November 16th, 2009

California Real Estate Goes Global

By Jackie Berg, Marketing Specialist

In one of the most innovative and consumer-responsive client implementations to date, global marketing firm Language Media Agency has launched Caimeiju.com, an interactive real estate portal giving Chinese homebuyers and investors  a way to explore communities in California. In just over a month since its launch, visitors from over 40 countries have visited Caimeiju.com, validating Language Media’s exploration of a niche market they considered to be both strong and underserved.

Back to the Drawing Board
The easiest thing to do in a recession is cut. Change is difficult for our industry of late adopters, sent battered back to the drawing board in search of a different outcome – often unsuccessfully, by reshuffling the same inputs. Real estate professionals have found themselves debating: how do I get ahead in a stale market? How far should I stretch my marketing strategy if it will fall on deaf broke ears?

Agile companies like Language Media Agency (LMA) realize that real estate is local, but buyers are global. And with a crafty use of technology and translation services they specialize in, Language Media has viewed the marketplace through a unique lens to meet the growing demand of Chinese-speakers looking for properties in California.

“With the downturn in the real estate market, sellers need to be creative in marketing their properties,” says the President of LMA. “They are no longer constrained to placing ads in the local newspaper or hanging flyers on front doors.”

California: A Growing Hub for Chinese Residents
Surely you are also desensitized to bleak market forecasts painting the American real estate landscape as a dry marketplace. Sellers are clinging to any signs of hope – most recently, the tax credit extension working its way through Washington.

For LMA, the downturn provided an opportunity. With Chinese being the third most spoken language in California, the forward-thinking LMA team selected a ripe market to connect with.

The Language Media team took a close look at not only the habits of Chinese-Americans, but also the international potential for Chinese investors abroad. According to LMA, the number of Chinese internet and broadband users is the highest in the world. China’s economy is climbing while most others continue to face a recession. In fact, this week’s Time magazine suggested the U.S. could learn a few things from China.

Bridging Cultural Gaps
The goal of Caimeiju is not to sell houses. LMA seeks to bridge the culture gap and provide a credible and tasteful place for US realtors and developers to reach the new and growing market.

Caimeiju combines interactive technology with localization, statistical data and community information in a way that assists Chinese readers in understanding the distinctions of each neighborhood, town and city in California.

The site is not just a hub for buyers. Real estate professionals can market their listings and services both domestically and internationally through news and blog channels on the site.

Recognizing that all consumers are not alike, LMA has stocked Caimeiju.com with supplemental lifestyle, local, education, and luxury articles to create a community among this niche market.

(While we’re discussing cultural gaps, you may be wondering how the site got its name. “Caimeiju” in simplified Chinese means ‘selecting a beautiful residence’ or ‘selecting an American residence’.)

Meeting the Needs of the Chinese Consumer
Implementing community information to Caimeiju.com was imperative to reaching the Chinese consumer. The diligent Chinese consumer seeks facts, data, and research rather than sales and advertising messages.

“Providing community information is a great way to provide this type of information in an unbiased fashion,” the President of LMA said.

Caimeiju is certainly not the first website in Chinese to sell houses or offer listings in California, but it is the first to provide the important community information buyers need to know when selecting a community. This differentiation for Caimeiju is crucial for shoppers looking for the best fit from across the Pacific.

LMA’s launch of Caimeiju accompanies a dynamic behavioral shift to mobile. According to a June report by Sina News Portal, 46% of Internet users in China are using mobile phones to access Internet data. Mobile Caimeiju.com users are able to access the community data quickly without installing Flash or other proprietary tools.

International SEO: A search for "Orange County" (characters above) leads users to Caimeiju through the site's implementation of Onboard content.

Content Services Benefits
The Onboard Content Services package LMA implemented allowed complete freedom to design and encode this data in a way that speaks to the end consumer. Aside from the inherent benefits of providing users with local information, LMA attributes these additional benefits to the addition of community data:

• Search Engine Optimization: LMA’s content covers virtually every city and town in California. By translating and building pages for each place, Caimeiju has optimized their site for Chinese seach engines like google.cn, yahoo.cn, and baidu.cn.
• Geo Segmentation: Caimeiju can now serve advertisers based on geographical searches. For instance, someone shopping around in the Bay Area will only see ads from local advertisers.

Technology: Friend, not Foe
Language Media Agency is clearly a forward-thinker in using technology to drum up new business and market opportunities. More importantly, LMA’s recognition of a real and growing need among Chinese and Chinese-American consumers is sure to assist international buyers who are unable get a flavor for California communities in person. Data and informatics, not marketing speak, is boosting Caimeiju in the no-BS marketplace. We salute them.

Tags: Caimeiju, Chinese consumers, Clients, Data Services, Language Media Agency, real estate markets, SEO.

October 2nd, 2008

Oh, the Humanity! (Thoughts on SEO)

By Robert Hahn - VP, Marketing

I’ve been preparing for a presentation at the MLS Tech Fair 2008 next week.  It is always an interesting exercise to put down on paper (or on PowerPoint, as the case might be) things that you’ve been mulling over for years.

The insight for the day comes directly out of that mulling-turned-to-slides.

If there is one cardinal sin that far too many realtor websites commit today, it is one of idolatry at the altar of Google.  I mean, I know SEO is important, but look at this:

Trojan.exe is now being downloaded... Please Wait...

This is a classic case of worshiping at the altar of Google too much by half.  The site is essentially illegible to human beings.  It might be fantastic for various search engine bots.  You can actually tell that some of the links in the circa-1997 table are search key phrases: “Magothy River Waterfront Homes” for example.

The owner of the above website might be happy as a clam because he sees his traffic coming from Google and Yahoo and whoever else.  But a website this bad does two things:

1.  The user ends up clicking the ‘Back’ button with the practiced quickness of a online kung fu master.  Site like this screams out warning signs.  Minimal design, lots of Google keywords, and the hint of something illicit going on here — as if it were some pirate MP3 site.  I have to wonder what the bounce rate is for this home page.

2.  Whatever brand you have or had is now history.  How can any online consumer take a company seriously if their website is this bad.  The broker whose website this is may in fact be the absolute expert when it comes to Maryland real estate; I’ll never know, because I will never, ever click on any links on this site for fear of catching some sort of digital cooties.  If I were to be contacted by an agent from this company, and I go to check out her website and get to the above, I would immediately look for a different agent.  Someone working for this company can’t be any better than a used car salesman, right?

Humanity.  Don’t forget humanity.

SEO is important.  All of our products are built with SEO in mind in one way or another.  But SEO is not the be-all end-all of websites or of online marketing.  At the end of the day, a website is a tool for communicating with your customers, with other professionals, and with the industry.  It’s a relationship channel, in a way.

And human beings have relationships with other human beings.

It makes no sense at all to build a site, drive tons of traffic to it, and end up having human beings who visit your site think you’re an illicit pirate download site.  By all means, execute your SEO strategy — but don’t do it at the cost of your humanity.

-rsh

Tags: bad design, SEO.

September 29th, 2008

Tips on Using Links to Increase SEO

By Colleen Staunton, Product Manager

As most of our clients know we’re not just a data provider we’re a partner.  We don’t sit back, throw a bunch of data at you and wish you luck.  We’re here, we get it, it’s what makes us ‘us’ and why our clients are some of the top in their industry. 

We actually have relationship specialists, bless them, that know what works and what doesn’t work from a user experience and information architecture standpoint. They advise our clients on strategies that can maximize RIO using Onboard products and services; from SEO to lead generation to stickiness and user loyalty.

The knowlege and advice that we provide isn’t just related to our products, it’s invaluable in web marketing.  Take SEO for example…

Definition: SEO, Search engine optimization is the process of editing and organizing the content on a webpage or across a website to increase its potential relevance to specific keywords on specific search engines and importantly ensuring that external links to the site are correctly titled and in abundance. This is done with the aim of achieving a higher organic search listing and thus increasing the volume of targeted traffic from search engines. Thanks Wikipedia!

Here are some best practices/tips from one of our talented Relationship Managers, on using links to increase SEO.

• All links on your page, whether to another page on your site or to an external site, are important from an SEO standpoint. Links that follow along with the hierarchy  will be placed with greater importance with the Search engines. In other words, a link within a paragraph will have more weight than a link anywhere else.
• How a link and its destination page are worded will also dictate how important spiders perceive the link destination page to be. For instance, if you have a link that says “Schools”, then the title of the page that it is linking to should have a similar title or URL (i.e. /schools/CALos_Angeles/University_Senior_High_School) and should contain content that is related to Schools.
• Along with the name of the link and its destination, any title or description attributes added to them are important from an SEO standpoint. Titles and descriptions can be added to links for display (in the code) of more information regarding the link. These attributes are generally for text-readers and spiders to use when interpreting the importance and the relevance of a link.
• External links (links to sites other than your own) will not directly increase your ranking. In fact, having many of them on a single page might actually hinder your ranking because search engines may consider this to be “link farming”, so be careful. What external links can do is increase the ranking of the site you are linking to, which could potentially increase your ranking over time if the other site also links back to your’s. Backwards linking to your site is therefore more desirable if the link is relevant.

Tags: data, increase_SEO, linking, onboard, SEO, web_marketing.