seo

April 9, 2013

Rental marketing video

Following on from our previous video blog on creating your Letting Agency Video Channel, here we can see how to publish a property marketing video on your YouTube station. (by Rentviewsoftware)

Process for editing your rental marketing video

Here is 5 steps in uploading your rental marketing video to YouTube. You will need to create an account as outlined in the above link.

Step 1. Upload the video from your computer or device. If you are using a smart phone or tablet you can easily upload the video by just clicking the upload facility.

Step 2. Start to place SEO information relating to your rental marketing video. It is important to use keywords which you hope to rank with in the Title, Description and tags. For example if your property is located on Manchester Ave you may want the title as “Manchester Ave Apartment to rent” this should also appear in the description.

Step 2a. Include the text to appear in your Facebook or Twitter Feed if you have social media connected with your channel.

Step 3. Advanced settings, will allow you enter details such as location and options to include recording date etc.

Step 4. Once you have everything completed press save and now you edit some of the rental makreting video to include on screen texts and links etc.

Step 5. Promote your rental marketing video in order for you to generate traffic and views. The obvious places of promotion are all your social media channels but also on the description of your rental property.

Why agencies use rental marketing video

The strategy of using a rental marketing video by letting agents to attract tenants allows them to qualify the tenants to the highest level possible. By offering a rental marketing video any potential tenant viewing your property knows that location, price, layout & interior match their expectations.

By using rental marketing videos you are offering more in your marketing services to landlords. With increased competition within the lettings industry having more USP’s will certainly help you attract more listings.

Read more on Strategy in marketing a rental property – which discusses letting agents’ different marketing strategies.

by Andreas Riha

(Source: http://www.youtube.com/)

April 5, 2013

Creating your YouTube channel

In our previous blog, Why use YouTube for marketing, we discussed the benefits of using rental marketing videos for your letting agency.

Creating your YouTube channel

So the first step in rental marketing videos is setting up a channel to host the videos. There are a number of video hosting platforms but we have used the most popular, YouTube. In this demonstration, I am going to go through creating your YouTube channel.

When creating your YouTube channel it is very important to keep SEO in mind, as this is really going to help the channel to get traffic. If you didnt know already, YouTube is owned by Google, so by using SEO with your brand’s keywords and marketing message in your YouTube profile, you are feeding Google’s search appetite.

Below is a video blog showing how to do this and here is a link to the YouTube channel I just created: Letting Agent UK

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsZckmGYfU8

Creating your Letting agency video channel (by Rentviewsoftware)

by Andreas Riha

February 7, 2013

Letting agency website design

In our last blog post on letting industry challenges we looked at how winning new landlords was one of the current biggest challenges for letting agents. Apart from providing an excellent service to your landlords and winning referrals, your website is currently your next best marketing tool. The problem is, as we discussed, that many letting agents neglect their website and their letting agency website design.

How to use your strong letting agency website design to build a portfolio

Image Credit: Jayel Aharem

Letting agency SEO

So let’s start by doing a quick health check on your website to see how people are currently finding you. There are a couple of simple enough ways to get under the hood of your site, I would recommend using Google Analytics (click here for a previous blog on Analytics) or Google webmaster tools. You can access these by simply setting up a free Google account (if you haven’t already got one) and simply searching for them. You will need access to the control panel of your website to install a simple code into your website as a security feature. It’s quite simple but if that is something you are not comfortable doing, just ask who ever looks after your site to install the code.

Analyse your website

If you can’t access either of these a simple way to get some information on your website is to got through Alexa. Here you can get a quick overview of where your website ranks. It also gives you the chance to see keyword queries that bring a high percentage of traffic to a particular URL. So when here, check your own site and then perhaps a competitor who is doing well.

Once you get the site up, you can go through and click onto search analytics to see the top search queries which are driving traffic to your competitor’s website. Compare it with your own. Is your competitor generating more traffic through search terms? Are the search terms they rank highly in ones which you wish to gain traffic through? If so, they are probably working more effectively on SEO than your own site. Most letting agents are looking at finding landlords through their website SEO.

How to use your website as a visitor

Search the term that you think a new landlord would search to find a property manager or letting agent in your area, then see who ranks the highest. Now visit their site on Alexa to find out more about them. Learn from their website and implement changes needed to move your website up the search ranking.

Another interesting statistic to find out is how many back links your competitor has. The more back links a site has, the more attractive the website is for search engines to return that site on the first page of a search result (or SERP). A back link is your website’s URL on another website. Below is how a back link looks:

https://rentview.co/blog/data-backup-for-agencies/ or if hyperlinked in text, the same link might look like this.

If you want to know more about link building strategies this is a great place to start. In order for your website to generate traffic, it is very important to look at your letting agency website design.

by Andreas Riha

July 25, 2012

Internet Marketing for Letting and Estate Agents

Hi guys Cormac here with a new blog on some creative and effective marketing tips for agents. During my year writing a dissertation on viral marketing and social networks I’ve picked up some useful tips on their purpose for businesses online strategy. The attitudes of the consumer (for example your targeted landlords/tenants) are completely different to what they were five years ago. The way i like to describe it is the hunter has become the hunted. What I mean by this is that no longer are we standing still and brands/marketers/companies shout their marketing messages and push advertisements in our faces but we decide exactly what we want to engage with. The power of TV and newspaper continues to fall as we spend more time online and become more attached to hand held devices.

What does this mean?

So the consumer is now the one looking for the brand, once they decide what they need they will go online and start researching what available, they wont be listening to the radio when they have the I-pod blaring and they wont be seeing your ads when there reading the news on their latest phone app. So what an agency needs to do is increase its presence online. There is a wide range of areas you can engage in when implementing an online strategy as you can see from the infographic below complements of alltopstartups.

Today i’m gong to discuss part one of the online marketing strategy which is search engine marketing. Search marketing is broken into two areas SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and Pay Per Click advertising. This is one of the number one ways to market your agencies website as your targeted audiences are heading to Google every day to search for the services they need such as rented accomadation and letting or management services

Many of you will be aware of the Google Adwords platform as it is the main money making facility for Google so its marketed heavily to everyone and anyone on the internet. It is what really kicked off the online marketing buzz but in my opinion its benefits are slowly stagnating as more and more companies use its service. Why is it losing its appeal? Well you have to pick ‘keywords’ related to your industry for where you want your ads to appear, for example your doing a campaign targeted to Landlords you may choose ‘property management Dublin’ , ‘letting services in Cork’ etc , the more specific the better. However since the influx in companies using the services the costs of using such popular keywords are rising as companies bid against one another for the most common searched terms.

In reality there is only so many words that are relevant for an agent so it may get to the point where you are bidding more then you should or choosing ineffective search terms. What this means is you need to focus on natural search marketing known or as i referred to above SEO , search engine optimisation, Avril Fagan the head of Digital marketing at Sage Ireland describes this as the holy grail of search. It involves creating content relevant to your industry, website optimisation of key-words, meta-tags and much more that I will cover in the next blog.

by Rentview

November 24, 2011April 6, 2023

Setting up your Google places page for your agency.

So now that you have your Google Analytics set up, let’s focus on getting more visitors to your site.

Google places is a great way to build traffic to your site for FREE. Google places (map listings ) are now placed with the organic search results (non-paid results), with many Place pages located near the top of the results page. It will also increase your presence, giving you a boost in your organic search traffic. By setting up your Google places page you are ensuring your information is easily found and potential customers can find out more information on your businesses.

1 – Make or claim your Google Places Page

Your business may already have a Places page, even if you never set one up. Search for your brand name to see if one already exists. If there is a listing for your business, click to the place page and look for the “business owner?” link, then follow the instructions to claim it. If there is no places page for your business already, then start a new one at google.com/places.

2 – Verify Your Google Places Page

Next, verify your Google Places Page. You must verify that you are the business owner or else your listing will not be trusted by search engines. Unless it is verified, your listing might not appear in the search results, or how often it appears may be limited.

Verifying is simple, but it will take some time. When setting up your Places page, follow the instructions. Alternatively, click the ‘verify’ link when logged in to your places account. You will have to wait for a postcard to be delivered to your business address within 2-3 weeks (though you may get the option to receive a phone call instead).

Once your Places page is verified, you should optimise your page and make it easier for potential customers to find you.

Include keywords in the description of your Google Places page – Describe your business; keep it short and sweet. Include some keywords. Use Google Adwords keyword planner (this was Keyword tool) to help you to better understand what potential customers are typing in when they search for a service like yours. Don’t go for overkill though, just a few relevant keywords should do the trick!
Optimise your business title – In Google Places your business name should be your title. This could also include some information on your location. Google Adwords keyword planner should be useful again here.
Choose some appropriate categories – You can include up to five categories and this matters, however you should include only those categories which are relevant to your business.
Complete your Places page as much as possible – The more complete you can make your Google Places page the better. This gives you an edge over less complete pages in Google’s eyes. Some information you may want to include is; your opening hours, additional agency information, links to your properties advertised on pportal sites, and social media links. All this will make your pages more appealing to potential clients too.

4 –Rankings for Google places

Citations and mentions are more important than links to your website within Google Places, it is widely believed. Measuring the ‘buzz’ around certain local businesses or sites can be difficult for search engines so they try to take into account any mentions online. This is becoming more popular with the use of smart phones. You can look for chances to gain citations through –

Directories – Create a listing in any major directories; just be sure that your information is consistent across all listings you have online.
Review sites – Reviews give search engines a signal that your business is a real place that is known and liked (or disliked) by real people. Try to get reviews from your landlords on your services online.
Local Resources & Events Pages – Look for local directories, business listings, and event pages for opportunities to list your site. Check out competitors – visit their Google Places pages and see where their citations are coming from (you’ll see a list of links titled “more about this place” at the bottom of the page, which is a great place to start.)

5 – Optimize your website and be sure they can find you!

Good SEO for your website makes perfect sense as this willup your ranking in Google searches and attract visitors. This is also a good citation for your Google Places page. Include contact details in a prominent place on your website so that visitors can find them easily.

November 14, 2011

Increasing your property portfolio through the web

Having met with lots of different agencies over the last couple of months it appears that most, if not all agencies, are looking to expand and build their property portfolio for lettings and management.

So how can your agency increase its property portfolio?

Attract more landlords to your agency

If you want to increase your property portfolio, you’ll need to attract landlords first. The easiest way to do this is to attract them to your website. Your website should be the main port of call and act as a hub for activity. You need to have contact information clearly available on your website. Potential clients should be able to see 2 things from a quick glance at your website:

what services you offer
how to contact you

If you think about it, your website is like your international shop window. It could therefore gain you a lot of business. Equally, by not investing time effort (and some money) in a website, you are losing out on potential custom. After all, in today’s economic climate, landlords are increasingly based all around the world and these accidental landlords who may have initially rented the property prior to emigrating may now need assistance letting a property and/or managing one. New non-resident landlords are the customer most agencies are currently focusing their advertising towards. The non-resident landlord is most likely to take your full property management package and with property management software like Rentview, you are fully equipped to offer your landlords the ultimate management package.

Checklist

So it is very important to have your website:

looking well
regularly updated
attracting new visitors
analytics set up to track visitor trends
linked to your social media

Over the next few blog posts, I will take you through how to do all of this in some very easy to follow steps. All of these elements should help you to increase your property portfolio by harnessing the power of the web.