MyLocalProfile: Inexpensive Advertising for the Real Estate Industry

Part 1 of a 2 part series on local seach and the real estate industry


Most real estate agents and mortgage brokers have heard the stories of how some of their contemporaries are making a fortune from generate leads and eventually sales produced by internet traffic. Maybe at one point or another you (agent or broker) have wanted to get involved in the internet marketing arena, but had no idea where to start. Possibly you went as far as having your friends niece design you a website…now what?

Many people are exceedingly confused about how to marketing their site, compounded by the fear of being ripped off, resulting in never really doing much with their site. This is equivalent to having thousands of brochures or promotional materials created and spending hundreds to thousands of dollars on the design and creation, and then never sending them out. In its simplest form a website is just another promotional material just in a non-traditional format from print.

Your website is an interactive ad you have created, internet marketing is the distribution of advertisement (your website). Is there a point to spend time and money on an ad that hardly anyone will see?

I’m sure this is not the first time you have heard this or come to this realization. So, now the question becomes what are some viable options to promote my website and my service? There are many ways to promote a website, but most are expensive. Whether this is an expense of your time through doing research and implementation of your learned techniques, or paying a search engine marketing professional to do this for you, it will cost you. This can be a profitable endeavor, but it can be costly and may take up to 6 months to receive any relevant performance depending on a variety of factors that we won’t go into today.

Let’s say you happen to be an individual real estate agent or mortgage broker with a small budget, under $500, but you would still like to find a way to promote your site. MyLocalProfile (http://www.mylocalprofile.com) was created in response to this problem. Most real estate searches on the major search engines (i.e. google, yahoo, msn) contain a location descriptor in the search terms used. This produces the search engine's local results above any other organic website results.

An example of this would be someone in Miami Beach that is looking for a real estate agent. One of their search queries would be “real estate agent Miami Beach” As the picture below is a screen shot of the results that be would returned. I have highlighted the local results in an orange box for emphasis. As you can plainly see being listed in the local search engine results can be a very valuable.


end of part 1

Outsource SEO vs In-house SEO

SEO is becoming increasingly important to all who look to do business and use the Internet as a marketing tool. It is the path in which your market finds your offering. It has become almost a necessity for businesses to incorporate SEO in to their marketing plan. Many companies struggle with the decision on whether to hire a firm or conduct their SEO in-house. Unfortunately many companies lack the knowledge about SEO and assume it will be cheaper for them in the long run to hire someone "in-house". For some companies this may be efficient while others the overlooking the hiring of a professional firm to SEO can be costly. It is as critical to your business’ health as if you were to feel that you could heal a fatal disease yourself because you have access to the Internet and books instead of going to a highly trained physician. Now you laugh and say that would be absurd, but is the growth of your company worth the risk.

Knowledge Versus Cost Versus Time = Your Success

SEO is an ever changing business. Search engines change their algorithm frequently and new rules are put into place. One has to have the resources to find this information and understand how to implement the changes. An SEO firm is more likely to be aware of changes to search engine optimization protocols than an in-house individual. Many in-house individual will focus on developing and implementing your SEO strategies but typically remain in the dark about what goes on outside your organization due to they do not work with other scenarios. Outsourced SEO professionals must perform these same functions while constantly studying the industry, staying current with changing trends and familiarizing themselves with the latest SEO techniques. It is a part of their day to day business and necessary if they intend to compete in the marketplace and wish to survive.

What about cost? Surely the cost of hiring an individual is substantially less than the cost of hiring a company, right? This is a common misconception. Let’s look at it this way. You hire an E-Commerce Marketing Manager whose job is to develop and implements the strategic online marketing plan for an organization. Staying abreast of changes in the online marketing environment to best serve the objectives of the organization and adjusts plans accordingly. They may even be responsible for overseeing other aspects of the website such as the advertising and content components. In most cases the individual will be wearing many hats spreading them thin. His or her base salary according to Salary.com on average would be $85,703. That is $7141.92 a month and roughly $42 an hour. This is for one individual with hopes that they bear positive results. Let’s say they do not. It will take 3 to 6 months to start to truly see if the individual is an asset or not. That is $21,425.76 if you decide to let the individual go in just the third month. Not to include cost of taxes and benefits. And if successful, your company just paid $85,703 per year for SEO.

The average SEO firm charges anywhere from $5500 to $35000 to perform the same task with a staff of highly trained professionals in the area of link building, writing, optimizing, web development etc. Even on the high end you are getting a staff for the entire year for around what it cost you to hire an individual in-house for a quarter. And if it does not bear positive results and you decide to terminate the relationship you will only have lost less than $10,000 if prorated based on the $35000. in most cases you can even get some of that back. This logistically saves you time and money.

Would you agree that having one individual do the job of five is rarely a good idea? Would you feel it cost effective?

Time is another concern with in-house SEO. Will one individual be able to optimize multiple pages, write content, tags, build links, run reports and perform other SEO tasks in a timely fashion? One person can only do so much. Would you agree that time is money? Most SEO firms can do in a matter of days what might take an individual weeks to do. Many companies who use in-house SEO personnel spend more than necessary to get the same amount of work done in a longer amount of time. Once again you have one individual doing many task versus many individuals doing one task effectively.

In any case, is outsourcing the right move for you or your company? Whether you choose to outsource or not, here are a few things to keep in mind:

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Mylocalprofile.com: Getting Listed Local Search Results Just Got A Little Easier

This July GDMI has unveiled a new localsearch product called My Local Profile(http://www.mylocalprofile.com).

My Local Profile is a new service developed to provide an intelligent means for local business and "brick and mortar" companies to obtain and/or manage their online presence. MLP was created out of the frustration that many have vocalized over the years about either not appearing in local search engines or Yellowpages results. In some instances companies would be listed, but have old or incorrectly information associated with their listings, causing lost business opportunities.

In MyLocalProfile you can create a profile for your business containing the following information: Company name, company slogan, address, phone number, email address, web site address, category headings, business description, products offered, services, payment methods, hours of operations, and years in business.

Once your business page is created, My Local Profile updates its directory and pushes the information to data providers/companies that all the major search engines receive data from to build their local listings that appear in their search results. This "data push" is done on a monthly basis which provides businesses with the ability to have new information or changes in their business updated throughout the internet in relatively short amount of time.


Here is an example of listing created in MYLP (MYLP Business Listing Example)

For more information go to Mylocalprofile.com