It all started here officially several years ago with this study done by a respected industry analyst called Forrester Research, “video stands about a 50 times better chance of appearing on the first page of results than any given text page in the (Google) index”
http://blogs.forrester.com/interactive_marketing/2009/01/the-easiest-way.html
OK, a 50x advantage using video, specifically YouTube video over any other method of web presence.
And if it is true that: "Most people start at a search engine on the Internet 74% of the time."
Information sources used in home search:
Internet: 74%
Real estate agent: 69%
Yard sign: 22%
Open house: 12%
Newspaper ad: 9%
Home book or magazine: 6%
Source: 2010 National Association of REALTORS® Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers
And that of all realtors in a recent study conducted by realtor.org …. (only) 2 percent used YouTube or another video hosting site.
October 10, 2010 study http://www.realtor.org/topics/homebuyers_sellers_profile/techtrends_pres
And the rules by which we do all of this is in constant motion...
The ever changing landscape:
As stated above Google dominates the search industry.. They own YouTube. Google also embraces new companies from time to time. At one time they backed Facebook, then Twitter and for a short while Groupon… today those are no longer seen as partners but threats and competitors. Now they are backing a new group of startups like Storify and Tumblr. This process of embracing and then letting go of different partners effects the rules of SEO. This also provides an uneven and turbulent market in which to conduct a company’s business in which to acquire customers.
In our blog at http://offersnetwork.com/blog we identify all of these issues and how you can use Google’s current “love affairs” to maximize the SEO of your listings.
For example to take advantage of this we have written an entirely dynamic series of rules that wrap our client’s inventory into SEO landing pages using current Google partner’s sites as the scalable location from which to generate entirely new levels of SEO for their listings without violating the new rules of Google’s PANDA release [read more here http://tinyurl.com/pandarules ] and also we recognize through this process other rules of the road that are not documented but test out in our labs.
We are constantly evaluating the signals that Google is releasing regarding who they are backing and how that might affect our client’s ability to gain SEO of their brand and how we can use those alliances to have our client’s offerings dominate their local markets using these techniques.
Summary: To generate significant, scalable SEO for clients with large ASSET bases requires a programmatical approach. This cannot be done by hand. And with the ever changing landscape it is important to know what are the relevant signals the search engines give off that work and have the flexibility of design to take advantage of those new opportunities. Knowing which ones work and which ones produce false positives is a matter of hard work and testing. In addition, the research indicates that for those brokers that use Video, specifically YouTube video, it represents a huge advantage to dominate search results for their listings over other real estate listings in their market (98% of realtors don’t use video).
