Real Estate SEO

Archive for the ‘PPC’ Category

Thank you to everyone who came to our latest LogicClassroom session on Search Engine Marketing 101!  We explored the basics of SEM, including search engine optimization and pay-per-click advertising.  We learned how these tactics help you bring traffic to your site from the major search engines.

Don’t worry if you missed this LogicClassroom session, you can view the slides below at your convenience. Enjoy!

Our next LogicClassroom will be on 3/9/10. Learn how agents and brokers can create effective and engaging email marketing. Please email Katrina if you would like to attend.

I almost can’t believe that I wrote that headline?

Yesterday, I spoke with a guy who told me he wanted to run a direct mail campaign to drive traffic to his website and capture leads to “farm” (his word) into clients.

Now, first let me say that farming a cache of leads is a great strategy. You can source your leads lots of ways. We recommend a strong online marketing campaign including strong real etstate seo efforts, ppc, email marketing, and a highly accountable reporting system.

So, this guy isn’t completely off the mark. Yes, your database of leads and customers is gold. You need to nourish this list and grow it. The more qualified users you can drive to your site, the more leads you will generate. If your site is well built to convert real estate buyers, sellers, and renters into leads, then the more traffic you have the more leads you should have.

As we’ve mentioned many times on this blog, you need to consider the cost of each lead. What did you pay to acquire the lead? If you paid $4000 for 8000 clicks (that’s $0.50 per click or site visitor) on Google Adwords and that generated 400 leads, then you paid $10 per lead. Got it?

Well, let’s think about this direct mail campaign that the guy on the phone wanted to deploy. He’s going to spend money sending those mail pieces upfront. Let’s say he sends our 10,000 pieces at $0.40 each. That’s $4000.

Now, he told me that these mailings were going to direct the users to his website. So, how many of the recipients will actually go to a website on a postcard? Here’s where the plan falls off the tracks.

It’s not likely that many of the recipients will actually go to the website. I don’t know about you, but I toss those mailers in the trash. I pick up my mail on the way into my building and the next thing I do is filter out the junk mail straight into the garbage.

So, if our friendly realtor is lucky, he’ll get maybe 5 or 10% of the recipients visiting his site. If the site was fantastic and converted leads at 10% (which is pretty high) he’d have 10000 x 0.1 x 0.1 = 100 leads. That’s $40/lead. Honestly, the cost would likely be even higher.

Bottom line - For real estate marketing campaigns, SEM, SEO and PPC are far better investments than direct mail. And please don’t be fooled and think that you can generate web traffic efficiently using traditional marketing like direct mail.

Hopefully, we just saved you some time and money.

A client sent this question to us. We’re not going any SEO for them right now, just PPC Management. This is a typical question that we get from new and potential SEO clients. It’s our constant goal to educate you. So, let’s learn from each other, eh?

We Googled some pretty narrow search terms, like “their term here” and some of our authors’ names, and our site doesn’t come up in the first three or four PAGES of organic Google results. We were pretty surprised by this, so thought we’d check with you whether this is typical when you stop spending money on PPC? I would think we have enough SEO words and content on the site that we would pop up in organic search results.

OK, let’s break this down, shall we.

First of all, if you didn’t know it, your PPC spend does not affect your organic placement. SEO and PPC are not directly related. You can’t buy your way to the top of the organic results by buying sponsored ads. I just wrote the same statement 3 ways. I hope I drove the point home!

Sometimes SEO feels like you're lost in the woods. Here are some answers.

This doesn’t mean that you should spam your content with keywords. Don’t do that! Instead, write good content and people will read it, link back to it, and your seo campaign will flourish. This brings me to the next part of my answer to this client:

The search engines look at your site and other sites out there and they see how sites link to each other. They look at the text in those links and the pages those links are sitting on and judge the quality of the link. So, if other sites about real estate have links to your site that say “real estate” then you’re more likely to rank for the term “real estate.” The inbound links you have may or may not help you rank for a particular term.

There’s more I could write on this for sure. URL age, how new your content is, even the code of the site, all play a role. SEO answers are often complicated. I hope this sheds some light.

The client is mulling all of this over. I highly expect more question soon. If you have questions about real estate seo, just drop us a note. Thanks.

How the big guys plan to exploit the little guys and how Real Estate SEO and Real Estate SEM level the playing field.

It’s no secret that the National Association of Realtors is on the side of the big guys. I’m talking about the ERAs, C21s, Prudentials, and Exits of the real estate world. From one point of view, that’s OK. These big firms employ hundreds of thousands of Realtors.  That’s a lot of jobs. I’m sure that a lot of our readers work for some of these larger companies and that’s all well and good.

Now, I’m going to draw out exactly how the system that the big guys, supported by the NAR, have put in place, can actually work to the little guy’s advantage, through the use of the internet, SEM, and SEO. It goes like this…

The revenue model at the heart of most the big residential real estate companies is pretty simple.

1. They want as many real estate transactions as possible to happen under their brand
2. They want to keep as much of the transaction’s value as they possibly can.

Seems pretty obvious. If a trillion dollars in real estate transactions happen in the US in a year, then Coldwell, for example, wants as much market share of that trillion to be under their name. AND they want to keep, that is the corporation wants to keep, as much of that as they can.

Most of the big guys are on a traditional split. The agent negotiates a commission with the seller and the company keeps a percentage of the commission. There are 2 ways for the company to make more money:

1. The agent negotiates a bigger commission from the seller. This is all well and good, but most markets are seeing consistent commissions paid by sellers. It’s likely 5 or 6 percent in your market and just about everyone is working for the same percentage - regardless of how long they’ve been a Realtor. So, the corporation has little control over this.
2. The corporation takes a bigger percentage of the agent’s commission.

Now, most of these companies start you at a low split. If you’re new to the industry, they may take 60% of your commissions for the house. If you’re doing a lot of sales, that will graduate to 50/50 and on down until you’re keeping 80% or more of your commissions.

Of course, the big companies want to keep as much of the commission as possible, they don’t like 80/20 splits or event 60/40 splits. Their goal is to have as many entry level agents doing deals as possible. The result is that they’ll keep 50 or 60 percent of the commission. In order to make this possible, they need lots of new realtors in the market pretty much all the time.

So, the big companies, in cooperation with the NAR and local real estate boards around the country have kept the barrier to entry into the real estate profession exceptionally low. Lower than almost any profession where someone has as much earning potential as they do in real estate.

This means that just about anyone can come into the industry whenever they want. So long as this is true, there will always be too many real estate agents for very many of them to make a great living. Sure, some of them will make lots of money, but most will not. Most will take on a second job or do real estate on the side or even average less than 1 deal per year. Just take a look at NRT’s stats for deals/agent and you’ll be shocked. (they’re the largest residential brokerage in the country)

Now, here’s how this all plays into the hands of the average realtor. The internet is one giant level playing field. The big guys can try to buy a million clicks or SEO around every term on the planet, but it’s untenable. They’re years behind the local guys and longevity matters in the SEM game.

You can start a real estate website today and so long as it’s built on a good platform and you hire a good SEM/SEO team, you can achieve ranking in just a few months. In some ways, this means that the internet is in the little guy’s favor. The independent real estate company can be ranked right next to the big guys. In lots of markets, the big companies aren’t ranking at all.

As real estate marketing and client acquisition continually goes more online, the big guys will be more and more left out of the picture. With time, it’ll be easier and easier for the independents to challenge the big guys and take market share. We’re already seeing this in lots of markets. Do a Google search with your town or city’s name followed by the words real estate. This will give you some insight into who’s already investing into real estate SEM and real estate SEO.

Agree? Disagree? Thoughts? We’d love to hear from you. Thanks!

Image source: www.nuwireinvestor.com

Do you remember the world 20 years ago? No computers on desks at work. No email. No Internet. Forget about Google (started just 12 years ago) and social media was a gathering of newspaper reporters.  :O)

Please name for me 1 thing that you do in the same way that you did back in 1980. Just one thing that’s done in the same way. Something that hasn’t been affected by technology, made faster, or eliminated altogether? Is there anything at all that’s the same?

Do you communicate the same way you did back in 1989? The same phone? The same typewriter? Has your job been changed by technology? Of course it has. If it has not, you’re probably a painter. Even if you’re a painter, I’m sure the way you sell your painting has probably changed. Unless you’re that guy on the street corner selling your art, and I suspect, if you’re reading this post, that’s not you.

What about your marketing campaign, are you marketing the same way you were in 1989? If you said yes, then you need to wake up!

Best practices in real estate marketing have changed a lot. The unfortunate fact is that lots of real estate agents are marketing themselves and their services in the same way they always have. If the only significant affect of technology to your marketing has been the way you generate listing sheets, it’s time to get with it.

The really shocking thing is that there are lots of BIG real estate firms that still haven’t embraced the internet. They’re not leveraging SEO or PPC or social media. If they are, it’s a small percentage of their marketing budget.

Developers are some of the biggest culprits out there, or I should say, it’s the marketing firms that work with developers. These guys are spending a lot of money - I’m talking about hundred of thousands or often millions of dollars - on the same media and sales methods that they used in 1989. I invite you to look at the marketing budget for a development in your area. If you live in NYC or maybe LA, then this might not be as true, but just look at where they’re spending their money. What do you see?

Very often you’ll find large print media budgets in marquis local newspapers, the same papers who are dying because of drastically reduced circulation. You’ll find huge budgets on branding firms to design expensive brochures and folders filled with highly designed collateral. There will be special attention paid to press releases (ok, that’s a little better) and flowers for the model unit. Even with all of this spending, the real estate marketing firm that reps the place is probably still taking a full split.

If you find a website on that budget, you probably won’t find much online marketing to support it. An email marketing plan? A SEO retainer with a good SEO firm? A PPC ad buy? A CRM system? Is any of this on there and does that budget rival the print budget? I doubt it. Have they invested in a good CRM system for the sales center or model unit staff? Is technology going to help them sell the units in inventory any faster? If not then you know as well as I do that an opportunity is being missed.

OK, for you analysts out there, I know what your comment is going to be before I even ask. You want to know why a budget should be allocated. Or, maybe the question is not why there needs to be an online marketing budget, but is it actually a better investment? The answer is unequivocally yes. We’ve done the math for many projects and over many years. SEO, PPC, email marketing, social media, the online marketing 4 some, you might say, are by far more cost effective marketing investments for real estate marketing.

If, by chance, that budget you’re examining does have some online marketing on there and leads are, by chance, being associated with media buys or sources, do the math. Calculate the cost/lead and you’ll find that the online leads generated are costing half if not less than half of the leads from traditional media.

So, please ask yourself again. Am I using the same real estate marketing methods that I was 20 years ago? If you are, it’s time to innovate.