Activerain is down and tweets are showing up citing that it has been down for a good while now. When I last queried at the website, I was greeted with:

Service Temporarily Unavailable

The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.

In December, 2009, I took on an what many might consider an impossible task. That was just 11 months ago. My new client, real estate agent Jeff Lichtenstein went live with a brand new website (and domain name) in the most expensive zip code in the United [...]]]> Orange County SEO and Tiger Woods

In December, 2009, I took on an what many might consider an impossible task. That was just 11 months ago. My new client, real estate agent Jeff Lichtenstein went live with a brand new website (and domain name) in the most expensive zip code in the United States. (Forbes 2002 and other sources) Jeff’s goal was to rank in the top five on page one of Google in the most sought after 15 communities in Palm Beach Gardens and Jupiter, FL. There are thousands of agents, let alone giant chain offices and brokerages with huge budgets including SEO, all going after homes in communities with residents like Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan and Celine Dion. My job was to help my new client with zero staff, a new domain name, no content and a limited budget to rise to page one in Google for valued keywords and phrases.

Often cited as “the most expensive zip code in the United States” is the Florida community of Jupiter Island. The upscale real estate in Palm Beach Gardens and Jupiter, Florida is often identified by the homes and communities that bear names familiar to anyone in the area; PGA National homes, Admirals Cove and Jupiter Island are a few. Communities compete by exclusivity rather than price or other factors common to most real estate sales in today’s market. Certainly prices have come down, but these are not the short sale, foreclosure ravaged homes and neighborhoods so often found in formerly unaffected upscale neighborhoods. Prices have come down from prices like $15 million to a cool $12 million. You get the picture. These are high value and high competition communities.

What Orange County SEO can do for you

Most would have laughed at the idea of successfully taking on local powerhouse agencies, but I saw holes in virtually all competitors’ strategies and proceeded to educate Jeff in proper “white hat SEO” strategies approved by Google’s TOS. I encouraged Jeff to stay the course over the following months. Within a short time our first target community gained a position on page one. We were on our way.

Our latest effort, a well planned and executed promotion of one of our blog posts, proved to be a tipping point as well.  This was a coordinated effort because few succeed in search marketing by simply outsourcing some SEO and forgetting about it.

Now, 11 months after the brand new website’s inception, we enjoy a page one presence for eleven of fifteen target communities. These are based on high value keywords verified for competitive value in Google’s Adword keyword tool. These are organic results. They don’t include the page one video thumbnails we infiltrated page one results with, over eight months ago.

What are the value of these communities? Admirals Cove home prices top out at $15.5 million. PGA National? A mere $1.8 million tops the list of more “modest” homes in the upscale PGA golf resort community. Meanwhile, of the Jupiter Island homes for sale, the top home price is Greg Norman’s estate listed at a cool, if dubious $65 million. Closer to a realistic value may be Tiger Woods’ house, recently rebuilt on a 12 acre compound with its own three hole practice golf course.

Target Community in Position 4

It’s fair to say that competition in these communities is intense with marketing efforts on every imaginable front. SEO in this kind of an environment is only a part, but a critical part, of any real estate marketing strategy.

We’re providing the top players with head to head competition in the top profitable real estate areas.

While you can easily find Jeff’s website on the first page of Google searches for most of the top community names in Palm Beach Gardens and Jupiter including the often dubbed, most expensive community in the United States, Jupiter Island, our work isn’t finished yet. We’re well on our way to the “top of the fold” in the top five positions for our key communities.

Contact Dave at 888-216-1231 to discuss SEO for your real estate business.

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Let’s talk about an important concept and question in reaching your audience: Do you even exist? The philosophical tenets of solipsism are certainly skeptical [...]]]> “What if you knew something that nobody else knew about the behavior of people who are about to buy your product?” How does this question relate to SEO? more later…

Descartes, are you saying SEO makes the unseen visible?

Let’s talk about an important concept and question in reaching your audience: Do you even exist? The philosophical tenets of solipsism are certainly skeptical about our universe, transforming Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am.” to “Something exists only if I observe it.”

While that may be a philosophically indefensible or even silly philosophy, there is a truth not to be missed here when it comes to marketing.

We think of the sun as something white hot, burning, searing and unsurvivable, but the sun “calmly” does what it does. If an asteroid falls into the sun, neither the sun nor the asteroid cares and the effect is as if nothing happened. There would be no “history lost” or “population annihilated” For all the explosive energy produced in unimaginable quantities by the sun every microsecond, there is no sense of it anywhere but in the minds of scientists and people like me who might discuss it for a while, but in general, from nearly every perspective in the entire universe, the sun is not a stunning vortex of energy. It’s a pinpoint that cannot even be detected from the next door neighbor galaxy. In the universe in general, stars collide in stark silence and darkness. Without anyone to observe them, there is no difference between light and other levels of radiation, it is all just ebb and flow of energy “particles” as they interact.

How this relates to SEO

Likewise, In the minds of your leads, you don’t exist. You can be projecting as much energy, light, display and heat as the sun with great explosive force for a long time, but to a lead that doesn’t observe you, it is all like nothing. Like a man sitting in a desert at night millennia ago, who thought the sun dies every night, and a new one comes out in the morning, your leads have no concept that you are there to solve their problem. They do not know that you were there yesterday or will be there tomorrow.

Until you appear.

It doesn’t matter so much when or where you appear, but it matters greatly how they feel when they observe you. If you’ve ever rounded a corner and unexpectedly encountered a full length or wall mirror, you know how the sudden emergence of unexpected information can make you feel. You, for a moment, see a stranger in the room and then, almost but not quite instantly, that stranger becomes you. That moment just before your recognition of, “It’s me.” is the kind of moment you want for people when they discover you. An unexpected and powerful moment when a revelation takes place. One that says, “This person can improve my lot.”

Real Estate seller’s question: Are the right people who can buy my home going to know it’s for sale? How will they see it?

Real Estate buyer’s question: How do I know the homes I see are the good deals and the right prices?

What if you knew something that nobody else knew about the behavior of people who are about to buy your product? Suppose that a week before they start a search for your product, they type into a search something that only you know they are going to look for? You would have the opportunity to reach everyone who will be getting your product or service ahead of competitors that spend millions trying to reach those consumers first.

When researching, planning, promoting and everything else for SEO, this is the essence of what you must do.

Reach buyers first. Create an experience in their very first observation of you that compels them to take action. You need to create a compelling call-to-action in the mind of your readers. This is important because this is where you present to the public that you can solve their problem.

You must create content that will simultaneously find its way to people who need, who badly want, what you offer (what is that?) and motivate them to choose you to provide it. That is your simple challenge and that is what I always stress to my clients that they must find out.

In my Orange County SEO business, I follow this same concept, striving to figure out what kind of information people start researching who are early-on candidates for a product or service. Often that niche, when discovered can propel a campaign far faster than the traditional back-link contest against competitors who are miles ahead of a new participant in the race to page one.

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