Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Will improving our site's graphic design but keeping identical structure, tags and text result in better Google? Are lower bounce rates greater time spent on a site by visitors rewarded by Google n the form of higher ranking?

We are a commercial real estate brokerage firm in Manhattan and plan on making the following changes:

-Much larger photos for listings
-Lighter cleaner design with more open white areas
-Use of more visible fonts 
-Better forms
-Potentially less text and more emphasis on product, which in our case are real estate listints.

Our existing site:  w w w . m e t r o - m a n h a t t a n . com  is a bit ordinary and uninviting.

The redesign will have a concept similar to
http://www.dernieretage-paris.com/
The theme behind this real estate site is the city itself, which is quite clever and applicable to Manhattan.

Our home page as well as other URLs use lots of text. If we reduce text and use more images to make the pages more engaging, will our organic ranking decline?

If we reduce text can we compensate by fuller completion of meta tags?

Any thoughts???

My real estate brokerage firm is promoting a listing via advertising on LinkedIn. The advertising links to a landing page: http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/MidtownLawOfficeSublet3300SFBelowMarket

Rather than photos, the landing page has a 1 minute video. So far we have had about 10 visits to the page. Visitors leave the landing page after a few seconds. So they are not looking at the video.

Would it be better to replace the video with photos?  Or is engagement generally better with video?

My thinking is that business owners may not have the patience or the time for a video and they would more likely have the time and willingness to click on photos.

I would be willing to test this further, but at $5/click it could get costly!

Any thoughts?
Thanks, 
Alan Rosinsky

My designer has created a landing page with a dark background. Text is white and other colors. Does a dark background impact the conversion rate? Is it better to have a white background?

I am concerned that a dark background may distract visitors. The landing page is: http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/MidtownLawOfficeSublet3300SFBelowMarket

We plan on using this landing page for LinkedIn advertising.

Thanks!!

I own a commercial real estate brokerage in New York City. We represent tenant's in the acquisition of office, loft and medical space.

My company has a LinkedIn page (https://www.linkedin.com/company/11076827/) , as I have a personal LinkedIn profile (https://www.linkedin.com/in/metromanhattan) associated with the company page.

Should the company page be promoted or should the personal profile be promoted?

What is the relationship between the two? Note that I am a one man show but do operate as a company.

Thanks!!

For B+B advertising how do the costs of advertising on Facebook compare to LinkedIn? How do the quality of the leads compare from the networks? We are a New York City commercial real estate brokerage seeking to advertise to commercial office tenants.

We intend to advertise to, very specific segments. For instance partners of law firms with 1-10 employees located in the 10017 zip code. We will promote posts marketing specific properties to specific segments. From a  targeting point of view, which network is better?

Our  objective is to acquire actionable leads. We are not looking to build brand or become a "thought leader" at $28/click. Also, we have specific lists of contacts in each industry, however we don't have their personal emails, only their business emails.

Best to focus on Facebook or LinkedIn? A concern I have is that most people do not frequently check their LinkedIn account so this may be very limiting in terms of advertising.

My commercial real estate brokerage ie firm is targeting very specific lists of businesses. We send them emails regarding specific properties. For instance email to partners in law firms with 1-10 employees in the 10017 zip code. Response from email has been maybe a decent customer for every 1,500 emails. But it is inexpensive.

We would like to try to reinforce and enhance the results by perhaps using social media tools such as LinkedIn and Facebook.

Would it help us eventually advertise to our very specific segments if we Facebook like the individuals we are targeting? We would like both the individuals and the company pages. Any utility to this? We would also follow the individuals on LinkedIn.

In a perfect world we could advertise posts of below market, especially desirable properties to our target market; the same people we are emailing to on a regular basis. We are generating the emails through a CRM called "ZOHO" which we find very useful.

Is it worthwhile to add a social media element to our marketing effort? While the email has been very inexpensive and shows signs or being effective, the amount of effort to compile the lists and set up ZOHO was monumental.

Looking forward to feedback, thanks everyone!!!
Alan

Thank you Kelly and Michael for these excellent answers to my query.

Another related question: if a recipient clicks on a product pages (an office rental in Manhattan) and goes to my website, I have the ability to send them an automated email once they click the link or even several hours afterwards.  Will doing so increase my conversion rate? If I do not set this feature up, am I missing a key opportunity?

Also, the package I am working with allows me to send a follow up email if the recipient opens the my promotional email. Is it best practices to set this up?

I don't want to harass of spam any potential customer. At the same time I don't want to miss an opportunity. So what is best practices?

Note I have a mailing list of about 12,000 and intend to send emails targeted by industry during about 10 business days a month. Don't want to send more than one mailer a month to each recipient, scared they will opt out if I over do it.

Any thoughts????

Thanks, Alan

For business to business email, should we avoid sending on Mondays and Fridays? The nature of the service is commercial real estate brokerage for office space in New York City.

We are mailing to corporate decision makers in various industries (technology, finance, law). Should we avoid mailing during certain times of day? Or is there a best time of day to send the email.

Thanks, 
Alan

We are a New York City real estate brokerage focusing on office and loft rentals for business.

We intend to send emails with brief descriptions of loft and office space rentals to decision makers in various companies. Each email will be targeted to the industry as well as to the size space that the company may require. The emails will contain 5-6 photos of available space. Should we link these photos to the corresponding URL on our website to send the visitor to our webpage describing the space? Or should we encourage the recipient of the email to call us by placing our phone number under the photo? Note our objective is to receive a phone call and not to have the prospect wandering around our website (which is rather outdated-www.metro-manhattan.com). But we don't want to lose the potential prospect either.

Note that we have the Zoho contact manager and it can detect the name of the email recipient that visits our website and the number of pages they inspect, which from a marketing perspective is very useful.

Note we have shifted to outbound marketing as inbound has become too competitive and expensive in our niche.

Any advice? Anyone have experience with this issue as it relates to B+B marketing.

I keep getting the following error in my Campaign Dashboard:

“Our connection to your Google account was lost. Don’t worry, you won’t lose any data”. Please reauthorize now.

I do reauthorize but by the time I log out and log back in, the same message gets displayed.

Any ideas?

Thanks,

Alan

Does anyone have experience with reverse IP lookup software?

A company by the name of Lead Forensics provided me with a demo. It is claimed that the package can identify about 97% of corporate businesses and provide the business name, location, phone number pages visited etcera. Expensive package, about $400/month. Also tracking code needs to be added which I am concerned could slow down our Wordpress site.

Does anyone have experience with this or any other reverse ip tracking software? From a marketing perspective I would think it a god send. Might really improve ROI on costly advertising like Adwords.

Can anyone provide some clarity or advice regarding this?

Thanks, Alan

I run a New York City commercial real estate in New York City.

Lately, I have started to produce 30-second videos about property listings and neighborhoods. I have noticed that the engagement for these videos on Facebook is much higher that for text posts.

Should adding these videos on our website (hosting them on Youtube) result in increased visitor engagement? Could there be a positive SEO effect such as more links and higher quality links? Anyone have any experience with this?

Thanks,

Alan

Interesting that you mention video. Do you think, that if well done that attracts interest that is equal or better than an article? Also, as a B+B service, do you think that Snapchat would be appropriate for posting? Are links that originate in Facebook and Snapchat "follow" links? I know that YouTube is no follow. As a B+B business (commercial real estate) I am hoping to find the best sites for posting information. Recently we have been creating promotional videos of listings and informational videos of neighborhoods and are trying to figure out where to post them. From what you are saying it is key to post these videos on our website. Our few experiments have been on YouTube.

Hi Brett:

Makes sense, thanks!!

So let's say I have a useful article about renting office space in Manhattan. Would I be best posting it on a social media site with a link back to our site? Or better to add the article to our blog and then promote it on social media like Twitter and Googe+ and then like back to the article?

Thanks,

Alan

What is the best way to use articles from a "thought leader" to build high-quality links to my website?

I have heard that it is possible to pay bloggers to post business articles that link back to a website. That assuming these blogs have domain authority this is a good technique to improve ranking. Is this in fact true, and if so where would I find blogs to post our content. The purpose would be to promote real estate brokerage website.

Any suggestions? Is this possible, advisable, best use of quality content?

Alternatively, where else can we post engaging content to create links back to our site? Social media? The nature of the content would be such topics as how to find the best value in Manhattan office of loft space rentals, etcera.

Thanks, Alan

Excellent response!!! I apologize for the delayed response as I am travelling in Europe at the moment.

If I understand correctly, there are 3 entities, the business plus the 2 partners. When you refer to "unique set of local business listings/citations for each partner" what are you referring to? I understand that the business wold have a Google+, GoogleMyBusiness, GoogleMaps listing, however are you suggesting that the partners have listings for themselves that link back to the site, and if so where should these listings be?

Thanks,  Alan

Basically the question is what are best practices for multiple business phone numbers on a website. How should they be added without having a detrimental effect on local SEO?

Does anyone want to venture an opinion on this? I would think this is a potentially common issue.

Thanks,

Alan

Yes, that was the issue, thanks!!!!

MOZ Campaigns has been displaying a blank page in the last 2 hours. Is anyone else experiencing this outage?

I have attempted to access MOZ via an iPad and an iPhone using Safari and Chrome. My geographic location is France.