Opinion: Is Costa del Sol Real Estate SEO worth the effort?
Client Q. I would like to hear your views on SEO and Google ranking. There are some people who claim that they can bypass the ranking and get us to the top….
I received this email today:
From: John Denny <digitalconsultant193@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Recover xxxx.com, from Recent Google Penguin 4.0 update
Date: 14. nov. 2016 kl. 13.11.15 CET
Hi xxxxxx.com Team,
Hope you are doing well.
My name is John Denny, SEO expert of a Leading SEO service provider company. As per my analysis, your website is not performing well in the Google organic search as well as your traffic / visitor is poor from the last couple of months due to some of the reasons.
You might know about the frequent Google updates and as per the latest update, Google has completely dropped all authorship functionality from the search results and webmaster tools. So be careful with it and take the help of an SEO company to fix it.
Some of the aspects are given below:
1. Your back links are not good enough, which affects link popularity.
2. Some of the competitive Keywords are not on the first page of Google, Yahoo and Bing, which affects visibility.
3. Errors and issues found in your website.
4. Good Blogs, Articles and Press Release are not found for your website.
5. Your website overall SEO score affected due to no online promotion.
6. Your website generates less traffic as compare to your competitor.
Area of Improvement:-
1. We will give you 1st page ranking on Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
2. Improve your sales and brand value.
3. We will recover from the recent Google Penguin 4.0 (Real-time) update.
4. We will provide you high quality Blogs, Articles and Press Release for your website.
5. Increase your traffic flow by doing ad posting, forum posting, image sharing, pdf sharing, bookmarking, etc.
6. Target your local as well as global market to increase business.
We will be optimizing your website in the major search engines like: Google, Yahoo & Bing, which results in improvements in keyword ranking, traffic, link popularity, goal conversion, and ROI from the first month.
Please reply back to get the “Company profile”, “Service details”, “Pricing”, “Client testimonial” “Proposal”, Free Website Audit Report.
With Best Regards,
John Denny
SEO Expert
My question is this: Is that legit and does it work?
————————————————
A). …..we seem to have someone here who claims Elvis is alive… Generally speaking, my personal view on English language SEO for real estate companies on the Costa del Sol is different to normal SEO.
Of course, being on Page 1 of Google is important, otherwise we wouldn’t be paying Google to show our ads there, but the amount of investment required to get to page 1 for a given keyword for CDS properties is unlikely to produce profitable returns. In my opinion, you’d be better off buying a lottery ticket.
The sheer number of websites who have been paying thousands of euros a year, for many years, to secure a position on the top spot makes it almost impossible for other sites to get a look in.
There are exceptions yes, but these are exceptions. In addition, given there are roughly 10 organic spots on page 1 and 10 ads on page 1, even if you are on page 1 for a given keyword you only have approximately 1/20th of getting the click (remember, with adwords you only pay if they click).
Then you have to consider that websites, generally speaking, are terrible for lead generation so you’d have to calculate how many clicks it would take to get a lead. You can do the maths already by taking you monthly organic visits to the website and see what percentage of those became website enquiries. This will then tell you how many of the 1/20th’s you’ll need to generate a single lead….IF you make to to page 1 at all!
Plenty of clients come to us asking for help with lead generation, many of whom are already on page 1 of Google for a variety of excellent keywords, but they say their website leads have “dried up” over the years.
We’ve seen the decline in lead generation for all of our clients, across the board, who were use to getting a few leads via their websites. I am guessing people like us are getting to potential buyers before they Google for something via Facebook, Gmail etc
Are there SEO tricks to speed up the process? yes, there are tricks called Black Hat techniques. Some of the techniques may still work, but we stopped doing them years ago because these days you have more chance of getting banned by Google than any of them working.
Specific comments on some of the points mentioned:
1. Your back links are not good enough, which affects link popularity. – yes, true, but to improve your ranking you need relevant popular sites to link to you, for example, a news website or a university etc. Buying links will get you banned. A few years ago Google released an update to its raking algorithm called ‘Penguin’ which was specifically designed to penalise people using black hat techniques for link building.
2. Some of the competitive Keywords are not on the first page of Google, Yahoo and Bing, which affects visibility. Stating the obvious here!
3. Errors and issues found in your website. … like every website in existence…
4. Good Blogs, Articles and Press Release are not found for your website. True, so?
5. Your website overall SEO score affected due to no online promotion. BS
6. Your website generates less traffic as compared to your competitor. Just the one competitor? ha ha ha. ludicrous.
There is no shortage of marketing agencies who will have very different methods to us. I guess the starting point is to ask them to: (a) show me who you have on page 1 for cds real estate and (b) show me the maths – organic visits to leads (traceable via Google Analytics). Then convert this math (which they probably won’t have)
The argument in favour of SEO is being able to pay money now in order to capture leads forever. But, as soon as someone offers their seo service they will quickly convince you that it is a continual process, where you will need to sign up to a monthly plan to (maybe) get to your objective and to (maybe) keep you there. If it was my money I’d pay for an ad and be done with it!
A couple of previous articles on our blog about it:
Costa del Sol Real Estate SEO: Why Page 1 ain’t always what it’s cracked up to be (June 2015)
SEO: Why Page 1 of Google for Marbella real estate keywords might be a tad trickier than you thought (May 2016)
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