The biggest challenge in marketing my Littleton Colorado Real Estate business, House Calls Realty, has been reaching customers online. Search engine optimization has gotten much more complicated and time consuming in recent years. Ten years ago you could cloak, word stuff and join junk directories to your hearts content and get praised from the search engines. Black hat techniques like that will only get you banned by Google today.
You can spend countless hours creating a killer website and blogging your heart out every week, but if no body sees it, all that effort does very little to make the phone ring. In recent years Colorado real estate slowed to a halt. I realized that the slow market was a great time for some aggressive education enhancement. I decided to get certified in SEO. It seemed like my old tactics were in effective and I needed to figure out what is working these days. After certification, I proceeded to attain a full time position honing the skills necessary to optimize websites professionally. I think that most people are under the impression that search engine optimization is pretty simple. They think it is like the yellow pages, run your ad and wait for the phone to ring, but in a highly competitive arena like the Colorado real estate market you can forget that approach.
You have to fight every day for your position on Google. As a current SEO professional I now realize that I was in the most competitive SEO industry out there. No wonder I was frustrated, I was doing in house SEO and was struggling. The most competitive SEO industries I have noticed so far are photography, real estate and auto sales. Surprisingly dentists and chiropractors are pretty SEO savvy as well. Looking back I would suggest that every small business owner just bite the bullet and higher a professional SEO company. The amount of time and expertise involved is no longer an effective or efficient do it your self proposition.