Words: Ashley Rigg
Published: 30th January 2008
How Brian beat the property portals
Brian is not the Messiah…he’s just good at PR. In fact, traditional PR and print advertising is where Italian estate agent Brian A French & Associates spend virtually all of their marketing budget. So why did
www.Brianfrench.com rank number three on Google (UK) for “Property in Italy” in the autumn of last year and why do they still rank above Primelocation for this term?
Brian French could hardly be described as an online specialist. They don’t spend money on paid search or SEO and the only portal they use is Primelocation.com. Publisher Martin Talbot believes that “you only get a reaction when you advertise in hard copy” and plans to scale back their already spartan online marketing budget.
The reason for their success lies not in any technical know-how, but in the strengths of their relationships with people that provide links. Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz calls them the
Linkerati.
Steve Emmett, Managing Director of Brian A French & Associates (Brian French himself has now retired) has good relationships with the most powerful Linkerati of all: newspaper journalists. According to Martin, Brian French work hard at these relationships and are always available with images and background information when a journalist is covering a story on Italy.
As part of some considerable print coverage last year, the Guardian linked to them in story on
Affordable Overseas Property in September, as did The Times Online in an article about
Sardinia in June.
For long periods of last year, these extremely powerful links helped Brian French rank above some of the biggest names in the industry due to an algorithm called
TrustRank. In simple terms, this algorithm helps editorially rich, human-edited sites and websites with links from these sites, rank well in search engines’ results pages.
As time goes by, newspaper stories get buried deeper and deeper inside the archive and so become less powerful, which is why Brian French has slipped back down the rankings. They ranked at number 35 from 3,870,000 results for “Property in Italy” when I checked this week, which is still not a bad result considering the competition. The effects wear off over time but so do those of most marketing activities.
Done well, PR has always been a sure-fire way to generate enquiries. In an age where 9 out of 10 UK homebuyers prefer using the internet to find property, PR has the added and sometimes unexpected benefit of helping your website rank on search engines. If you use an external agency to do your PR for you, be sure to ask them specifically about their online PR skills.
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