What’s your plan for Internet leads?

Are you being held hostage by the third-party interlopers who are extorting money from you for leads you deserve anyway?

C-21, Coldwell Banker, ERA, Keller Williams, Prudential, RE/MAX all have plans on how they’re going to rescue leads from the third parties like HomeGain and HouseValues.

Independents are dealing with it on a local basis; buying clicks for their market at up to $5 - $10 per click.

Several of our coaching clients are paying a couple thousand dollars a month, so they can own a block of leads just so their competition won’t get them.

Primary Problem: Acquiring Internet Leads without paying a fortune to the third-party lead kidnappers (lead terrorists I jokingly said yesterday) or paying thousands of dollars a year for Pay-Per-Click traffic.

Maybe you’re being held hostage by the third-party folks, but you say to yourself, “At least I’m getting leads.” But, how good are you at converting those leads to something of real value to you and your business? If your website is like the Internet average website, maybe 1% - 2% of these leads are being converted to GCI. If you are great at conversion, you may be experiencing 3%, 4%, maybe even 5%.

The Solution To The Primary Problem: What if I were to tell you that we’ve discovered, and are actually using, proprietary Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tactics to achieve top page rankings on the 16 top search engines? For the major three Google, Yahoo, and MSN, which account for 90% of all Internet traffic, we are ranking in the top three for some of the most competitive search phrases (Real Estate Training & Real Estate Coaching) in the Real Estate Industry.

What does this do for us as a company? We get about 1500 FREE visitors to our website every day. Free to the extent that we did not have to pay a penny for that particular lead. They are what an SEO guru would call “organic traffic”, which basically means they are not pay-per-click and are a direct result of our SEO Tactics.

When you type a search phrase, for example Pittsburgh Pennsylvania Real Estate, there are two types of search results on the screen. It doesn’t matter which of the search engines you use, the top three and most of the others have Organic listings and Pay Per Click (PPC) listings. See Figure 1.

For this project, we are developing a website that is VERY search engine friendly that will climb the organic listings of the search engines. The PPC traffic is very competitive, and basically, whoever has the most money to waste wins. We’re not going after that traffic. Most people don’t click the PPC link anyway.

The good and the bad about organic listings is this. Basically, what’s bad about it is that it takes time to get a brand new site or even a newly renovated site to rank high quickly. Actually, the search engines would throw up a red flag if we climbed to the #1 spot overnight.

The absolutely good, and even great, part about it is once we get you up there using these grass roots, work like a charm tactics, you’ll stay up there indefinitely. We will actually be monitoring the rank status 24/7 to ensure it.

What’s different about us versus the standard SEO optimizing company? Well, for starters, about half of the “SEO” companies can get you ranked #1 by using what the industry calls “black hat tactics” or even by using terms that no body is searching for. The problem with both of these is that they are very short term. Once the search engines discover you’ve utilized “Black Hat Tactics”, they will not only drop your rank, they will likely even ban you. The other scammers will have you ranked for terms no one searches for, which will last only as long as it takes for you to figure out you have no website visitors. We are Real Estate Marketing Pros.

We have on staff, Real Estate and Internet Marketing Professionals. So, the main difference between us and them is we are using grass roots, legal tactics that work very well and are designed using the latest search engine algorithms for the most searched terms in your real estate market.

The Solution To The Secondary Problem: We have on staff Website Designers, Graphic Artists, SEO Experts, Sales Copywriters, and a Persuasive Architecture Expert. This basically means we have the people to take the traffic and put it down “Sales Funnels” that convert traffic into $$$ at rates from 8.9% to as high as 29.8%. Remember from before that the average Internet site is converting at 1% to 2%.

It’s even worse for agent sites. We already interviewed several dozen agents about there sites. Some of them have 2000 to 3000 visitors to their websites per month. The sad thing is that, for the 2000 to 3000 visitors, some of them have a little as 2-3 prospects per month. That’s prospects, not clients.

Even the great agent websites, agents who are spending several thousand dollars per year on their site, are only generating about 5 deals per year. I grant you that 5 deals should be sufficient to be a significant return on their money.

So here’s a little lesson on conversion. There are basically four conversions that happen on the client or customer conversion track. First, there are the visitors (surfers) to a Website. Let’s call them suspects for now. We don’t know anything about them at this point except that they were willing to invest their time and come to our site.

Second in our relationship building process is to get them to invest a little privacy with us and reveal their name, email address, etc. The more we can get the better. We’ll have to give something of value to them in return, however.

Ideally, we’d like to give them something of value that will get them further down the sales path. For a buyer, it should be something that helps them take steps toward buying, and the same sort of thing for the seller lead. If the visitor doesn’t value what we have, they are kind of self qualifying but not proceeding to build a relationship with us.

The next goal is to convert them to a customer/client. For us that means they list their property for sale with us, or they sign an exclusive buyer’s agency agreement. They’ve committed to us, and we to them. See figure 2.

To wrap up our lesson on conversion, the final goal is to establish referrals and repurchases (re-hires). This is a topic often talked about, but not many agents, or companies for that matter, have it really working for them. If you really had a great referral system in place, you could, theoretically count on 80% of your business coming from this 20% of faithful customers.

What We’re Doing: I’ve heard once before “see a need and fill it”, and, to some extent, that is what we, as REALTORS®, do. Sellers need to sell houses. Buyers need to buy houses. We help them both achieve their goals. So, we see a need for this service to be provided to our clients and industry as a whole, and we’ve made it our goal to come up with a solution and deliver it.

What You Need The Most From the Internet: A way to generate a large volume of targeted website traffic for your local real estate market, that turns into prospects (captured leads). These, in turn, should be qualified and turn into appointments with buyers and sellers of homes.

So, combine these solutions: 1) Highly Ranked Website, 2) Highly Converting Sales Process, and 3) all of the material I’ve created over the years for lead mastery, listing presentations, buyer conversion, etc., and you have a VERY high likelihood of great success on the Internet. A turn key website engineered and designed for success.

I’d like to be the first in the Real Estate Industry to provide the total package to Real Estate Agents and fill, what I believe to be, one of the greatest needs our clients and the industry have.

Beta Project: We already know the SEO Tactics we have work. There are a dozen or so sites we’ve successfully gotten ranked at the top of the search engines. Before we roll this program out to our industry in a big way, we need to acquire statistical information and data for some agents from beginning to end. This will provide us the undeniable proof we’ll need of our whole solution.

We’ve decided to solicit your interest in working with us in your real estate market over the next year. We only need 6 clients to be involved but want to pick the six that have the greatest need and also the greatest likelihood for tremendous results.

What’s In It For You? Well, what would it be like if you were ranked #1 in your market for Real Estate? Not only that, what if the traffic you did get was converted to income?

If you are located in Boise, Idaho, that means you’ll see the lion’s share of 18,0001 searches per month. By the way, the #1 ranked spot typically gets ~47% of the searches, or 8,460 visitors in this case. (ex. Atlanta, Georgia = 30,1601 , Las Vegas, Nevada = 62,5141)

What Will It Cost You? There will be a small up front cost and a monthly payment that is one-fourth of what some of our clients are currently paying the HomeGainTM and HouseValuesTM people.

It will be a 13-month campaign, which we’ll guarantee with a 100% money-back guarantee if you do not place on the first page of the top three search engines. Most of the sites we’ve had involvement with are in the top three spots for their search phrases. Our SEO guy says that, for the beta project, our clients will see favorable results within 4-6 months. Meaning you’ll likely be on the first page of the major search engines within 4-6 months.

1Values obtained for March 2006 from http://www.overture.com

During this 13-month campaign, we’ll also be developing websites to beat your competitors in your specific market along with conversion strategies that will help you convert the new Internet traffic into qualified leads.

When we roll out this solution, there will be three levels of service. Option 1: An SEO Optimized Website, specific to a local real estate market, for high Internet visibility. Option 2: Conversion Tactics And Tools, or Option 3: A Turnkey Solution That Has Both Options 1 and 2.

Beta project participants will get the benefit of option 3 for the cost of only one of the other options. You could say that by participating early you’ll get benefits of the whole program for 50% of the roll-out cost.

When will we start? If you’re interested in participating, we need to hear from you right away. So, send an email to Info@RealEstateChampions.com or call us at 1.877.723.4676 and mention that you’re interested in being considered for the SEO Beta Project. Mary Stewart, our SEO client coordinator, will be in contact with you to schedule a phone appointment for more details.

Please be sure to write in your email or mention over the phone what local real estate market it is that you’d like to dominate on the Internet. If you currently have a website please reference the address for us.

We’ll review all of the potential candidates and pick several that we think would benefit most from participating. At that time, we’ll go over the bottom line with you, close the deal, and get to work.

I expect that within 10 – 14 days, we’ll have all 6 spots chosen and closed. Within a few months after that, we’ll have some pretty great results to share with all of you.

Interested yet? So, do you have a plan to rescue your local real estate market’s Internet leads? Are you tired of having to pay a ransom to rescue the leads you have a right to anyway? If so, help me come up with a solution for all of us by helping this beta project with your participation.

If you are interested, don’t hesitate. Instead, respond and let me know that you want in.


To the achievement of excellence in your Business,
Dan Matejsek
Search Engine Marketing Director
RealEstateWebsiteSEO.com