With 4 service bays and full lifts, McReynolds Automotive has the equipment to perform any level of service required. New tire mounting, a/c recharge, rotor turning, computer diagnostics, and a full line of new equipment is on hand to take on any job for any make of car or truck. They offer everything from routine vehicle maintenance to speed services and fabrication for racers.

A special Search and Rescue Marketing client, McReynolds Automotive is now sporting an exciting professionally designed logo and their new Warner Robins Auto Repair website is well underway. This new custom WordPress website features a return to the dark colors of earlier webdesign days which really stands out in today’s white-washed web. The project is moving quickly now after tearing my hair out fixing a browser compatibility issue with a new theme but that is a tale for another time. The new site will also feature Search and Rescue Marketing’s new FaceBook page creation app which will allow Chase and his admins to create their FaceBook tab layouts from within their own website for the most power and flexibility imaginable.

Congratulations to McReynolds Automotive on their Grand Opening!

Google Apps is an excellent small business communication and collaboration solution and still free for <10 users.

If you don’t already use Google Apps you might not have gotten the recent email from them advising of a new pricing structure. Google Apps is a cloud solution to host your website’s email, company intranet, calendar and document sharing, communications, and more. It has always been free for unlimited numbers of users and you could pay to upgrade to their business edition which includes support and other features. But you didn’t really need support, because like most of Google’s products, it just worked. As of May 10 Google will begin charging new Google Apps accounts $5 per month for each user over the limit of 10. They will continue to honor unlimited Google Apps users at no charge on accounts that were set up before May 10.

This Google Apps pricing change impacts many business owners and we have had to update our pricing as a result. This honestly doesn’t affect most of the small businesses and real estate agents that we deal with, but could be a factor for a larger business or brokerage who must now choose between Google’s offerings or perhaps Microsoft’s exchange server solutions. With Google App’s new Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office it seems an easy choice. We love Google Apps and use it for all of our small business and WordPress real estate websites, $5 per month is actually a small price to pay for the power and scalability that Google Apps offers and we still highly recommend it.

Google Apps’ integration with the Droid mobile platform have also proven to be highly effective for real estate agents to retrieve and follow up on leads while in the field. It is a great way to allow intranet access, document and calendar sharing, and chat features between agents and managers. We are sorry to see the Google Apps free unlimited users offering go away, but most mid-sized business owners understand they are going to have to pay for small business communications, collaboration, and data storage. Thankfully small businesses of less than 10 users can still access all of this technology for free and it is included with every website we sell.

Link monkey brains are a delicacy said to be enjoyed by the Google Spam Team

The launch of our new WordPress real estate websites was done on three domains that already had decent age and search rankings and their new WordPress real estate themes allowed them to really shine. Built a few years ago, they have solid SEO foundations and are considered local authority sites. This status was accomplished through traditional SEO methods which are included with the SEO strategy bundled with every real estate website we sell. Building your SEO architecture correctly and and implementing a proven strategy can bring your site to the top of the search engine results nearly every time, even in highly competitive markets. Unfortunately the only downside is that it can take some time. The more competitive the market, the more time it can take.

Offsite promotion is a very time-consuming aspect of real estate seo. Ten hours a week would be a good start if you were trying to break into a competitive market with a new site and results could be months away. At professional SEO rates this could be exorbitant. In the past I have charged $75-$100 an hour for SEO consulting and services. Paying me to build links for your real estate website could be a very expensive proposition. My SEO Training Course was one way I tried to solve this problem in the past but I just don’t have the time anymore.

I needed link monkeys, good ones. After some searching I was able to locate some reliable talent which I was able to secure at much lower rates than normal. These are fledgling SEO’s who have been schooled in my processes and are located in the good old USA. They can take your SEO strategy and implement most of it for you, creating the offsite buzz that drives your site to the top for your local keywords. We can also outsource the other 25% for you very cost-effectively as well, for those busy small business owners or real estate agents who want to maximize their time to sell homes. You have a complete turnkey SEO real estate marketing solution at your disposal.

I am proud to announce that we are able to offer these USA-based SEO linkbuilding solutions for only $30 an hour. This is ridiculously low by SEO industry standards. You can’t even find offshore SEO’s for these prices and many of them will just get your site into trouble fast. Once you buy a site by our professional Atlanta WordPress designer you need the ‘juice’ to bring big results.  Our link monkeys have been trained to represent your website in the best light possible, building long-lasting authority for your domain which will rocket your site to the top of the search results.  Professional consultation and custom SEO strategies still remain at $75 an hour, but our link monkeys can do the bulk of the heavy lifting at prices you can afford.

Now being offered to my clients, these WordPress real estate websites are SEO powerhouses. In two months Site #1 has over 1,250 pages indexed with Google thanks to the WordPress IDX solution with my custom SEO tweaks. Talk about your longtail keywords! Sporting an 8% signup rate and with phones ringing off the hook, the agent has declared the move a raging success. Most importantly, she has already written several  contracts as a direct result of the site which has always ranked well but was suffering in conversions before the move. Right now the site is averaging a new lead every 7.92 hours. Roughly 70% of these leads provide good phone numbers and are willing to be contacted. Get a couple of these sites working and you can overwhelm an agent quickly.

That particular Atlanta suburb site is running my #1 Theme Style. The top-ranking Atlanta site that uses my #2 Theme Style has experienced similar conversion and indexing explosions. Designed for maximum usability and conversion, these themes give home buyers what they want to see and the tools that keep them sticking around. Bounce rates in the low 30s and roughly 13 pages per visit are very impressive if I do say so myself.

Just as end users are pleased with the sites, site owners appreciate the easy-to-navigate site backend, page creation, lead management, and more. Our new Facebook FanPage Creator App even allows you to build your Facebook pages with your own unique branding, right from inside your Search and Rescue Marketing WordPress real estate website!

Theme #3 is being designed now and then our real estate website product line will be ready for launch into several large markets. Get yours now before the rush and get set up right away. One home sale this year would more than pay for the new site and if you apply the included SEO plan you should see many more closings than that. As a professional REALTOR, don’t you hate when FSBO sellers think it is easy to do your job? Why are you taking a FSBO approach to your website? Let the professionals handle this and allow yourself to spend your time working the leads and making the sales.

Anyone interested enough to research your company online was certainly very interested in your offerings and was highly likely to convert into a customer had they not found discouraging things about your company. Your investment in online marketing could be going completely to waste. Some shady companies such as the ‘Rip Off Report’ conduct what is tantamount to online extortion, posting negative testimonials supposedly written by consumers and then refusing to take them down unless large sums of money are paid.

Depending on the situation, legal action can sometimes be taken but can be a long and expensive process. Most reputation management performed by SEOs takes another route, ‘pushing down’ unfavorable search results on the first page of a brand search to the rarely-seen second page of results. This typically restores most of your online reputation as only the most dedicated researcher will venture past the first page of results. Flooding the first page of your brand search with favorable listings can be done in many ways these days, from social media profiles to dedicated offsite blogs there are many options available.

Hanging out on the internet since it was first commercially available, I quickly learned that anything you say or post can and will be used against you at any time. Having no good reason to reveal everything about myself, a Google search for my name Brian McReynolds shows that it isn’t quite as uncommon as I thought and until this site launched there was no mention of me anywhere except a couple of vague mentions around pages 8+ such as a obituary where I was a pallbearer, and one or two other forum references where friends had dropped my name.

I’m real busy these days but past research has shown that some of these other Brian McReynolds characters subscribe to passionate partisan political theories, and one guy in particular made me cringe at the thought that some old friend of mine might think that was me. I have participated in plenty of social forums in the past but always used a handle, my name is not associated anywhere with my passions or views.

Like any good SEO I have this thing about wanting to see my sites on the first page, and the more I thought about it the more I deciced that maybe it’s time I did a little something to take my name back on the internet. I’m not really looking to be #1, apparently one of my namesakes is quite the hockey player and I am sure his fans will want to find him so he would be a tough one to take out and I wouldn’t want to disturb the integrity of the algorithm by trying to do so anyway. I’m sure there are many more people looking for him than me. A new Brian McReynolds popped up strong out of nowhere a couple of weeks ago, a photographer from across the pond. A personal trainer out of LA does pretty well usually.

Bouncing around #10-12 on and off the first page for a little while, after a couple of tweaks I am showing at #9 today, just ahead of Twitter but way behind Facebook. The fact that I optimized an interior page for this term instead of the homepage means that I have extra work to do, but it just wasn’t one of my priority keywords. I am not really putting much effort into this project, it is simmering on the back burner for now but should hopefully make for a good future post about some methods used to make improvements.

If I was trying to cover up the first page or push down bad results I would likely need to involve the help of social media profiles and our old friend YouTube. That hockey player is dominating with 5 results on powerhouse domains like Wikipedia so I would likely never take #1 without monumental effort. Curiously, there are no hockey players above the fold on a Google image search and I already show 2 results there for myself without trying, a lesson to the wikipedias and hockey database sites out there that they need to work on their image optimization. Google image searches can drive a surprising amount of traffic.

My best results so far for a personal name are 9 out of the 10 first page results that I control for my wife and again, that is not a priority keyword in her business either. Not that we do, but if you have a troublesome search result for your name or business then reputation management is an effective way to deal with it and is a service that Search and Rescue Marketing is proud to offer.

I thought it was a slightly clever play on words, and the visual imagery of lost clients floating in a sea of websites sealed the deal for me. At the time (a few years ago) SEO was getting something of a bad rap so I was careful to stay away from using that term and thought ‘marketing’ would have more staying power in the future.

The story normally ends there, but if you read this far I feel that I owe you something a little more, I mean why are you reading an SEO blog, right? From an SEO perspective why would my company name matter? Search engines give more weight in their ranking algorithms when a domain contains the keywords of a search. Want to rank for ‘new york real estate’? A domain containing those words will help. As I stated in my first blog post, I wasn’t trying to rank this site for extremely competitive keywords, but the SEO in me just wouldn’t let me build a site that wasn’t set up right from the start. So yes, my domain searchandrescuemarketing.com was designed to help me rank for keyword searches containing the words ‘search marketing’ such as ‘real estate search marketing’. That’s the whole story.

Carrollton / West GA SEO Update:

Two days after my Carrollton GA SEO blog post, I ranked #1 on Google for both ‘carrollton ga seo’ and ‘west ga seo’, two search terms that a couple local competitors had been trying to rank for. In the case of ‘west ga seo’ I even pushed one company down to #2 for their own brand name. I think that proves my point about the competitiveness of these terms and the local market in general, and this was done with a fairly new site with little juice. Screenshots are below and I checked across five different G datacenters.  If you look close you might see a clue.

Poor guys– apparently hailing from Chicago, they have a ‘tough row to hoe’ as we say around here. Committing yourself to exclusively doing SEO in Carrollton, Georgia is akin to committing yourself to exclusively selling parkas in Hawaii. Sorry Carrollton, but it’s true, you are a little slow to catch on. Sure there is a younger, hipper contingent at the University of West Georgia, they even have a real estate marketing program. Unfortunately even the students can’t bring the numbers up, there is just no local search volume for any of the usual markets.

It’s so bad that I don’t even waste any time optimizing my real estate sites for Carrollton, their paltry 720 global monthly searches for ‘carrollton ga real estate’ aren’t worth a drop of juice to me, and I live in Carroll County and my wife could show houses there in minutes. Not even a market worth entering to me. Not to mention the trouble with the keyword set with Carrollton, TX being much more competitive.

According to this new firm’s blog they intend to take a deep-dive into the Carrollton, Georgia search market, one-by- one through the top ten most advertised categories from the yellow pages (?) beginning with the auto market which they covered pretty thoroughly. Next in the series will be plumbers apparently. Once they have completed all ten categories they intend to promote this material within Carrollton to show all the businesses what they are missing out on by not being at the top of Google.

I say they covered the auto market pretty thoroughly, but actually they left out one key piece of data. Search Volume? For the search term used, ‘carrollton georgia car dealer’ Google traffic estimator shows  zero global and local monthly searches. 0. Nada. Zip. I knew that before I even looked it up. You can try ‘carrollton ga used cars’ or any term that would normally be high-traffic in any other city and you will come up with the same result. Zero.

People in Carrollton know where the car dealers are, and if a new one opened up it would be the talk of the town. They would would no more think about typing that into Google than they would ‘home brain surgery’. And selling SEO to these guys? Good luck my friends. If you have to explain to someone what you are selling them, you are in trouble already. Trust me. If you do make some sales, how will your customers feel when none of this promised site traffic happens? Pick your keywords carefully people.

It sounds like I am being tough on this new firm, but I have been around in this local SEO market for over 5 years now. There is no market. Well let’s not take anything away from our friends over at WestGASEO.com, looks like they are going like gangbusters over there. And optimizing for West GA, that is even worse than Carrollton. Doesn’t anyone do keyword research for their own site any more?

No, I’m not being tough, I am really just trying to save these guys a lot of trouble. Go for Atlanta SEO if you’ve got the juice guys.  If somebody in Carrollton, GA does need a website or SEO services, I hope they do their research. It wouldn’t take much to rank up top for Carrollton GA anything, the competition level is extremely low and as usual it is determined by the fair market value of the keyword: Zero.

What would I do if I got there? I have a pretty full plate and only work on a few projects at a time. I am getting some more help but am careful to schedule projects and still have a real estate group to help run. Keeping my web business small and personal is a good model for me. Once I decided not to worry about ranking up top on Google for these markets, I was relieved when I realized that I wouldn’t have to run an SEO blog. Competing in those markets would mean some serious blogging and it takes a lot of time and effort to crank out quality posts on a regular basis. I just didn’t feel the world needed another SEO blog and I didn’t need any juice for this site, so why bother? I had many other reasons not to blog about SEO, why would I give away free SEO tips to my local real estate competitors?

So Why The Blog?

First off I have to apologize to my clients. I felt like a real hypocrite for hammering away about how important the blog was in their strategy and the need for regular posts when I didn’t even do it on my own site. I have done a lot of blogging on different platforms and know it can be a chore at times. But I didn’t feel bad enough about it to start a blog.

I am starting this blog to actually save time. This is an ambitious project the likes of which has never been attempted on the internet. Instead of a time-draining black hole of writer’s block, this will be the first blog that has ever given time back to its owner. It didn’t even take any custom programming.

Finding myself repeating the same information on the phone and sending the same emails to potential clients, I began to ask myself: “What if I had some kind of place that I could send them to where this information resides?” Today I was particularly excited to work out the details of a deal that my clients will be thrilled to hear about. I thought to myself, “Wouldn’t it be nice to have a way to notify all of my clients and potential customers viewing my site? Hmmm if only I had some way to release timely information…”

So here we are. I’ll try to keep it interesting and include more than just company news. I think I have a few ideas already.