Jim Somers, an agent at Alain Pinel who sells Homes in Redwood City, CA recently told me he spent $4000 with one SEO firm who promised him top page of Google, yet he never made it past page 3.  Of course he didn’t get his money back and ended up doing better by purchasing SEO for Dummies!

The proof is in the results.  Where does your site rank after someone has managed the SEO?  Be wary immediately of any SEO person that promises a specific result.  The truth is that SEO is art, it’s just as much art as the original design of the site.  It takes knowledge of what users search for… it takes knowledge of how search engines rank results… it takes knowledge of how code works.  Furthermore, it takes content, quality written content that to the average users appears as completely natural, but to a search engine it’s gold.
We had a proud moment at Tribus today, our Los Angeles, CA brand Partners Trust Real Estate Brokerage made it to position 6 for the term Los Angeles Real Estate Brokerage.  One might think this is a lengthy term, but there are 58 million results that were produced from this search.  We were able to achieve this after just 3 months of the site being live.

Over the past 2 months, Tribus representatives have been working hard to kickstart our 2 newest affiliates, one in Dallas, TX and one covering Los Angeles’ Westside with communities like Beverly Hills, Bel Air, and Malibu. (We’ll have another post on our new Dallas affiliate coming soon.)

After meeting with the representatives of Partners’ Trust it was clear that they were willing to subscribe 100% to the changing business of real estate.  They were ready to embrace social media, they realized that profitibility was something that needed to be considered, they understood their market, they were a great candidate for working with our company.

One of the important aspects of their company is that each associate is a partner in the firm.  This means that the infighting, waste, etc that occur in other real estate companies are mitigated.

Partners Trust immediately integrated each of our tools including our accounting system, GPS enabled mobile application, contact management, IDX, website and more.

On September 1st we launched the website.  We worked together with an outside design firm to build an integrated strategy.  When complete there will be more than 30 websites covering hyperlocal areas in the West LA market.  Each website pulls in our IDX to allow local searches.  For example, when visiting one of the local sites you’ll find links to specific areas such as Brentwood Real Estate Search. And Even as specific as a community within Brentwood such as the Mandeville Canyon Real Estate Search.

One of the big questions we’ve been asked recently is about the design of the Partners Trust site.

Here’s the thought process behind the design that we worked together with their ownership team about:

1. They wanted a separate site to focus on assisting buyers – thus www.LosAngelesRealEstateVoice.com was created that answers the three questions that every buyer cares about when visiting a real estate brokerage website a) What homes are for sale b)What’s my home worth? c) How’s the real estate market?
2. They wanted the main site to showcase 3 of their listings right on the main page and above the fold (the portion of the website that can be seen without scrolling)
3. They wanted to focus on their concierge service that offers unparalleled service

At Tribus we wanted to utilize some other resources on the site so we suggested the addition of web videos about each of the 8 main areas the company sells.  We also wanted to bring in the blog posts the company wrote so that anyone visiting the site could easily see new information.   We also wanted to make it easy for individuals visiting the site that might be ready to make a purchase to be able to find a home search as well as users could find market statistics.  In just 10 days we had already procured 2 quality leads for the company through our many channels.

As the website matures over the coming months, we’ll keep you updated as to how things are going.

There is literally no reason that any Realtor covering Santa Monica, Pacific Palisades, Malibu, Beverly Hills, Bel Air, Brentwood and the rest of West LA should work for any other company.

You can get a peak at the website that we implemented for them at www.ThePartnersTrust.com

Look for more to come.  We’ve also go a Dallas Brokerage that we’ll be discussing more in the next couple weeks!