From Chicago Agent’s feature on “Secrets of Online Success,” featuring Dream Town Realty owner Yuval Degani:
“The search engines are pretty smart, and the days of successful bad sites with heavy links are long gone,” says Degani. He warns against placing too much emphasis on SEO tactics, because it can be expensive and time consuming to build a top website that ranks highly in search engine results. “Consider who’s competing for meaningful placement: newspapers, national real estate websites and every brokerage in town. It’s a hard game for an agent to play,” he says.
…Agents can promote themselves and their sites through a combination of traditional marketing and social media, says Degani. “Blog, blog and blog some more. Tell it like it is, with your distinct flavor, with candor and show off your expertise,” he says. Twitter and Facebook also are useful tools that can help agents showcase their neighborhood knowledge and expertise. “The explosion of social media gives agents an opportunity to shine,” he says.
Downplaying SEO in favor of personalized agent blogging and news you can use? Boy, that’s a dramatic shift from Dream Town’s old MO. Too bad the story didn’t link us to any of this flavor or candor, because the only Dream Town blog I can find is the one on the brokerage’s website.
To be fair, I think his point was individual agents should not try to buy their way to the SEO top because too many deep pockets are there. They should promote themselves by blogging… I’m biased of course. I’m also glad the vast majority of agents don’t blog or even worse, blog badly because it allows a few of us to stand out.
Dreamtown has obviously done well in SEO as a brokerage and “capturing leads” but I don’t find the site useful as a consume/real estate professional… more like generic…. I use a lot of other resources and blogger sites.
Here’s the post I drafted before seeing that Joe had already posted on this:
Misdirection from a man who knows a hawk from a handsaw
Whichever direction the wind is blowing, Dream Town’s Yuval Degani knows the relative value of search engine optimization (SEO) and blogging to his business.
From what I can see, Dream Town has invested heavily in a sophisticated SEO strategy to drive traffic to his firm’s Web site. It doesn’t take much digging to discover a forest of sites that front for Dream Town and, in my take, mislead home buyers into its home lair.
I was more than a little amused to read Degani’s remarks in Secrets of Online Success, a cover story from Chicago Agent Magazine:
I consider Dream Town a sleazy blight on the real estate industry and don’t recommend that anyone visit any of its sites. That’s the reason you won’t find links in this opinion piece.
When I visit Dream Town sites and its lackluster blog, I find Degani practicing the exact opposite of what he’s quoted as preaching. When you see pay-per-click links to Dream Town, as you frequently will if you search for anything related to real estate, ask yourself why Degani is wasting his money on a tactic that doesn’t deliver for him.
Degani’s advice reminds me of a rural New Englander’s purported response when questioned about the difference between a hawk and a handsaw: “When you set them both out in the rain, the handsaw’s the one that rusts.” In brief, totally useless advice designed to mislead competitors.
I did get a nice free poster of the Chicago neighborhoods from Dream Town a while back…but then I had to tell the agent to stop calling me, cause I only wanted the poster.