If you follow any SEOs* on social media, today’s a good day to keep scrolling.

Google had its big developer event today with lots of AI-related news, and my feed on other social networks is overflowing with hawt takes from “SEO is dead” to “SEO is getting fun again” and everything in between.

Sigh.

*other than me, a non-hawt take guy who prefers to process, think, and say intelligent things after some time has passed rather than blurt out the first thing that comes to mind in the hopes of going viral. You don’t need to keep scrolling past my posts.

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

SEO Hawt Takes Everywhere Today

I didn’t even know I’d ever connected this site to Google Search Console, but just discovered it in my list of GSC domains. Sure enough, when you don’t blog in years, Google starts to ignore you.

So, anyway, this post is just me testing/messing around for a moment.

Big question is whether I’ll remember to check back in a month or so and see if anything looks different. Someone wanna ping me in mid-April? Thanks.

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

Been a while…just checking out something

Here are some examples from Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

Instagram

Instagram’s 10-image limit is nothing new; we’ve all posted multiple photos at some point. What I’m referring to is more like the example below, where Chris Smith, the co-founder of the digital marketing platform Curaytor, is using the 10-images to offer what amounts to a visual version of an info-packed blog post.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Chris Smith (@chris_smth)

That’s more than your typical multi-image Instagram post. It’s high-quality content presented in a compelling way, and even has all the calls-to-action on the last slide to invite engagement. It’s the kind of post that, if you’re a real estate agent (Chris’ main audience), makes you stop scrolling and pay attention.

LinkedIn

That example is similar to posts like this one on LinkedIn from Gary Vaynerchuk. In this case, it’s a 12-page visual listicle and again, IMO, it’s the kind of thing that stops you from scrolling and invites you to scroll/click through each visual.

It’s a shame LinkedIn’s embed code doesn’t put out a better result; that post was much more engaging in the LI feed.

Twitter

Twitter threads have been around for what seems like forever, but lately I’m seeing more people/accounts using them as an intentional storytelling tool rather than just to share random thoughts that don’t fit in a single tweet.

You’ll have to click the timestamp to see the full thread, but the quick summary is that Redfin created a 7-tweet thread with data and insights from its latest monthly housing market report. The last tweet is the one that promotes the blog post where all the data/insights came from. You could argue that there’s no need to click the link in that last tweet because so much interesting data preceded it; I bet Redfin’s willing to make that trade-off. They’re capturing your attention one way or another — whether you only read the tweet thread or if you also click for the full article.

Over the past year, Sahil Bloom has been posting long, detailed, and often-fascinating Twitter threads that offer background and shed light on things going on in the finance industry. Here’s a recent one, and again you’ll have to click the timestamp to see the full thread on Twitter.

Not New, But Better and More Engaging

Again, I’m not saying any of this is new. The use of 10 images on Instagram, Twitter threads, etc., has been happening for a while.

What I’m saying is this:

• I’m seeing more of this recently across all social media platforms than I’ve noticed before.
• What I’m seeing is higher quality content, as if you’re converting a blog post (like this one) into something that fits better in the social media feed than just a boring link post.
• It seems very intentional, and IMO is really successful. I know I’m engaging more with this content than I do with regular social media posts.

What are your thoughts on these examples? Are you seeing more of this, too?

(Tape measure image by jacqueline macou from Pixabay)

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

Longform Content on Social Media: A Great Way to Capture Attention

The day of reckoning has arrived. Facebook has taken away several ad targeting options from anyone doing housing-related ads, like targeting a specific city or ZIP code (among others detailed below). The changes are based on good intentions, but also kill the biggest promise of online advertising: the ability to pinpoint ads specifically to people who might want to see them.

Facebook warned back in March that changes were coming. In response to lawsuits that accused Facebook of allowing advertisers to discriminate against protected classes, the company announced changes for anyone running housing, employment or credit ads:

• no more targeting by age, gender or ZIP code
• fewer targeting categories overall

The changes began to arrive in Ads Manager about a week ago, and there’s already a lot of hand-wringing in some of the private real estate-focused Facebook groups I follow.

Why are real estate agents upset? Here’s a look at what’s changed and how they have to run Facebook ads (if they choose to continue at all).

Facebook Ads for Real Estate

The changes are front and center as soon as you start to create a new campaign.

1.) You must self-identify as a housing, employment or credit advertiser.

Facebook asks you to self-identify as someone who’s based in or targeting the U.S. and creating a campaign in the housing, employment or credit industries. Anecdotally, there are reports that Facebook has already suspended the accounts of advertisers who tried to run ads in these categories without self-identifying.

2.) You cannot used Saved Audiences, nor can you save a new audience.

This makes sense, since most of a real estate agent’s past ads probably used an audience that runs afoul of the new rules. The Saved Audience tab is still there, but can’t be clicked.

Custom Audiences are still available, as you can kinda see above.

3.) You can’t advertise to a specific ZIP code or city.

Now, the most targeted geographic advertising a real estate professional can do is to a 15-mile radius around any city/address/point on the map. That’s explained in the “ZIP code selection is unavailable” pop-up at the Locations prompt.

And once you put in an address or city, the radius targeting tool now goes no closer than 15 miles.

That radius tool used to go down to one mile, and you might say … is that necessary, Matt? Does anyone really need one-mile targeting?

Well, we used the one-mile option a couple times:

1. When we wanted to advertise an Open House to the immediate neighbors of our seller, with the Facebook ad campaign timed to begin the same day they received postcards in the mail.
2. When we wanted to advertise to a neighborhood where we had just sold a home that was difficult to sell. Three other agents had been unable to sell the home, and we wanted to let the neighborhood know that we finally got it done, and wouldn’t they like to hire the Cari McGee Real Estate Team to sell their home? (Yes, we think they would.)

We obviously won’t be running Facebook ads like that going forward.

I get the reason for Facebook’s new policy on geo-targeting — advertisers shouldn’t be able to advertise primarily to neighborhoods where most residents are a specific race.

But not all neighborhood or super-specific geographic ad targeting is bad. Consider a real estate agent who lives in Vancouver, Washington. The city is right on the border with Oregon, just north of Portland, and has a population estimated in the 175K to 200K range. An agent who works in Vancouver and is only licensed to do business in Washington now has to show her ads to most of the city of Portland and its 650K-plus residents … even though she can’t help them unless they want to move across the border.

So much for targeting the people who can actually use your services.

4.) You can’t target ads based on age or gender.

These options are unchangeable if you run housing, employment or credit ads.

And again, I get the reason behind the policy. But there are legitimate uses for age-based targeting in housing.

My parents used to live in a senior residential community; you had to be 55 or older to live there. As our population continues to live longer, more of these communities will be built. (The growth of our population aged 65 and older is “unprecendented in U.S. history.”) But if you own or manage one of these communities, you’ll have to show your ads to many Facebook users who can’t live in your community.

5.) You can no longer exclude audiences.

One of the detailed targeting options that Facebook took away is the ability to exclude certain people from seeing your ads.

On a practical level, the only excluding we’ve done is one that’s very common in the housing industry: We’d exclude other real estate professionals from seeing our ads. So if you had a job title like “Real Estate Broker” or listed your employer as Century 21, Windermere, RE/MAX, etc., we didn’t want you seeing our ads.

But going forward, it looks like we’ll be paying to have other agents click on our ads (when they can see the same info, and better info, for free in the MLS database).

6.) “New House” is one of the removed targeting interests.

This one seems weird to me. Facebook still lists “New House” as one of the targeting options — show your ad to people who’ve expressed an interest in “new house” — but when I choose that option, Ads Manager throws an error.

What’s strange is that so many other interests are still available for detailed targeting, including “apartment” and “luxury real estate” among others. As you can see, none of the interests below trigger an error alert.

As best I can tell, those are the main changes impacting real estate advertising (plus employment and credit). If I missed anything or got something wrong above, I’ll update this article.

Final Thoughts

It appears that these changes aren’t in place when I try to duplicate or restart an old campaign — they’re only showing up on new campaigns. BUT … I’m betting that the Facebook people who review housing ads won’t let an old campaign relaunch with the old, now-disallowed targeting. It wouldn’t surprise me if they’re suspending accounts for shenanigans like that.

I’m sure we’ll continue to run Facebook ads, but I’ll be watching our results very closely and we’ll adjust in whatever way we need to. If Facebook advertising becomes a waste of money and offers no ROI, we’ll stop … just like we stopped advertising on Google and Zillow.

My guess is that most real estate pros will continue to advertise on Facebook, but at least some of that advertising will switch from promoting specific properties/open houses/etc. to more brand/name awareness ads.

The main takeaway for me is something I’ve always preached: You need a variety of sources for revenue, leads, sales, etc. You can’t rely too heavily on one source, like Facebook ads or Google/SEO traffic, or whatever. Things can change in a heartbeat and leave you scrambling. The internet is littered with the remains of businesses who relied too heavily on one tactic, one channel, one source and lost everything when that one thing changed or went away.

Facebook phone image at top by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay. Frustrated emoji image by Nina Garman from Pixabay.

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

Facebook Ads Just Got A Lot Harder for Real Estate Agents

My wife had her best year ever as a real estate agent in 2018. Most transactions completed. Most dollar value sold. Most commission income. It was a great year by almost all of the metrics that a real estate agent measures.

But we didn’t have our best year ever in the one metric that means more than anything: net business profit.

In order to have such a great year, we had to spend a lot of money. Some of that was the necessity of changing the business name, forming a real estate team and doing a big branding push to get mindshare and familiarity. And to a large degree, we feel that was successful.

But there were also a lot of expenses that maybe we didn’t need to spend. I say “maybe” because we’re gonna find out in 2019 whether that’s true or not.

We’ve stopped spending on Zillow ads and Google ads.

Why? Have a look at this chart that I put together for our year-in-review deck.

What it shows is that 83 percent of the leads we generated last year were from paid sources. But only 7 percent of our transactions came from paid sources. In other words, we spent a lot of money generating leads and very few of them turned into revenue-generating clients.

The vast majority of our lead gen expenses was spent on Zillow; it’s insanely expensive to advertise there and frankly, most of the leads were bad. So we stopped advertising there in December.

We stopped our Google advertising last summer for what I expected would only be a couple months. But that turned into “for the rest of the year” and now I’m not seeing any reason to start again.

I’m not saying paid lead gen is bad; we’re still advertising via other channels and acquiring new leads. It’s just that we’re spending a lot less to do it, while getting essentially the same quality of lead (i.e., not great).

That’s been the biggest takeaway for me in the 18 months or so since I changed careers and began working as my wife’s Chief Marketing Officer — in this industry, SEO and PPC are dwarfed in importance by the three Rs: relationships, referrals and reviews. As we adjust our expenses in 2019, that’s where our focus will be.

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

Why We Stopped Advertising on Google & Zillow

If you’re in a real estate, as my wife and I are, you can’t do much better than getting a domain name that looks like [yourcity]homes.com. In my experience, that’s a very common search query and having an exact-match domain is pretty much never a bad idea.

The problem is that all of these domains have been registered for years and completely unavailable. So that’s why you see some real estate agents with domain names that have 20-30 characters and/or combine 4-5 words. It can be pretty ridiculous.

Imagine my shock, then, when I somehow stumbled on an (almost) perfect domain for a Tri-Cities real estate agent: Tri-CitiesHomes.com. I had to do a double-take when it showed up as available. And then I think I did another double-take.

If I’m nitpicking, I’d prefer no hyphen in the domain … but that wasn’t gonna stop me from grabbing the domain right away. I did, and here we are just three days later with an active domain where people can find Tri-Cities homes for sale, save searches, get property alerts and all that stuff.

Domain History

While putting the real estate web site together, I kept wondering about the domain’s history — as you always should when you buy a new domain. It can be troubling to buy a domain that has a checkered history (i.e., spammy content, bad reputation, etc.).

So I went over to the Wayback Machine, typed in the URL and was quite fascinated by what I found out:

• The domain was in use as far back as August 2000 by a local real estate agent whom I’ll call Sam.
• By 2003, the domain was being used by another agent. I’ll call her Patty.
• A year later, Patty added another agent to the website. Let’s call her Carly.
• By 2009, only Carly’s name was on the website.
• In 2013, the domain started redirecting to a different real estate-related domain — one that I didn’t recognize. (Archive.org has no history for this other domain.)
• By 2015, that redirect had gone away, and so had the Tri-CitiesHomes.com web site. It was just a blank page.
• In 2017, it was redirecting to Sam’s new web site. The same Sam who owned the domain originally.

And that’s the last record the Wayback Machine has.

It turns out that “Sam” is now retired and still living in the Tri-Cities. I guess he just never bothered to renew the domain and, most amazingly, none of the professional domain buyers/sellers picked it up when it became available.

Their loss is our gain. I’m super excited to own such a fantastic domain for a Tri-Cities real estate web site!! And I’m grateful for the Wayback Machine and the fascinating things you can learn there about a domain/web site’s history.

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

In Praise of Great Domains and the Wayback Machine