If you are a small business owner and just read all of the things that will be required of big businesses, you might be breathing a sigh of relief because since your business isn’t that big, you won’t have to worry taking all those complicated steps.

Guess again my friend. You need to take the same steps to achieve your goals and you will have to work even harder because you don’t have the same staff or generous budget that your big business competitors have. Of course everything that has disadvantages has advantages as well.

For one thing, you don’t have a large staff which means that there’s less egos that you will have to deal with when trying to get your SEO show on the road.

Because your staff is smaller, it will be easier to schedule meeting times with them since there are fewer personal schedules that will need to be juggled. One of the reasons that people go into real estate in the first place is because of the flexibility of hours.

This allows both men and women to take care of their home responsibilities and conduct business based on their own personal schedules.

You will also probably have an outside IT consultant who takes care of your site’s maintenance. This can be a very good thing because since they have their own business, they are probably on top of all of the latest method of coding and the other technical knowledge that enables to garner and keep business. That means there’s less to explain.

If you are a single person business, than all the better because you can use your off time to dedicate to enhancing your knowledge and if you need more ideas, no problem. You can use your competition to get them. In one sense this is even better because by studying the sites of your highly ranked competitors you will already know what methods work because they’ve already been tried and proven to be true.

Hopefully these advantage will make you feel better, but there is still a lot of work to do so let’s get started.

1) Educate Yourself and Others Involved

Just like the big business moguls, you need to educate yourself and those that you work with regarding all of the SEO techniques that you will be using.

If you are using outside staff for IT and advertising, you will still need to schedule meetings with them to explain what it is you want done and, if need be, how you expect them to achieve this. Since you are their client, they should have no problem with meeting with you on a regular basis.

2) Set Your Goals

Website design doesn’t start on the computer; it starts with a pencil and and piece of paper. Start by deciding what your own online goals are. Your goals should mirror the ones that were set for the larger businesses but since you will be doing this without the help of a staff, you need to determine what your primary goals are and how you plan to achieve them.

Separate the short term goals from the long term ones and then map out a plan that will help you achieve each one, one at a time. It might take you a little longer but you know the old saying; the longest journey starts with a single step.

It might seem like trying to achieve all of this is just going to take too much time. To that I say time is going to pass anyway. Six months from now, you can be at a higher spot on the search engine results or you could be wishing you had started your SEO campaign 6 months previously. Go ahead and get started. You have little to lose and tons of profits to gain.

3) Start Small

Just like the big boys, you need to start small and begin at the beginning. If you don’t already have a website in place, you now have the knowledge required to design one or have it designed effectively.

If you do have a site in place, time to sit down with your pad and pen and start analyzing each section. Use what you’ve learned to dissect it and determine what stays and what goes.

Larger companies will have other staff members to analyze the site and brainstorm on ideas to improve it. If you are a smaller agency or run a one person office, the onus is on you to make sure that you have a user focused site. Look at it the same way you would if you were the one seeking information on real estate in your area.

Because you are a real estate professional, you may not really consider the same things that a layperson would when wanting information about real estate.

To help you with this, feel free to enlist the support of your friends and family members who are not in the business. Ask them to look at your site and give you an objective opinion on its efficiency.

If you already have content that includes articles, blogs and newsletters, ask them to read them and rate how well they answer their questions and hold their interests.

This advice can be better than what you paid for because your friends and family will be give you an honest assessment and since they are not professionals, they have a better idea of what a layperson is looking for in terms of information, so take full advantage of asking them for advice.

a) Budget Accordingly

One of your primary concerns is going to be your budget. While the larger companies may have a huge surplus of funds to use for their optimization efforts, the question is, do you?

You may be fortunate enough to have been careful with your money and have enough overflow to set aside a large amount to be used for SEO purposes.

If this is not the case then you need to pull out your calculator and start analyzing your available funds to determine how much you can afford to spend on the optimization of your website.

You are probably tired of hearing me say this but I have to say it again and it won’t be for the last time. SEO is a continuous process. That means that your budget needs to be a monthly one.

You might have a bit extra in the coffers this month that you can use to optimize your site effectively. Unfortunately, one month is not enough so you need to have a set amount that you can comfortably spend on the ongoing optimization of your site.

You may already have a webmaster that maintains your site and that’s a good thing since you will have already budgeted in his monthly service fee.

If you are going to need him to provide extra services to optimize your site then there may be additional fees involved so you need to set up a meeting to go over his new duties and find out how much more this will cost you.

If you are setting up a website from scratch, then you will need to shop around for a website hosting service. There are many of these companies and all will promise to provide the best service possible but as a sales professional you already know not to base your decision solely on the promise of another.

Now your on the other side of the fence, so shop around and make sure that the company you choose is reputable and is able to provide good customer service support.

Look for a host that provides 24 hour live service. Many sites will promise 24 hour support but that support might be in the form of annoying and usually unhelpful computerized advice.

You type in your question and the computer will return with a list of answers they think may help you. These companies have their own search engines and the spiders that seek out the answers may return with the wrong ones.

This costs you valuable time, especially if there is a problem with your website and you need it addressed ASAP. Having a live person listen to your questions and take steps to help you will be worth the few extra dollars a month that they may charge to host your site.

You will also need to budget for your email marketing campaign which will be discussed further in the next section.

b) Beef Up Your Email Marketing Campaign

Your long and short term goals are going to be the same as those of the larger businesses with a few additions. Because of your lack of staff, focusing on an email campaign is something that you should give strong attention to. Larger agencies have lots of agents, and with these agents come enough personal referrals that will keep the business afloat.

While instituting an email campaign is certainly advantageous for them, they have other irons in the fire and might not be able to direct a large portion of their attention to it. They may feel they have so many other clients that they look at an email marketing campaign as gravy. You, on the other hand may have much more time to focus on a campaign that can be extremely lucrative for you.

One of your first priorities is to make sure that you site has a way to capture email addresses and automatically respond to opt-in requests.
If your site lacks opt-in requests then make a note to have them added.

Another way that email marketing campaigns benefit small agencies is that since you have less agents to bring the business to you, this type of strategy lets the business come to you on its own.

Having people leave you with their email address gives you a potential goldmine of potential clients. It’s a lot easier to communicate with 50 people online through emails and newsletters than it is to physically seek them out using offline strategies.

c) Doing Things the “Write” Way

Now that you recognize how much an email marketing campaign can benefit you, your next consideration is the actual written opt-in content such as articles, blogs and newsletters. Larger businesses may have an advertising department to handle the writing but you may have to depend on yourself to get them done.

Make an honest assessment of your writing abilities. If you are not the type that is able to communicate effectively with the written word then you will need to go to outside sources to get the job done.

Luckily, there are many Internet ghost writing agencies that can handle this for you and the cost may be lower than you might expect.

There are plenty of starving writers out there that will bid on the job of writing your articles, newsletters and blogs. You just have to find them.

It’s easy to post an ad in one of the many freelance online writing sites. These sites post your advertisement and it’s seen by writers that are looking for work. Once such site is, http://www.elance.com.

Another is http://www.freelancewriting.com/ifreelance.php

These sites are viewed everyday. What you will need to do is set a budget for your monthly or weekly or daily requirements, post your ad and let the writers bid on you job.

Naturally you will post the content on your site as though it was written by you and no one will be the wiser. This way you can keep fresh content on your site and not have to worry about handling all of the writing yourself, which will be considerable. This will allow you the time to focus on responding to the emails that are left on your site thanks to your opt-in content.

d) Long Term Goal – Expansion

Keeping your expanding list of potential clients in mind, its time to consider how you will handle the sudden rise in inquiries and your ability to convert them into actual clientele.

The last thing you want to do is to have to answer 50 inquiries into real estate in your area and be so busy trying to turn them into clients that some of them end up sitting on the back burner or worse, go completely ignored.

It does not help you to have a dynamic site that reels them in and you are unable to handle them all. This will not only cause you lose viable leads, but can also hurt your reputation.

As you know referrals are all important in this business and you don’t want people to say, “Great website but he never got back to me.”

It’s human nature for a client to be quicker to talk about your negative aspects then your positive ones. You can do a great job for someone and while they may say thank you, it was their expectation that you would do such a bang-up job for them in the first place. This means that in their minds, you didn’t do anything extraordinary, you were just doing your job.

It doesn’t matter that you wrangled with the seller’s or buyer’s agent over carpet allowance or repair credits, stayed on top of the appraiser to submit his paperwork despite how busy he is and harassed the lender to make sure that the loan closed within the required deadline.

They don’t see you do all of that and even if they did, in their mind this is what they are paying you for and they are right. So while you might have sweated it out and burned the midnight oil, you were doing what you were supposed to do so what’s the big deal?

On the other hand, let’s say that despite your best efforts, the appraiser dropped the ball and took too long to submit the appraisal report, or the lender just couldn’t fit you into closing schedule on the day that you needed to.

Your clients, who are nervous enough may have taken the day off from work thinking that they were going to close that day, just to find out that they will have to come back tomorrow or the next day.

Who do you think is going to bear the brunt of their annoyance? The lender? The appraiser? Nope, the person whose phone is going to angrily ringing is yours.

Even worse, your ears will probably be ringing as well since these same clients that you slaved over will be venting to their friends and family and guess whose name will be at the forefront of their raving?

You got it, yours. Real estate can be a thankless business so you want to do everything you can to keep your reputation in tact and get these same people to refer you to their friends and family members.

That means its time to think about expansion. Now don’t read what I just wrote and start hiring agents in a panic. As previously stated several times throughout this book, SEO takes a bit of time so time is on your side.

However, you will need to have a contingency plan ready for when your business does get to the point of needing people to help you handle your growing list of prospects.

It might seem a bit early to start thinking about this but it is better for you to have your expansion plans in place, so that you won’t have to worry about it when the time to use them arrives.

You might be looking at your budget and start wondering how you will be able to afford a larger workspace or more employees. Not to worry. Initially, you may not have to rent out a larger work space.

Thanks to the Internet, many people now telecommute, working out of their own homes. All you would really need is to be able to provide a conference room or some area in your office where the agent would be able to sit down with their clients and discuss business in a professional environment.

Telecommuting is an especially viable solution as an alternative to losing money by renting extra space. Much of real estate transactions can be done over the phone and most written work can be accomplished on an agent or employees home computer. This way you can expand your business at little to no extra cost.

You might also consider hiring someone who will work on a commission basis determined by how many leads turn into to actual clients. This person would be responsible for answering emails, sending out newsletters and if possible, writing your blogs and articles. Another option would be to pay them a straight salary. It would all depend on the portion of your budget that you allotted for this purpose.

There are other cost cutting ways that will allow you to free up extra money to be used for your SEO purposes. Take the time to sit down and come up with the ones that will work best for you.

e) Keep organized

Hopefully by now your brain is in total SEO mode and the ideas are flowing on a continuous basis. When you embark on a journey into new territory, it’s easy to get so many ideas that by the end of the day you will have so many new ideas about all of the new aspects that you have been considering that your desk becomes a jumble of paperwork. It’s important to remain organized so that all those ideas will be effective.

1) Work On One Thing At A Time

Organize all of your thoughts, turn them into a comprehensive list and work on one at a time. This will help you to focus all of your energy on one concept thus allowing you to develop that idea more fully. This is far better than trying to multitask and end up not doing a complete job on any one item.

Consider the definition of the word, “optimize”. It means to “enhance the effectiveness of”. Your optimization efforts do not begin with your website, but with the ideas that are in your head and your ability to develop each one effectively.

Trying to do too many things at once may seem like a faster way to handle them but may actually not only cost you valuable time, but money as well because you may miss ways to effectively get more leads and as you know leads are the source of your income.

2) Map Out Your Progress

Once you start to put SEO theories into practice it is important to keep track of the progress that you are making. You will need to institute ways to keep track of your online conversions, separately from your offline ones.

Make sure that your site has a hit counter to help you with this purpose. This will help you to more easily determine what that percentage is.

Earlier in the book, I suggested using a telephone number on your site that is dedicated to your online viewers. This is to help you keep track of which of your conversions are coming from your offline sales and which are coming from your online ones.

In order to facilitate the process more successfully, talk to your office providers about instituting a way to capture the incoming online and offline phone numbers and to separate them on your bill. Many phone companies have introduced ways for businesses to save money on their business phone bills.

One such way allows a business to have two separate numbers by having one number forward to the main business line. The negative aspect of such a program is that all calls fall under the main phone number.

You may have to pay more to have a dedicated line that is separate from your regular office number but in the end it will be worth it. This way you will be able to accurately determine the percentage of both forms of conversion.

If you have hired someone to handle your email marketing campaign, whether they are paid on a commission or a straight salary, have them submit regular reports on a weekly or even daily basis.

You don’t want to wait until the end of the month to start sifting through reports. Hopefully your number of email leads have increased considerably but imagine having to review a month’s worth of progress all at once. You will have to dedicate much more time sifting through the paperwork and this could interfere with other things that you need to accomplish that day.

Reviewing this information a bit at a time will help you to give it your full attention and really analyze your progress. Its much better to review this information on a gradual basis, so that you won’t feel as pressured and stressed out.

3) Time Management

Another important part of SEO is your ability to manage time. Considering all you have learned in the proceeding chapters, you now recognize all the work that needs to be done and to truly be effective you will need to manage your time effectively.

Review your to do list and set aside regular time allotments for each task, each week. Yep, I’m saying it again. SEO is a continuous process so you will need to continuously find time to keep up with all of the techniques.

Initially you can start with an hour a day as you slowly increase the optimization of your website. This way you won’t inundate yourself with so much SEO work that the rest of your business suffers.

As your business grows and the leads begin to increase, you can then consider hiring someone to help you with your efforts and adjust your SEO time management system accordingly.