Toprank blog had a short but intriguing essay recently discussing predictions about the Death of SEO within the next five years or so. To me, this is one of those articles that is important not because of the answers it provides but because of the questions it raises.

On the one hand, I do agree with the author that Search Engine Optimization is getting harder and harder to do. I say this with some confidence because, over time, I’ve found that the effort that I need to expend to promote a site to top place has grown over time from something I would consider child’s play to a sort of full time Herculean task that may or may not produce results.

So, indeed, to the extent it becomes more difficult, I’m sure that over time SEO failure stories will become more prevalent than the success stories, and that won’t be good for SEO as an enterprise.

I must admit, however, that the author loses me later on in the article when he talks about building traffic through social media becoming more effective. Although in a later article the author does go on to give specifics as to how this might work, I do feel like there’s a little bit of the ubiquitous “If you blog it they will come” hocus pocus going on. To me, there’s nothing more effective than the following scenario:

• User is looking for a solution to a problem, and types a search in a search engine.
• User finds results that match what she’s looking for, and clicks through to a web site.
• The web site looks like a fit for what she’s trying to do, and offers more information.
• Phone rings. Start selling.

There are probably cases where one can sell effectively through the social network of fellow bloggers, but it all depends on what you’re selling, I think. In the case of real estate blogging services, the people reading your blog are also your likely buyers. My friend Jim Cronin is doing a brisk business capitalizing on this. But in the case of real estate blogs, on the other hand, I’ve found that most of my readers are either fellow Realtors® or folks who want to take pot shots at us. So there’s no direct correlation between blogging and business — the “social network” I’m targetting here starts with a “G” and rhymes with frugal.

What I’ve found, however, is that this is only working for me on sites with a long history already, so for me, “search engines versus social networks” not is not a case of either/or, it’s a case of one of those hands washing the other.

In my last article about real estate landing pages, I talked about the two different functions of a landing page — being a traffic generator and being a lead generator. This time I want to look primarily at their lead generation function and critique a few pages, including my own.

One reasonably successful page of mine — that nevertheless could stand improvement — is a basic form and form handler combination that I use on a variety of pages. The idea is that I can gather contact information for any offer I want to provide. Here for example I use the page to offer email updates for condo buyers. In another context, the same form provides info of interest to first time buyers.

The benefit of the way I’ve set this up is ease of use, and not having to do the tedious table set up for the form over and over again. But the limitations of the current form are obvious to me:

• I’m probably collecting too much information for most purposes. For example, unless I’m writing hand written thank you notes or the like (which admittedly I sometimes do), the physical address of the user especially is definitely overkill at this point. In some contexts it may make sense to the user to provide it, but if I’m offering email updates for condos I may be losing users who otherwise would have converted by making them jump through too many hoops.
• Related to the first issue is the more general problem that the form does not offer any way to test different form elements to see if conversion can be improved. The process of gleaning what information you can about the effectiveness of an online campaign is sometimes called A/B testing (or, more ambitiously, “multi-variable testing”). If you’re unfamiliar with this approach, you might want to start with Jakob Nielsen’s excellent article on the benefits and limitations of A/B Testing, Putting A/B Testing in Its Place.

Part of the reason I haven’t implemented some kind of basic A/B testing in my own landing pages is that the necessary incentive (pain), hasn’t been there. My focus in my web sites has been primarily on the broad end of the funnel — on Search Engine Optimization. Because I’ve been somewhat successful in this, I haven’t tested my landing pages as rigourously as I would if (for example) I had a $1,000 per month Pay-Per-Click ad budget. However, it would be interesting to develop some basic A/B testing strategies for my own business and perhaps offer them to consulting clients as well, so I will start looking into that and then let you know how it goes in a later article. It’s only probably a two to eight day coding job (depending on how fancy I get).

The second landing page I’d call your attention to is the home page of TucsonProperties.net. I came across this page through a reference to Tucson real estate in the ad for Marketing Sherpa’s pricey book on landing pages. I’m not overly fond of some of the cosmetic aspects of this page (such as the textured background). Nevertheless, I think this page has a number of interesting features that bear mentioning:

• I like the idea of putting a strong call to action on the home page, since this of course is the page that typically gets the most traffic from search engines. At the same time, this isn’t a “pure” landing page, but contains links to other areas of the site, as well as a way to search the site.
• The amount of personal information required to get through the form is kept to a minimum, while at the same time doing a good job of qualifying the prospect. The form asks for first name only, not full name, and “Email or Phone”, which is a pretty user-friendly move. (Yes, I know, I know, you want the phone number, and so do I, but having read through my share of people living at “(123) 456-7890″, I don’t think a nod to the user at this point is necessarily a bad thing). The “I describe myself as” dropdown field does an excellent job, here, I think, of signalling the agent about the buyer’s motivation.
• On the “definite no-no” side, the reset button needs to go away here. It doesn’t add much, and an accidental click will annoy the visitor and possibly lose the conversion.

Overall, the Tuscon form is friendly, simple, and probably leads the user to a conversion quite well, so it could serve as the basis for a nice generic real estate contact form. It would be an interesting (and, more importantly, profitable) experiment to test a variation of this theme against my own multi-purpose form to see how they perform against one another.

I was talking to a Realtor® colleague the other day who was good enough to call and let me know one of my sites was down. Over the course of the conversation we started talking about search engine optimization and the like, and I told him my opinion that as more Realtors® compete for top keyword positions and the search engines continue to refine their algorithms, search engine optimization has become more difficult and labor intensive.

What that means for Realtors® is that traffic is harder to lure to your site. This raises the stakes for being able to convert more visitors once they get there. This agent told me he was paying $600 per month on pay per click advertising, but when I brought up the issue of landing pages, he said “What’s that?”

With that question in my mind, I thought we’d start with the basics. I would suggest that some of the confusion about landing pages springs from the fact that there really are two good working definitions. A landing page should do either one (preferably both) of the following two things.

1. Contain content that a search engine will consider to be appropriate for a high ranking for a keyword combination that your visitors will be searching for.
2. Contain an offer and a way to contact you that will be compelling enough to convert a visitor into a lead. (Generally in a real estate site we want a conversion to a buyer or seller lead. For an eCommerce site the definition of conversion may be an actual sale).

So a landing page can be a traffic generator, or it can be a lead generator once the traffic gets there, or both.

You can think of a landing page as a sort of a minature version of your entire site and your entire Internet marketing campaign (or lack of one). All Realtors® — whether they can turn a computer on or not — fall somewhere on the following Internet Marketing Spectrum.

Real Estate Marketing Spectrum — Where Do You Fit?

Of course, in the best of all worlds, your landing page will rank high in the search engines, and your visitors will convert at a high rate when they get there. (High traffic plus high conversions, quadrant 1).

Perhaps the next best case is where your conversion rate is somewhat low, but you’re so good at generating traffic that you still make a good living. (Quadrant 3). I myself spent many happy years in quadrant 3, and I suspect that most of the current cult of real estate blogging is driven by the fact that blogging is a great quadrant 3 activity.
Also acceptable is the case where your traffic is paid for (for example, pay per click), and your conversion rate on the pages they land on is high enough to more than cover your costs. In this case, you’re likely to have low traffic and high conversions (Quadrant 2).

The worst case, of course, is where you have low traffic and low conversions, i.e., quadrant 4. One case of this is, of course, what many Realtors® do: they have no web site at all. Actually this isn’t as horrific as it sounds, because in this case the agent has zero web site traffic, and zero web site conversions, but their financial outlay is also zero. So at least they have company floor, open houses, cold calling, and whatever other prospecting tools may be in their arsenal to work with. Another possibility is the favorite of listing agents, the YIHAWS option. (”Yeah, I Have A Web Site”). In other words, you paid somebody something to have a site, so you can tell your sellers where your site is. You may still have pitifully small traffic and conversions, but since having the site may help you close a seller to get a listing or two, the money spent on your web site may not be a total loss.

We’re going to talk more about landing pages in Part 2 of this article, but for now, just remember that the goal of a landing page is to get you and your web site out of quadrant four.

I am beginning work on an eBook project entitled “What Every Realtor® Should Know Before Buying a Web Site”.

Some of the topics this eBook will explore will include custom sites versus template sites, IDX, search engine optimization, pay per click advertising, blogging, landing pages, reciprocal linking, and more.

In addition, I’m planning on reviewing the web sites that are available from several major web site vendors so that potential buyers will have an informed basis for comparison.

I may also discuss alternatives to developing a web site. Let’s face it, not everyone in the business cares about HTML and blogging and the like, but many agents still want to get leads from the Internet. This pent up desire for business is feeding a thriving lead re-sale industry.

Within a few weeks, I’ll set up a mailing list for those who might be interested in learning more about the eBook as I develop it, and I will probably use content that I send to the mailing list members as the basis for what will become the eBook.

Needless to say, there’s a lot to learn and put together to get this done, and I welcome input from Realtors® about their experiences with different web site companies and lead providers.

Hi,

John Lockwood here. I’ve been saying for some time now that I need to get some more focus to this web site, and now it’s finally kicking off with the launch of my real estate Internet marketing blog. The purpose of this blog will be to serve as a major resource for information about making money on the Internet, with a special focus on how Real Estate professionals can use all the tools that technology has to offer to improve their business. We’ll have a new interface in a day or so, and start moving content over from our personal blog, then we’ll start adding what we hope you’ll find are lots of great new articles.

So pull up an RSS reader and stay tuned!