Hi everyone. I've been in the biz for about 3 years now. With 80% of buyers and sellers going to the net first I figured I better invest my marketing dollars wisely. I have talked to advanced access about a web page. The offer a marketing package that guarantees first page results in google, msn and so on. If you look at there web page it is the Premium Package with the marketing package tacked on. It will cost me about 5000 for the year. My questions is have you had experience with this company? Also would you recommend this to a full time agent that is doing about 18-25 transactions a year and wants to do much more. Please any information you could provide would be greatly appreciated. Please no solicitations.

b

I think that is a lot of money to spend. First page results can take months to get...and I don't like when someone "guarantees" something like search engine placement.

Do they promise you a refund if you're not on the first page of DECENT* search terms? Like, normal key word searches for your area? You should ask them what they will do four months down the line and you're still not up there.

Before I came on full time in this office, my boss paid some SEO guru lots of money - and it went NOWHERE. I initially designed the site, and told them (at the time) that I was not savvy on SEO. So they hired some sheister who promised them the moon. Anyway, a year later and they had zilch. I came into the office full time about a year ago, and by this time had learned a significant amount of info on SEO - and now our website is almost always on the first page of results, usually near the top, for just about any SENSIBLE search related to our area.

Read all the fine print very very very carefully. $5000 is a lot of money to spend on smoke and mirror promises. You'd be better off taking some time to learn it YOURSELF and do it....that's my opinion and I'm sticking with it. LOL

*Decent search terms means, not some weird obscure term that someone is unlikely to search with.*

Perky that is great. I have been trying to figure out SEO and I am either reading the wrong stuff or I need to clear the cobwebs out of my head. It is still all Greek to me.

I don't think they can realy give you first page results..That is very hard to do..It sounds like a sales pitch to me .I would shop around more

My competitors use them. I checked the bottom of the pages and I saw a lot of Advanced Access, Z57 and something called iHouse. I found Advanced Access incredibly expensive unless I did my initial research wrong.

I use LinkuRealty. I am still starting out and have a lot to do still starting my one-man, soon to be two-people shop. I can click and choose what I want and learn little by little and I think its cheap. And they have really done a good job of embedding my info all across the net. I have a pretty nice search engine ranking for who I really am. For this Im paying about 30 bucks a month and Im happy.

http://www.kevingoleary.com

I work in web services, and I would be very cautious about spending that much money for search engine results. No one can guarantee first page results in Google, except for Google! They may be simply using a small portion of that fee to put up a paid adword for a low traffic search term. Also, it is not difficult to get good search results for very specific, rarely used terms, and I doubt they are guaranteeing that they will give first page result for a term like "real estate".

First, determine which search terms you want your website to be top-ranked for. Then ask which search terms the company is providing a guarantee for. If they can't guarantee the search terms you need, then they're useless. Also find out if they guarantee top placement for "natural" search results, or sponsored results. It's impossible to guarantee top placement for natural results, since that is dependent on a number of factors including relevancy to the topic, inbound links, SEO, and others. And it takes months to achieve. If they guarantee top placement in sponsored results (sometimes called PPC or pay per click), then you can save your money and do it yourself. The reason being that sponsored results are partially based on how much you're willing to bid for top position. And remember that if anyone is offering a guarantee, get it in writing BEFORE you part with your money. Good luck!

check out Agent321.com this is my non-branded site. Once people sign up to get the free reports their contact info is sent to me and it starts recording every move they make on my site. Also tells me when they are on it. The best part is the text message that I get on my cell phone is sent SECONDS after they summit their contact info. People who willingly give you their real names and emails and phone numbers a screaming for help. Satistics show that a high percent of people want a responce almost instantly and slightly smaller amout want a responce within the hour. By getting their contact info texted along with the report they accessed gives me the edge because not only do i get their info instantly, I also know what they are interested in by the report they chose( this allows me to call them right away and we all know most buyers/sellers go with the first realtor that contacts them). My system also email drips them everty couple of days or weeks ( depending what catagory they fall in [ buyers talked to, buyers interested, sellers talked to, seller interested etc etc etc],this allows me to auto email them thank you,follow up,reminder,etc etc emails. So when the are ready to buy/sell they will contact me because I not only gave them access to my free reports and free mls access I remained in their inbox on a regular basis with friendly emails. Also after they sign up the are given access to AgentRoman.com which is my branded site ( warm approach ). The reason I have a branded and unbranded is simple. EX: when you go to the car dealership, whats the worst thing? The sales man that comes up to you pestering you. We all say " just looking " and dont want to be bugged. Well thats the same with my websites. People dont want your face all over the site, telling them that your the best of the best and blah blah blah crap. They just want info...free...now...and they want to feel like they found it on their own. So this is what my system does. Im sorry if I rambled on and on. But if you are interested in setting up your site like mine. Contact me. Its not gonna cost no where near 5K to get it up running. And the cool thing is when you get 4 realtor buddies to buy in the same. you get your set up free for life!!!! Theres so much to explain on the back end that if you want to find out more... you have to contact me.

thanks buh bye.

Hello LancasterRealtor

This is not a solicitation, I am not in the sales department, just clarifying in case you were concerned about the info you were given. I lurk in different forums in case I can look into an issue for any of our clients.

Just a couple of quick notes about our packages. The Premium Marketing Package is exclusive for your #1 city. For example, if we have you signed up for Lancaster Real Estate then we cannot sign anyone else up for that term. This is because what others have said is correct... we don't want to optimize your site for some obscure keyword. And we don't feel we can deliver results ethically if we compete with ourselves. If we have a whole department and 20 people are using the same techniques for 20 sites, that really doesn't work out.

I do know we are very careful with the word "guarantee" - no one but Google knows who's getting top placement in the SERPs and why. Hopefully that was just misunderstood. We do however guarantee that if you work with us on following your site evaluations and allowing us to appropriately manage your site that you will have positive results.

To break down costs - we have an initial set up fee for the site, and monthly hosting. Then the Premium Marketing Package has a flat fee. In addition to that are your pay per click budgets, etc. Even still, I don't think it quite adds up to that much, but some of it is not ongoing... for example, the website set up fee is one time only.

Have a great day,

Anna

Perky is right, it's fishy to guarantee such a thing.

I'm not judging Advanced Access, they're probably really good.

But... do you have any desire to learn how to optimize your own site for your search terms? And to manage your content?

I was thinking about writing up a guide for this forum of how to:

1.) Get a domain name.
2.) Get hosting for it.
3.) Get the best PHP real estate agent software package.
4.) Get an experienced web developer to install it.
5.) Learn the basics of SEO, since the basics is all you need.

Hmmm...

I have first hand experience with Advanced Access and I think they are a great company. But, currently they are going through an upgrade which new customers will jump right into. They are having some dificulties with this as does every new program.

As for the guaranteed 1st page placement I believe this will be some sort of PPC program which they will setup for you.

AA has some pretty good support and issue a monthly email regarding SEO for your site.

If you want to get a site and have someone else run it and do the SEO for you it will be expensive.

Or, you can get a site and do your own SEO. New sites don't tend to get good rankings for compeditive keywords for a long time due to some search engine algorithm changes involving domain age, backling age, etc. So PPC would be a good way to get some search engine traffic to your site.

Of course if you find a website host with a really good MLS search function that is very user friendly you can put some sign riders up saying search for homes at (your web address) and probably get some good results. Make sure you choose an easy web address that is not to long or hard to remember.

If I were you I would look into a few more website hosts and look a little into SEO. Figure out if you want to do your own SEO or not. If you don't than find a good package that you can afford look at some of that companies customers sites and check things out like - the property MLS search function and the featured listings page are going to be viewed more than most other pages on your site, so they shjould be to your liking as they are usually not changeable.

SEO companies can't really guarantee top positions in search engines unless they are talking about PPC which is just an ad on the search results page for specific keyword searches.

It is alot of work to get your site to rank well and you will have to keep up with the changes in the search engine algorithms which can be a task itself.

There are some that have taken the time to become webmasters and do well with them but AA has been chasing the technology curve for years ... IMHO that is

you better check into them a little deeper, AA just took a hit from Google.

You can read about it here

http://www.realestatewebmasters.com/showthread.php?t=15141

I don't think it is a hit to all AA sites - it seems like a "hand job" and many AA sites continue to rank as they did before. I think anyone who has a directory-type link exchange on their site (that has non-real estate related categories in particular - and vacation rentals are not real estate and neither are hotels) is a target right now.