Sellsius real estate marketing blog

What’s more important for long term business success, a strong brand or strong SEO? Let me put it another way—Is it better that folks know your brand name and type it into the search engine box (Google) or that you appear on the first page of search results for your market keywords?

Google’s new search popularity measuring tool, Google Search Insights, measures search volume for keywords and is a good indicator of brand awareness and strength, (or lack thereof) – nationally, regionally, by state, by city and even internationally. Type in your brand and compare its search strength to your competitors.

Zillow v. Trulia: Battle of the Brands

When I played with Search Insights, I compared Trulia and Zillow and concluded that Zillow has a stronger national brand than Trulia, based on Google search volume. This means that consumers are more often typing keywords containing “Zillow” than keywords containing “Trulia”. How important is this, now or in the future?

Perhaps Zillow would rather have folks type in their brand name rather than find them after typing “New York real estate”. While Trulia may be on the first page of Google for “New York real estate” today (and not Zillow), it may not be there tomorrow. Strong SEO is undeniably good, but it must be constantly worked on. Being a Google first page champion is not a permanent title. You have to constantly fight off interlopers, who are discovering and using your SEO secrets to knock you off the coveted first page.

Although having a strong online brand is not a guarantee of success, it may be a ticket to survival, as more players enter the fray to fight over the search engine traffic. Maybe building brand strength will save you from the scars of the SEO wars. SEO may win the battle and brand the war. I definitely have to give this some more thought.

Using Google Search Insights in your business marketing

I think your marketing plan ought to include building your brand awareness, as well as building Google rank with SEO.

Use Google Search Insights to:

• compare your brand strength to your competition’s–nationally and locally
• market your business in areas where your brand is strong and work on building up your brand where it is weak.
• promote your brand dominance with Google’s stats. Folks may not trust your company stats, but they will trust Google’s.
• discover which states send the most traffic to your brand and market there
• check “Rising searches” to see who may be gaining on you or how off brands are performing
• discover the search terms associated with your brand
• check your international search popularity.

Here’s a search volume comparison between RE/MAX and Century 21.

Take a look at the city results. RE/MAX apparently rules Cincinnati …

… while Century 21 does much better in New York. (this stat may help agents decide which brokerage brand to work with)

Rising searches for REMAX & Century 21 show regional/specialty brand performance:

How have you used Google Search Insights?

Further Blogger Insights on Google Insights:

The Future of Real Estate Marketing: Digging into the National Real Estate Search Scene

The Seattle Specialist: Google Insights maps where people search

The Future Buzz: Google Search Insights: A Look at Social Media Trends

Fun With Google Insights and Unified Communications (JasonKolb.com)– examining international search results

Google Search Insights: What can be learned from Google’s new trend spotting tool (Trendsspotting)

Using Google Search Insights to Determine App Popularity (the app gap)

Technorati Tags: google search insights, trulia, zillow, real estate search, branding, real estate marketing, remax, century 21, sellsius

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