I'm often asked what will be included in an REW SEO project by smart Realtors who are looking to enhance their digital marketing strategy. The truth is that every single project at REW is a bit different, because we look at your company, competition, and opportunity within your market, and then develop a strategy accordingly. Your designated SEO expert will be able to create an individualized strategy for your site and share it with you fairly early into your project. In the meantime, let's take a look at what we plan to accomplish for every new SEO project that comes across our desks. We want to transfer existing content If you have existing content on an old site, our first activity will be evaluating what you have and determining what is worth…

Choosing a domain for your site shouldn't be stressful, but it does require thoughtful planning. This easy guide will tell you how to choose a domain, and walk you through the details you should consider. Domain Authority How old is the domain? Generally speaking, the older a domain is, the more likely it is to have a history. That history can be extremely valuable if the site naturally earned links over the course of its time, which in turn builds domain authority. For this reason, your oldest active domain is usually your best choice. Note: If you participated in link-building or other potentially spammy SEO tactics in the past, consult with an SEO expert before deciding on an existing domain. Branding & Memorability Your domain is your calling…

Running into some snags with your real estate PPC campaign? No problem, we're here to help! In this blog post we'll talk about the three most common PPC challenges we come across and what you need to do to improve them. Problem 1 – My Leads Are All Junk This is one of the most common problems in ALL types of online advertising. While there's no way to ensure all of your leads will be qualified buyers looking to find a home today, you can increase the specificity of your ads to help target buyers who are further along in the buying process. These types of leads will be more likely to register as they are at the point where further help is needed, rather than simply wanting to browse. For campaigns in the real estate industry, the easiest way to do this is…

Capturing leads is one of the most important roles your REW website will play in your online marketing strategy. For many Realtors, the entire point of their website is to bring more clients to their business, which is why maximizing lead capture and conversion is critical. There are essentially three steps in the online lead conversion process: Driving traffic to the site (typically through SEO or PPC) Capturing leads from that traffic Converting those leads into clients This blog post is going to focus on the second step in the online lead conversion process, and provide some tips on how you can use your REW site to capture more leads! Enable forced registration on your site The very first thing you need to do is enable forced registration on…

David was nominated for our Career Spotlight by Vy, the Director of Product Development. David has held various roles at REW that have given him a really well-rounded view of the business, which his peers and the industry can benefit from learning about. He has also been recently promoted to lead of the Product Enhancement squad in Product Development. Hello David! What's your favourite thing about working at REW? Every day I come into work it's different. Something's different. And sometimes it's interesting when you come back from vacation because a lot of things have become different. I mean different in a good way. It's not instability or scary—it's just different. Every day it's a new task and we're really focusing on making ourselves better. I feel…

Your Google Adwords quality score will directly impact your ad costs and visibility, and therefore ROI, which makes it an extraordinarily important metric to pay attention to if you're managing a real estate PPC campaign. Here at REW, we take care of quality score for all our clients, letting them focus their time and energy on real estate. However, if you're tackling your own campaigns, this is what you need to know about Google's quality scores: What is Quality Score? Every ad in Google Adwords is given a quality score, and this quality score directly reflects how good Google thinks your ads are. Google created quality score to help improve the user experience, by ensuring that advertisers created ads that are likely to be of interest to the…

There's a lot of high-level SEO information out there to help Realtors thrive, and search engine marketing is a practice that includes an immense level of detail. But sometimes we need to take a step back from the fine tuning and look at the bigger picture. The 5 real estate SEO tips in today's post help agents focus on that big picture and create a website that's well optimized. 5. Keep your community area focused When starting your site off, pick a city or handful of communities, and then focus. Create as much content as you can about that area, write everything you know about it, go out and take photos that nobody else has, and ultimately make your site the single best resource out there for learning about real estate in it. Focusing on a single…

Choosing whether you need your own autonomous domain can seem overwhelming, but the decision becomes a lot easier when you understand the main differences between autonomous sites and subdomain sites. First, let's take a quick look at the difference between subdomains and autonomous domains. To properly grasp the difference, we have to understand that domains come in three levels. The extension you choose for your domain—most likely .com or .ca in North America—is called the top-level domain (TLD). A TLD tells everybody which section of the world wide web your site belongs to, and is typically organized by country or region. The second level comes from the unique identifier you give that TLD, and it's what we commonly refer to as "domain name".…

We don't have to tell you that sellers represent a huge opportunity for real estate agents, because you already know that. But do you know how to attract and convert sellers? Two weeks ago, we talked about how to attract and convert buyer leads using your real estate website, and this week we're going to talk about how to get seller leads! Set yourself up to build relationships One of the major themes you're going to see us talk about in the coming months is relationships, and that's because relationship building continues to be crucial for effective real estate sales. As digital media changes the way we interact, and agents focus on sales targets and transactions, it can be easy to overlook the people behind the real estate. But the need to build…

While Google does the heavy lifting when it comes to tracking metrics for your PPC campaign, it's up to us to discern what these numbers mean to your campaign's performance. Your PPC metrics help us understand what we're doing well, and what improvements can be made to ensure the ongoing success of your PPC campaign.  Our PPC experts have the foundation skills to make high performance campaigns, but there's always some test and learn involved in refining a PPC campaign so that it performs at its absolute best. What works well for one website might not be effective on another, and it's important for us to evaluate your PPC campaigns on a regular basis. We do this evaluation using the same metrics we share with you in your regular reports. Let's delve a…