Real Estate SEO

Archive for January, 2009

At Boston Logic, we’ve always had a philosophy and it goes something like this:

“You’re in the real estate business, we’re in the marketing and technology business. You shouldn’t be expected to run your online marketing campaigning. That’s our job.”

Our clients take comfort in the fact that we know what we’re doing and they see the results, so they are happy and loyal. I bring this up because it illustrates an important reality about buying premium services. It’s unrealistic to become an expert before making every single purchasing decision. What you need to know is just enough to make an informed decision. Then, you can go back to doing what you do best, Real Estate.

The other day, I spoke on the phone with a real estate broker who had, unfortunatley, missed the important first step. He hadn’t informed himself enough and therefore had made a poor decision. When I asked him how his PPC campaign was going, he told me that he was encouraged by the number of impressions that his SEM manager had generated for him. So, I asked how many visitors this had brought him, what his click through rate was on the campaign, and what his cost per lead was. He had no answers.

When we’re managing a campaign, impressions aren’t a bellweather. Sure, they’re a part of the equation, but they are certainly no measure of success. This broker wanted to bring more visitors to his real estate website and sell more homes. He is spending money on a PPC camaign and he’s got no idea how it’s performing. All he knows is how often his ad is coming up.

If you’re looking for an SEM or SEO vendor, make sure that they are willing to educate you on the basics of how they’ll be doing their work. If they can’t explain it to you, then you should assume they’re hiding something from you because they probably are.

You need to be an educated buyer. Here’s a useful page about SEO vs PPC. Also, if you read this blog regularly, we touch on many of these topics and we’ll continue to educate you on real estate seo and ppc. If you want us to explain the basics to you, we’ll do so free of charge. Just drop us a line on the contact us page.

If I can leave you with one parting word today: Be an educated buyer. It will make you far more successful.

Have a good weekend and good luck with your SEO.

For those who missed the first course. Here are my notes from the course presentation. Hope to see you at the next class.

First of all, thanks to those of you who attended the first session of the online marketing for real estate course on Monday at the North East Association of Realtors offices. I’m looking forward to the next session which will be on February 2nd.

While I was giving the talk, I learned something astonishing and I just had to write a post about it. It seems that a large real estate conglomerate called Prudential Prime Properties here in Massachusetts made a BIG mistake. Though, I’m sure they did so unwittingly. They signed their entire 21 offices and the agents in those offices up for a website service that is, to put it mildly, holding their agents back. The company is called RLS2000 and while they’re not selling SEO snake oil, I just had to write a post and put it in this category to talk about why these sites will only hold back your real estate SEO campaign.

First of all, a basic principle of any good SEO campaign is unique content. It seems that the only page that you can edit on your RLS2000 website is the home page. One woman had shown up for the course and only wanted to know how to edit her home page in order to appear at the top of the search engines. Well, I told her that she’d need to edit many more pages on her site than just the home page. She informed me that she could not. Hmm. That’s not going to let you do any real estate seo to speak of.

Another fellow in the room had the same site – yes, it’s almost the exact same site – we looked at his. He had written a great update on his home page about IBM moving offices to his town and how this would impact the real estate market there. I immediately asked him if this was a blog post. No, he said, they don’t have blogging capabilities. What? They’re trying to help you market online and they don’t offer blogging. Run, as fast as you can people.

Here’s the kicker, many of the pages of their sites were exactly the same, and they couldn’t update them. This means that their sites are virtually guaranteed not to rank well in the search engines. I was encouraged to see that the search on the site was not in an iframe, the problem was that there are no static links to any of those pages. So, again, the real estate seo opportunities are completely lost.

So, I asked them the price. It’s apparently $350/year! Well, my surprise was replaced by disappointment. Of course you’re not going to get anything for that price. Good real estate seo is not cheap. What really disappointed me was that a company with 23 offices and hundreds of agents would set back their people so drastically and without asking someone who knew simple questions about marketing and SEO like, “is this going to help our agents?” “Are we doing the right thing to help our agents succeed by signing up with this service?” The answer, very simply is no.

With so many agents, there are great opportunities to work together and really achieve great search engine placement and generate thousands of leads. This is a lost opportunity. Now, I’m sure that this company had some decent reasons for using this vendor. I just hope they rethink their logic before the re-up for another year.

If you’re running an online marketing campaign, there are some equations that you should understand. These equations will allow you to understand the effectiveness of your website and the marketing media that you are using to drive traffic to the site.

Now, real estate SEM, that is PPC and SEO, are both online marketing media. So are banner advertisements and email marketing. You can use these equations to examine all of these and many other media. You can even judge the effectiveness of traditional marketing media. It all boils down to the same math.

First, let’s talk about your website. When a user arrives on the site, they are anonymous. If they register to become a lead (or customer in the case of an eCommerce website) we call this a conversion. The ratio of conversions to total users is the conversation rate of your website. So:

1. Conversion rate = Leads / Total Users

For example. If your site is visited by 1000 users and 50 of them register and become leads, your conversion rate would be 5%.

Next, it’s vital to understand your cost per lead. You should be able to calculate the cost per lead generated by each marketing medium in which you are investing. You can also calculate your overall cost per lead for your entire campaign. Tracking each of these number and optimizing them is the key to superior ROI

2. Cost per lead = Amount spent / Number of Leads

Conversion rate of each add is also vital. You could be trying to spend on PPC, but the ad you wrote is failing. Also, you might be sending email marketing messages that aren’t effective. To judge the effectiveness of the ad or ad copy, you’re going to want to know the click through rate or CTR:

3. CTR = Click throughs / Impressions

Now, when you’re running a PPC campaign, your impressions are free! PPM campaigns require you to pay for the impressions. You’re not guaranteed any click-through traffic from a banner or tower PPM ad. So, you better be tracking the CTR of that ad. If it’s not performing, you can change it or stop spending altogether.

When you’re managing your PPC campaign, you need to understand your cost per click. The Adwords and Yahoo Overture systems will calculate this for you. Overall, you should be able to calculate CPC for PPC or PPM advertising.

4. Cost Per Click = Ad buy / Clicks

If you’re spending on any medium, you can simply divide the amount you spent by the number of clicks or the number of visitors that it brought to your site to understand the CPC.

Combining these equations really gives us a way to measure our ROI:

5. Cost per lead = Cost per click / Conversion Rate

If that’s a little confusing to you, scroll up and have a look at equations 1 and 4. what we really want to know is, how can we get the most leads for our ad buy. So, let’s examine this marketing equation.  My goal is to minimize the cost per lead. So, to do this, I need to either raise my conversion rate or lower my cost per click. This will guide how you choose your PPM ads, your PPC bids, and even how much you want to invest into SEO.

I know this is a lot for some of you. Math isn’t everyone’s forte. If I went through this too fast for you, please drop us a comment and we’ll respond promptly.

I’ll be writing a post soon on how we improve campaign performance using these equations. Stay tuned

The New Year has just begun and it’s customary for people and businesses to set goals or make resolutions for the year ahead. If you are like me you may already have grown tired from hearing about so many superficial goals. I believe that it’s important to set SMART goals, meaning “Simple, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timely” goals. I recently read an article by Chris Brogan, President of a social media agency, who described choosing your goals in the year ahead akin to choosing your campaign keywords. The exercise is to choose “three words that will help you frame your challenges and opportunities for 2009.”

I was inspired by his approach and in turn present you with the same challenge. What three words would you choose? And, why?

I chose words that would work for myself, my profession and hopefully as an inspiration to those who read this.

Engage. Community. Change.

Engage: The word to me encompasses a lot. Through our work, and especially this blog we engage our audience. It is up to each of us, part of the larger online community, to engage our peers. To engage them with quality and newsworthy information. Through this process of sharing and engaging we are community building and social networking. It’s important to find a means by which you can engage others, a process that is a good fit for you, and your business.

Community: As you manage your website, as we do ours and those of our clients, the aim should be to make your site an online community for your target audience. You should always keep your business plan or your overall goals in mind. Think of what is important to you. As you become involved in the community – your niche, you will be able to communicate your plan and goals, and through that offer how you will respond to changes ahead.

Change: This word seemed almost too obvious for me. But if you think about it, change is not always embraced, nor is it necessarily easy. With the year ahead one can’t help but wonder what will be in store for us. We already know it’s a great year for Political changes; the incoming President’s site is even called change.gov.

I believe, this may be a bit cliché, but the change you want to see in the world starts with you. I also believe that what will give you an advantage in the year ahead is the ability to be able to anticipate certain changes, and how in response you handle those changes. As a professional in any field you need to look (be proactive), listen (be aware) and learn quickly (be able to adapt) in order to respond to and cope with changes. I suggest you evaluate yourself and your business. Assess where you are, where you’ve been and where you want to be. From that point you can make changes where and when appropriate. While you don’t have to have a magic 8 ball to know what’s to come, you have to be in tune with your surroundings, your community, and those whom you engage.

I believe that all three of our goals will be important in 2009. For our line of business I further anticipate the following changes and opportunities:

• Blogging will be an essential component for each business.
• Social Media will be embraced, and not just thought of as something for tweens.
• Social Media will become more regulated.
• SEO is not dead. More importance (as it should be) will be placed on traffic, and lead generation.
• Customer service will make a comeback, and become a more valued and measurable asset.
• Influence and popularity (like we’re back in high school) will be as important as relevance.
• Mobile applications will be a hot commodity, as long as user experience is good.
• Will this be the year that Video (online videos) will make it? Maybe.

I hope you found this helpful. We would love to know what your goals are for the year ahead.