Real Estate SEO

Archive for the ‘PPC’ Category

If you aren’t involved with Google Adwords already as an aspect of your real estate marketing campaign (agent or office), then read up on why you should.

Local Businesses thrive on online advertising.
89% of people in the US search online for services and products online before they make a purchasing decision. This is true - perhaps even more so - even when the potential service is available at a business in their area. And with such a geography-centered field as real estate, PPC is perfect. You can also use Google Adwords to  set your ads to show only to people in your area: so you can target your specific demographic in the city, state, or zip code that you specialize in!

Excellent SEO coupled with PPC ads can increase the ranking of your website.
You’ve diligently taken all of our LogicClassroom advice, read all about real estate seo best practices, and your website is now perfectly optimized after all of your hard work. So, your real estate business may already appear in the organic search results on the left side of the page. But run a quick test: Does your website appear on the first page of search results? 2nd? 10th? Does it come up for all possible search terms that your customers may be using when they are looking for what you have to offer? If  “yes”, that’s great, HOWEVER, studies have proven that search advertising can still increase traffic to your site. In fact, appearing in both organic and paid positions of the page at the same time increases the perceived relevance of your website and as a result even increases the number of free clicks you get to your website.

Paid Search compliment your SEO Campaign
SEO Campaigns take a great deal of diligence to see through, and takes time to see results. However, in addition to your real estate SEO campaign,  paid search has a few advantages: It is easier and quicker to setup, offers much more control over when and where your ads appear, and its impact is easier to measure through comprehensive analytics and reporting. It is recommended that website owners practice both effective SEO and advertising.

Online advertising can be customized to fit any budget

Consider PPC Advertising as an investment, not a cost. You only pay per each click that a user interested in your product clicks to learn more, so there is a direct return on however much or little you spend. And how much you are willing to spend is completely up to you. There’s no minimum spend requirement and you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. You can even set a maximum that you are willing to bid per click and you can start and stop your advertising at any time.

You don’t need to be an expert to set up your own campaign.

While it’s helpful to solicit the service of experts (ahem, Boston Logic!)  to manage your real estate sem,  getting started is easy. You don’t need to have the perfect keywords or ads immediately: you simply get started, see what works and what doesn’t, and make alterations. You can constantly fine tune and tweak your campaigns as they run, without having to check in on them everyday.

The automated feature allows you to let them run without checking in every day.

Real estate agents and brokers are busy. We get that. But once you have got your online ads up and running, the automated PPC feature doesn’t require that you check in with them everyday. Still don’t have time to get started? We can help you! Contact Boston Logic today about setting up your business’ online advertising campaign.

Outdoor can work. Here’s a great example:

When you want to reach a mass audience with a geographically targeted message, Consider outdoor media.

Now, you may be puzzled why we’re writing about outdoor on an SEO and online marketing blog? Well, first, here are some reasons we love outdoor:

Have a look at the billboard in the photo above. That’s quite a message. It’s in a place where this woman knew her husband would see it. Well, so did another 250,000 people. Let’s call the woman the advertiser and the man her market. Well, she had a very targeted market and she get her message right to them. Imaging your perfect customer. Is there somewhere they go all the time (other than Google). Can you catch them when they’re looking for what you’re selling?

Next, outdoor is highly geographically targeted. Now, with Google adwords, you can pick, in a pretty precise way, the areas where your ads will show up. If you’re doing SEO, and you want to get local, you’re going to need to pick localized terms. The nice thing about this strategy is that the more specific you get, the better your customer will be. Also, these hyper specific terms are easier to rank for and cheaper (if you’re using PPC). They just get fewer searches then some of those marquis terms.

So, here’s why I don’t like Outdoor:

It’s hard to change your message. If you spend $10,000 putting up a billboard, you’re stuck with it. The cost to put up a different billboard is quite prohibitive and it’s going to throw your ROI calculations into the red. By contrast, PPC campaigns can have different language running in about 5 minutes.

Just the other day, i saw a billboard that said BUY MORE CARPET is huge letters. Then, there was some language, in much smaller font, telling you who put up the ad. The problem is, I can’t for the life of me remember whose ad it is. Also, they don’t want you to just buy more carpet. They want you to buy more from them. So, if the ad had said:

BUY MORE CARPET
(from us)

This would have been more effective.

I guess the folks who put up this ad were going for laughs, but all they had to do was work their name into the joke and then they’d get a lot more bang for their buck. Dunking Doughnuts has a good slogan “America Runs On Dunkin.” If they’d made the slogan, “America Runs On Doughnuts” it wouldn’t have been nearly as effective.

I just feel really bad for that carpet company. By the time they figure out that their message isn’t helping their brand, it’ll probably be too expensive to change. Luckily, the woman who bought the billboard in the photo above doesn’t need to change her ad, even if the message never reaches her audience. I don’t think she really cares.

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.