pretty, but it has to work really well, it has to load right, it has to be mobile friendly, and you need to hire a professional to do this stuff, and don’t try to skimp on it.
Joy Aumann:
I think it’s just important though, because there’s professionals charging a lot of money and one might think, oh, my company is endorsing this company. Or so-and-so’s a big mega agent, so they’re using them. That must be okay. They forget that that big mega agents not using their website potentially for the same reason. A lot of times it’s very easy to rank for your name. If you were to… Your name is Joy Aumann, it wouldn’t be that difficult to rank on page one of Google for that. But that’s not what some guy up in San Francisco searching when they’re looking to buy a vacation property. So doing your research and really knowing what you’re doing before you start just handing over money, I think is still a takeaway on that for me, it’s huge. And I speak from experience. I’ve been taken more than once. And then I finally learned, and I know what I know.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Right, right. Okay. So we know now what the site needs to sort of how it needs to operate. Let’s talk about niches. So one of the things that you have recommended is having a niche, that it’s important to have subject matter niche. We’ve talked about that a lot on the show because it’s very helpful for marketing when you do have some way to differentiate yourself from a lot of other agents. And when you can specify what it is that you do, the particular types of homes you work with, particular types of clients you work with, maybe it’s a geographic area, that’s all very helpful. And it is very helpful for marketing. Explain why a niche is so helpful for search marketing.
Joy Aumann:
So it’s important for the website and Google search because you’re building authority around one thing. So we should probably back up a little bit and talk about, what does the website actually need to have to rank on Google? Because I helped us answer this question as well, because we’re building authority around one thing… One thing could be the lifestyle, like an equestrian property, a lakefront property, or it could be an area. The city country called community, a hyper-local, maybe it’s a 600 home subdivision. And so before you decide on niche, you do need to do an analysis. You need to find out who are your competitors on Google, and then determine desirability because every market is different. You might think that you have a great idea for a niche because you love this neighborhood and the locals love this neighborhood, but the truth is monthly search volume and interest is actually in reality, super low. And so you wouldn’t know that until you start doing some keyword research. So it’s always important to come up with your ideas and then sit down and research before you execute.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Okay. What’s the best way to identify your niche? I mean, for some people it’s going to be obvious, but if they are listening to this and thinking, oh, I don’t have a niche. What’s the best way for them to narrow that down and figure it out?
Joy Aumann:
Well, you have to first think about who you are and do you have a passion for lake property? Maybe you own a cabin or a second home on the lake or your family does, or the country club, maybe you’re a member at that country club or a city. You just absolutely love, for example, a site down here in San Diego that will be relevant, could be north county San Diego. And it’s all about the north of the county because San Diego is actually the size of the state of Connecticut. Starting out, it wouldn’t be wise to do an entire San Diego wide site. It would be more relevant to do a medium size are. There’s guys here that specialize just in downtown, those Metro markets where they’re just specializing in high rises. That’s a niche as well.
Joy Aumann:
So really have decide who you are. Do you walk your dog? Do you live in a certain area? Are people going to see you out there all the time? And then really do the analysis on, where is the search volume coming to your area? And I’m even trying to… I don’t want to just use large cities for this talk. I want to use medium to small towns as well, that want to compete with Zillow because a lot of the misconception to the scale is, well, I came starting my own websites doodle because then I’m ranking with Zillow and Redfin and I can’t compete with them. So the truth of the matter is no, you can’t compete with them. You’d need millions of dollars to compete with them on Google. But the consumer is also searching below those conglomerate sites and looking for the local professional with local knowledge, and that’s where you come in.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Right. Okay. Good. Good advice. All right. So let’s move on to content. And obviously, Google rewards sites that are well-designed, that operate right, but they also reward good content. So talk about content and how to create content that will rank the highest on Google.
Joy Aumann:
Well, would it be okay if we go to talking about what a website needs to rank on Google first and then get to the- [crosstalk 00:17:08]?
Gayle Weiswasser:
Sure, absolutely. Go ahead.
Joy Aumann:
So there’s 200 factors that go into ranking a website on page one of Google. And there’s a saying that, where’s the place to hide a dead body? And it’s on page two of Google. Usually, unless someone is searching for a real estate agent or realtor, because again, on page one of Google you’re going to have Zillow, Realtor, Redfin, and then you’re going to have Yelp and expertise.com and HomeLight and Dave Ramsey. You’re going to have those types of sites, usually when searching your city realtor, your city real estate agents. So in that case, they would potentially go to page two because they are looking for that local professional. But otherwise, if they’re searching, Dana Point homes for sale, that’s not happening. If you’re not on page one, position seven, eight, and up there’s 10 spots on page one, but seven or eight and up, you don’t even have a chance of getting any traffic for that.
Joy Aumann:
So here’s our short list. Your domain authority is also known as DA in the industry is one ranking factor. And it increases when high authority sites backlink to you. This is tie into the content we’re going to talk about in a minute, while in the visual pages also have their own page rank based on link authority. Then we’ll talk more about that when we start talking about content in a moment. Choosing the right URL or domain name is important. A lot of agents don’t get this, excessively long URLs hurt a site search and invisibility. So Orange county real estate has already been taken probably 15 years ago. So do not pick Orange county real estate and homesforsale.com. You’re just killing yourself right there. You need to keep your character link minimum between maximum 16 to 17 characters under 10 to 12 is even better.
Joy Aumann:
And think of these Netflix, Hulu, Amazon. Those are the home run URL names. Domain age is a factor. I had a lady call me for some advice a couple of weeks ago. And she has a site for 12 years, and she’s never done anything with it. And then she made another site, so she’s parked that domain, and then she made another site with another domain name, and that’s the one she’s been playing around with. And I said, “You need to get rid of this one you’re playing around with, because nothing’s happening there. I need to go back and bring the 12-year-old domain to life that you’ve registered that many years ago, because domain age is a ranking factor.” So that’s phenomenal. You get a little step up. So a lot of times people do have domains they purchased many, many years ago and just done nothing on them.
Joy Aumann:
And then back to RankBrain, if a site use ability reduces someone’s time on site, like the number of pages they look at, the bounce rate, that’s when you click on a site and you don’t like what you see and you click right back off, it will adversely affect your ranking. And so one another takeaway for today is turn off your IDX forced registration. If you want to rank in Google, forced registration is not the way to go, period.
Gayle Weiswasser:
So that means requiring people to register in order to see results?
Joy Aumann:
Yes. Many agents sites, the minute you try to look at a property and click on it, it’s saying in your face, name, phone number, email, or the sites literally locked and you can’t see anything. It just doesn’t work anymore. They used to. They used to work 10 years ago, but it doesn’t work anymore because there’s a million other sites where I don’t have to sign up and give my personal information. So we’re that-
Gayle Weiswasser:
Right. People just don’t have the patience for that.
Joy Aumann:
No, not anymore. What we do is we earn that phone call or we weren’t earn that inquiry. And then the final thing, it’s proper on page construction of the page, which is again, going to our content. And that means using the correct heading, title tags and well thought out meta-description tags that if you look on Google, I don’t know if you’ve ever searched something, but you could probably search like perial recipes. And you’re in a soldier what’s called a meta description tag, and you’re going to see some, it just don’t make any sense.
Joy Aumann:
It’s because the person didn’t… Well, usually you’re not going to find it on page one, but maybe if you go to page four or five, they didn’t even know how to do it. And it needs to be inviting. It needs to say something like, “Oh, here today, we’re going to discuss…” For example, we talk about the homes for sale and schools and you want to make a full, detailed description of what they’re going to get when they come onto your website. So then back to content, we want to create epic content. And so what that means is, let’s say we’re going to write a blog post on a country club community in your neighborhood. We want to make sure that that is the best article, the longest, the most, in-depth, the most updated article on page one and page two of Google.
Joy Aumann:
And we talk about the chicken before the egg with content marketing, so you might be like, “Well, okay. That sounds like that’s going to take me hours.” One of my articles is taking me 30 hours to write, but it’s actually a very, very strong article on our site, but it’s the whole chicken before the egg with content marketing. So your site can’t get that domain authority. You can’t get other writers to back link to your page as an authority site, including you in their article. If you don’t have epic content. You can’t rank without content. And then technically, you can’t rank until your website has authority, but the content does have to come first because that’s how your site is going to be looked at overlapped. If you pull up a bazillion realtor websites, you go to their blog, they’re basically like 400 to 500, 600 words long. So those are never going to move the needle.
Gayle Weiswasser:
So are you hurting your own or weakening the strength of your own website if you take your content from your website and you share it elsewhere? Like, if you go on social media and share it, or if you tweet it or do something else with it, is that a bad idea?
Joy Aumann:
Absolutely not. So if you’ve spent hours creating exceptional content, you need to spend two to three times longer than that, took you to write it, to promote it. The obvious promotion spots are Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Facebook, but there are real estate blogger groups. There’s even one on Reddit. So that’s what they are. They’re specifically designed to share your real estate context. Now, I want to make sure I’m clear about this. You don’t want to just copy and paste your introductory paragraphs. You don’t want to copy and paste anything. And I want to add to our talk on content, scraping someone else’s website and copying their content. Not only could you get a cease and desist letter from their attorney because you’re not allowed to do that, but number two, you’ll never rank because Google knows. Google knows who the first person is opposed to that content.
Joy Aumann:
So I personally don’t spend my time chasing people around the internet who are copying my content because Google knows and I’m fine with that. I do know a couple of people that get so bent out of shape about it, that they chase people down. I did cease and desist one gentleman who literally copied every single thing on my website, but that was a one time thing.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Got it.
Joy Aumann:
So Pinterest is a great way to give your content legs for… Pinterest, the challenges you have to create beautifully, visually dynamic pins. You might need to pay a designer if you’re bad like I am. I mean, I have Canva, but I still don’t do it very well because then your content can get keep getting shared and shared. And I have an article that’s been shared maybe 130,000 or 150,000 times on Pinterest, possibly more now.
Joy Aumann:
And it was due to the pin, not the content, but the content is good too. But the pin sort of the thing that made it viral for years. I mean, I’m talking like, I think it’s been like five years now. And then Twitter’s a great platform to really learn because that’s where the writers are. So writers aren’t hanging out on Instagram and TikTok as much. The writers for the New York Times, MSN real estate business, Business Insider, all of those types of places where you want to network. So that like, “Hey, the next time you’re writing something, can you reach out to me? I’d love to be a source, which makes you get a back link.”
Joy Aumann:
But there’s times where I’ve spent six hours helping a writer put a story together. So definitely don’t think you’re just going to get on there in the app for two minutes and be done. You might not have to put some time into it, but it’s a great place to network and find those folks because otherwise you have no idea like who the real estate writers are or the top tier publications that you want to have your content links from.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Okay. So let’s talk about the big picture here. What is the point of all of this? And obviously, when you want people come into your website and those are interested, people who are then looking at your content, but how do you then convert them into clients?
Joy Aumann:
Well, let’s talk first about how Google SEM differs from social media marketing, because that’s what folks are probably immediately thinking. Well, I got a lot of followers on Instagram or Facebook or something like that. So why wouldn’t I just continue to put content on there? The difference between social media marketing, like Instagram, YouTube, Facebook is that they’re not an active user intent, actually considered interruption marketing. They’re on Facebook, looking for their friends, checking in to see their friend that just got married, how their honeymoon is going, that sort of thing. And all of a sudden there you are talking about real estate. You’re just interrupted them. Whereas on Google, people are searching physically for that information, market data, homes for sale, or realtors that they want to interview to list their home. So that’s really important too, because a lot of people… Because social media is an easy out.
Joy Aumann:
It’s a lot easier to network on Facebook and Instagram. So then back to your question, new business. So this year, so far, we’ve closed a little bit over 8 million. We’ve got three, $10 million packages we’re working on. When I say that, I mean, a house to list and a house to buy, which are right around $10 million for three different sets of clients. Last year, we closed over $20 million from our website. So how does it lead to business?Down the road, throwing your traffic on your website, leads to showing requests, buyer and seller inquiries and actually team member hires, which can they do to revenue issue.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Okay. Well, that’s all very good stuff. So that explains why search engine marketing is such a worthwhile investment. It requires patience and it requires attention and detail. And it’s not as easy as some of the other social media tactics that we’ve talked about the last 160 episodes, but it really does lay a fantastic foundation for your brand and for your presence. Like you said, your 24/7 presence and obviously leads to very desirable outcomes. What does an agent need to have in place before they start getting leads?
Joy Aumann:
Great question. If you just, and this actually doesn’t just speak to your own website, but this speaks to signing up for realtor.com or Zillow leads. You need a CRM of your own, where these leads are coming into, and then you need to create a funnel with both physical touch points. So those would be called and had written cards, looking for them on social media, those sorts of things, along with automated ones. So our funnel is 43 steps and it’s actually 50, 50. Automated versus phone calls, texts, physical things that the agent needs to do. And then you need to have your scripts ready so you know what you’re going to say when you get on the phone where I could just see, a newer agent, especially all of a sudden have their first lead. They don’t even know what they’re going to say to them. So you want to be prepared.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). So when these leads come in, you need to know what you’re doing and what you’re going to say and how you’re going to process them. It’s a great thing to get a bunch of leads, but if you don’t respond to them, you don’t answer them, it’s meaningless.
Joy Aumann:
Right, because the average online lead is a nine month incubation. So you need to know how you’re going to take them from acquisition and romance them for nine months, being creative and doing what every other agents most likely not doing, because they are also signed up on other agents websites. And we can all speak to this. How many times have you guys gotten a ride to send a link from your client? What about this property? Or hey, I would like to take a look at this. And you’re like, what are you doing on Redfin? That’s what you’re thinking. And so it happens all the time.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Right. Okay. Well, this has been amazing. Lots and lots of great content here. Do you have any top takeaways that you want people to… you want to leave them with before they finish the show today?
Joy Aumann:
Yeah, I think it’s just really important that before you hire someone to do your search engine marketing, you’re starting to do it on the right website that’s actually got a chance to rank. And then really start to understand what are the actual deliverables that the old company is promising you, because search engine marketing is almost like a foreign language and it’s the easiest thing to bamboozle a client with. We’re going to do X, Y, and Z. And that all sounds great, especially when they make these long white paper reports. I mean, it looks good to me, here’s my $3,000 a month. So I think that that’s the biggest takeaway is just to make sure the person you’re working with. Another question is like, well, first of all, making sure they’re doing work in your industry, which is real estate. I do my own FPL, but if I were to hire someone, I would hire someone that worked for attorneys or realtors.
Joy Aumann:
Either one would be fine. You need to be [inaudible 00:30:01] doctors as well. And then I want to see what are the websites that they ranked. And that’s where I stop most of these guys dead in their tracks. And then, what are the actual keywords? So if this chiropractors ranking for San Diego chiropractor, now we’re talking. But if he’s not ranking for anything much with high search volumes, then you’re going down that wrong path, I think. So I think those are the two… Because I also see realtors investing in SEO and they’re on the completely wrong platform. Those websites that they’re using do not rank on Google for the homes for sale type searches.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Great. Well, thank you. Joy, before I let you go, I know I asked you this somewhat recently, but have you been using any new apps this summer that you want to share with the audience?
Joy Aumann:
Yeah, actually one of the SEO tools that I pay $100 a month for, it was called Ahrefs A-H-R-E-F-S. It’s a great tool, but I just recently switched in August to SEMrush S-E-M-R-U-S-H, and it’s about $110 a month as well. So I just swapped the two. And SEMrush has a great app. And so you can track your keywords on a daily basis, the top ones you want to track. And it tells you every morning when you wake up, because a lot of times your keywords will fluctuate up and down. For example, today, downtown San Diego condos for sale, I’ve dropped position three. I was up at position two yesterday. So it always is fluctuating. So it’s really cool app. I mean, it can make you a little neurotic, but interestful app to watch because your ranges do fluctuate. Even though you’re on page one, one day, you’ll be positioned one, next day two, up to three, then to one again. I mean, it just floats all over the place.
Gayle Weiswasser:
All right. Great. Okay. Well, thank you so much for sharing all this great information, Joy. What is the best way for people to find you?
Joy Aumann:
Well, probably our website is luxurysocalrealty.com, if you want to take a look at a very strong website in the real estate space. And then just Facebook, Luxury Soquel Realty is the same tag that we use for our Instagram and social media and Facebook.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Great. Well, I will link to all the various tools that you mentioned, the app that you mentioned and your website as well.
Joy Aumann:
Perfect. It was wonderful being on your talk today.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Thank you so much for coming back. I appreciate it. We’ll have to-
Joy Aumann:
Okay, have a great day.
Gayle Weiswasser:
… have you back soon. Okay. Bye-bye.
Joy Aumann:
Thanks. Bye.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Thanks for listening to another episode of the Snapshot. I hope that you enjoyed what you heard today. If you have a moment, please leave us a review. It really helps us get new listeners. This podcast is part of Industry Syndicate, a curated media network containing the highest rated real estate and mortgage podcasts. Find other excellent estate content at industrysyndicate.com. Home of real estate’s first media network.