Real estate gurus have been harping “The Secrets Of My Success” snake oil for centuries. Late night television, drive time radio, and now - Internet marketing; it kind of makes you want to bend over your File 13 and fill it with hot lava.
I recently stumbled upon another real estate sales pro who wants to share his secrets with other real estate professionals. “Do what I do and you’ll be as successful as I am,” is the clarion call of these Get Rich Real Estate Icons. If only it were that easy.
The Biggest SEO Snake Oil Salesman In The Real Estate Industry
I’m not here to slander anyone’s name or to make someone look bad. I’m here to help people get better results from their search marketing efforts. That’s why when I see something that is an obvious losing proposition then I want to blast it clear to kingdom come. It’s not personal. But hail mary’s work in football because you have professional catchers going long for professional throwers. Such techniques rarely work in business.
The man’s name is Craig Proctor. He’s got a nice looking website. Sleek sales message. Probably closes a lot of sales.
He uses all the time-tested strategies: Special Report free download, lots of promises about benefits, the obligatory 60-day “No Risk Pay Nothing Test Drive.” He even appears on the screen and talks to you - a great sales tool, I must say. But that’s where the substance ends and the fluff begins.
Why SEO Snake Oil Doesn’t Rank Well
Here’s the issue: After you get past all the glitter, all the pizzazz, all the promises of heavenly bliss “if you’ll just be my girl,” after the courtship and the sweetest honeymoon ever, if you buy Craig Proctor’s real estate website package, your website isn’t going to do well in the search engines at all. What I mean is, it isn’t going to rank for the keywords you want it to rank for. The reason is so simple and elementary it makes me wonder why anyone would try to sell this kind of package in the first place, and even worse, why would anyone even buy it.
It’s called duplicate content. Plain and simple. Craig Proctor sells real estate agents a package that contains website content he licenses to them for use on their websites. He owns the content so they can’t modify it, but he allows them to use it - for a fee, of course. And the fee is a hefty $150 per month - OK, I lied, it’s actually $149.95 - but that’s after you pay the “Ultra-Low setup fee of $199.” And for all that, Craig Proctor guarantees that you’ll make $60,000 extra income. He even offers you a full refund after 12 months if you don’t make that extra $60,000 and “you have made an honest effort to use and market your SuccessWebsite as we suggest.” I don’t see how he can make that guarantee since the websites won’t rank very well in the search engines. Where is this new business going to come from? Mr. Proctor doesn’t say.
Still, his package is guaranteed to make the real estate an additional $60,000 per year using the exact sales copy that he uses on his website. That is truly amazing, if it worked.
The SEO Proof Is In The Real Estate Website Pudding
At right, you’ll see a screenshot of Craig Proctor’s very own real estate website. Further down this page you’ll see screenshots of some of his customers’ websites as well. Notice that they use the exact same template. There is very little variation in them at all, as you will see. But that’s the least of the problems. As far as SEO is concerned, your website template looking like a couple of thousand other websites online doesn’t really matter. What does matter is the code that is used to build the template. You want to make sure that the template itself is crawlable by the search engines and provides your website with the necessary SEO benefits so that it can be found by people interested in purchasing real estate from you.
The curious thing you’ll find about Craig Proctor’s real estate website, and the websites of his clients, is that they are chock full of Javascript. Click View Source on any of the websites using his system and scroll down. What you’ll see is script after script after script long before you get to the meat of the website - the actual on-page content. That’s bad. It’s very bad. And the price you pay for that kind of code-to-content ratio is very high. You’ll likely not rank well in the search engines for your keywords, if you rank at all.
Finally, there’s the content itself. We at SEO Service Provider frown on PLR articles because they have this pesky problem of not really helping you when you buy them. In order to get any SEO benefit from them at all you have to totally rewrite the articles. If you’re going to do that, you might as well just write articles from scratch. It doesn’t take any longer and you are assured of getting original content for your website.
Well, the content on Craig Proctor’s sites is the equivalent of PLR articles. It’s nothing but duplicate content. The screenshot below shows one page of content from Craig Proctor’s real estate package and it seems to appear on all of his clients’ websites, which won’t benefit any of them in the search engines.
Who Is Craig Proctor And Why Is He Selling Websites Without SEO Benefits?
I don’t know Craig Proctor. He’s probably a good person who wants to help real estate agents succeed. He’s probably a good father and a good husband. He may even be a good real estate agent himself. But he’s not an SEO expert. That much is clear.
The problems with Craig Proctor’s real estate websites are unsellable. I would not encourage anyone to buy one of these websites. In fact, I would tell any real estate agent who is seriously considering purchasing this package by Craig Proctor to spend the money on a unique web design by someone who understand SEO and to purchase original content for that website by a company that knows how to produce original content that is search engine optimized. Craig Proctor’s content is not search engine optimized. It is duplicate and he owns all the copyrights.
If Craig Proctor really wants to benefit his real estate agent clients, he will offer them more than one choice in templates, design a template that is SEOd properly, and quit selling them the same content he features on his own websites. Once again, it’s not that he is a bad man doing bad things. He probably doesn’t know that his websites have these problems. His website may have worked wonders from him in 2001, but it’s not 2001 any more and the search engines don’t crawl websites that look just like someone else’s.
SEO Lesson to be Learned: Be unique, be different, be yourself. And don’t buy into anyone else’s hype.
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Do these website design packages really work? My guess is they don’t work at all.
SEO Service Provider wrote an excellent post on real estate website design packages yesterday. Specifically, the post was about Craig Proctor, a leading real estate…
That was a great article! For months now I’ve considered jumping on the bandwagon of Craig Proctor websites, “I’ve Now Seen The Light”.
It’s Not going to happen! Thank You for the insight concerning the SEO potential of the “SuccessWebsites”. I’ve often wondered what there potential was, and have often tried to search for client sites of the system. But they are a “No Show!”. Better yet, I contacted the Craig Proctor sales team, and they won’t give out url’s for sample sites of happy and satisfied client’s, nor will they give out unsatisfied client contact info. That says a lot to me!
Yup, Martin. Not just proctor specifically, but all of these systems that use duplicate content are not going to help people be successful with their website.
Better to get a domain name, buy hosting, build a website, and promote it all yourself or hire an SEO Professional to help you with it.
More about this craig proctor and successwebsites at http://www.realestatewebmasters.com/showthread.php?t=1813&page=1
This is from another forum;
Re: Proctor’s Success Website Solutions- Are They BENEFICIAL or A PROBLEM for Realtors?
——————————————————————————–
Well, if you’re already convinced that the Proctor “Success” cookie-cutter web sites are the best avenue to represent your business to a global audience, the criticism I have for them probably won’t matter much anyway. Personally, I think their one-size-fits-all template layout looks more like a cheap tabloid than a web site design. But even if you don’t mind the fact that a thousand other web sites already look exactly like the one they would crank out for you, there are a whole raft of problems with these types of real estate sites.
First, they were never built for SE optimization. They all feature the same bloated code inside the same little capsules and were never intended to accomodate any kind of personalization or flexibility to promote them. If you want to find out how successful “Success” sites really are, sit down and do some searches for a variety of important keywords you wish to target in real estate and see where they come up in the major engines. They don’t, regardless of their own hype.
If you are new to the Web and your marketing budget is low to the extreme, you’d do better just to have someone (qualified) create an extremely attractive, glorified business card with all your contact information on a single-page. At least you’d have a starting-point Web presence - that you’d own outright - for next to nothing instead of an expensive, throw-away clone controlled by a self-serving mob of digital racketeers. You don’t need all the info-drivel they plaster all over their sites. It’s freely available in better format elsewhere and does nothing to enhance your site content.
Don’t start registering domains and lining out Primary NameServers for the same until you are positive about what you really need and want a site to do for you. I’ve seen so many real estate agents fail taking the road you’re on that I can’t do much but encourage you not to go down it. It’s a waste of your time and money. Perhaps if you are uncertain about the Web and cannot afford even a modest, well designed site right now you should just wait until you can investigate other options and build up the cash to pay for it in the cookie jar a little more.
Just my $.02.
The rest of the comments are here http://www.realestatewebmasters.com/showthread.php?t=8181
Very informative…You make a good point ..most of the real-estate are not
very thought out…
Best Regards
Vincent
President - Friend Inviter™
Increase Traffic to your blog
I am am a Realtor, and I am going to subscibe to Craig Proctor’s training AND his SEO incompatable website! That is because I get it - his website is not designed for SEO, it is designed to be used in conjunction with other types of advertising which drives potential customers to parts or all of the site! I understand that if you want a SEO optimized webpage that you will need another page along with the main one. I think that the criticism here is not considering the big picture, but that is understandable, the author is in the SEO biz! When I was exposed to Craig’s Quantum Leap system, it was never represented that his web pages were SEO searchable, so I feel that his integrity is not impugned here!
Gregg, I understand your thought process, but you could not be farther from reality here.
By using a system that is NOT designed for seo, you limit yourself to ONLY using other avenues to build up traffic.
If you build a website that is optimized for the search engines you get the seo benefits PLUS you can still advertise your website in other ways.
I guess you are one of those guys who likes to tell people, “I can beat you with one hand tied behind my back.”
lol
Looks like Chris beat me to it, but I was going to say the same thing.
I understand your thinking, Gregg. You can absolutely be successful online without search engine optimization if you are good at branding yourself and doing other types of marketing - PPC, networking, off line advertising, etc. But when you see the search engines as another avenue of marketing, and a free one to boot, then it makes sense to incorporate it into your overall strategy - especially if you are building websites and marketing yourself online. But tell me this …
Why is it that when I type in keywords that are found on Craig Proctor’s websites that I can find him but none of his clients? It looks like your “big picture” assists Mr. Proctor more than it does his clients in the very area that you say isn’t necessary. If it isn’t so necessary, why doesn’t Mr. Proctor exclude Google from crawling his sites? Maybe it’s because he doesn’t consider it so unnecessary?
Seems you are trying to sell search engine optimization. Good luck keeping your site ranked near the top everytime google changes their criteria, keep paying through the nose to keep the SEO Guru’s working on your optimization on a monthly basis. Here is the truth. Proctor’s sites work with the intended ads that he teaches. They are not very optimized for search engines. Why would you want the low quality leads you get fropm people just surfing the web. I am not saying you will not get leads with SEO, you will, I have tried both, I find The ads drive better qualified buyers and sellers to my site, as opposed to the poorer quality leads I waas getting with SEO. Good luck in your choices but the author hear did not tell the whole story on why the sites not being SEO friendly makes no difference.
Jim
Bill, I have more work than I can get to. The post was written to warn people.
If you were unable to convert organic traffic, i’m sorry. But 80% of the people who search click on organic listings, not ads.
You and the others using ANY system that focuses only on ads are all competing for that same 20% of your target audience.
In addition to that, you all have the same exact landing page with the same content.
If you truly believe that is a good way to go I wish you all the luck in the world. Luck is exactly what you are basing your business plan on.
I’m not putting you down here. There are a lot of people with similar “systems” for various projects and get rich quick schemes.
The truth of the matter is great original content and SEO will make you more money than any system that requires you to drive all of your traffic through ads. It’s a fact. Like it, don’t like it, bury your head in the sand, it’s still true.
Well, Jim, or Bill, or whatever your real name is. Yes, we sell SEO services. That’s why our domain name is SEO Service Provider. Unique concept, no?
Comments like yours amuse me because they’re based on nothing. You were probably paid $10 by Craig Proctor, who has yet to appear here to defend himself, to come here and make a comment. It’s an age-old strategy that is still used by crooks, liars, and cheats who can’t rationally defend their practices.
You claim that you have ads that drive targeted traffic to your site. Good for you. But where is your site? You didn’t include the URL in your comment. It seems to me that if you had a website that was making you money then you’d be proud of it.
No one who has shown up here to defend Craig Proctor’s system has linked to their own site even as they praise Craig Proctor’s system and tout it as successful. If it’s so successful then why aren’t you linking to your own success story?
There is nothing personal here. I have no axe to grind with Craig Proctor or anyone else. He may be an honest person and good real estate agent, but he’s not doing himself or his clients any favors with his system. I’d make the same comment about anyone else. Even if I wasn’t selling SEO services.
I thought I’d chime in on a few things since there’s some heated debate here.
First thing the original post is write about these sites and them not performing too hot when it comes to SEO.
Other comments are right in saying that the sites work with proper marketing, etc.
You want a variety of ways to drive traffic to your site. You don’t build a table with one leg and certainly shouldn’t do that with your marketing campaign.
Craig Proctor wouldn’t post here because he’s a multi multi millionaire and has better things to do. He’s more successful than the person who runs this blog realizes.
There’s a lot of people using these sites with great success. Although it’s because of the marketing more than it is the site itself.
gregluther.com
brianmoses.com
dannygriffin.com
duffteam.com
tphss.com
all successful people with the same sites.