I don’t have any reason or evidence with which to really disagree with Jill. I’m also not sure that I do, in fact, agree with what she said, and I want to propose another thought.

Jill’s premise is that Google may be keeping their page 1 search results informational so that the commercial search results have to be bought. I.E. Jill is arguing that Google keeps their search results inaccurate in order to sell more AdWords. Again, I’m not saying this is true or false.  Here’s what I do know:

Google has little motivation to improve their results at this time. Why? Because they’re already the most popular search engine! They’ve already won your business. If Yahoo and Bing really make a comeback, then OK, there’s a reason to accelerate improvement. Some folks might even say Bing has done or is doing just that, taking Google’s market share. Perhaps  this will motivate Google to start presenting ‘better’ results. For now, Google is getting billions of searches and even more page views, and lots of clicks which are paying them billions of dollars. Why change?

It’s a well documented sociological reality that if you want to know how someone is likely to act, you need to understand their motivations and incentives. Something would have to motivate Google to make big changes to their algorithm. Obviously, they haven’t had that motivation.

Now, Jill might be right in arguing that Google’s incentive (paid clicks) is driving them to produce a poorer algorithm. I would argue that I don’t think Google is actually trying to make a bad algorithm. I don’t think they’re trying to mislead us. I think they’ve got something that’s pretty good and it’s making them billionaires. So, why fix it?

Lastly, I’d love Jill to come up with a fix. I mean a real fix. She does present a 1 line suggestion. It’s not a bad suggestion, but I think the complexity of search engines is quite deep and to make changes to an application like Google ain’t no small task. it’s just not that easy. They have a lot of money and very good developers, but it’s very costly to build a better mousetrap. Google knows this and they’re probably trying to make their capital investment – or all past dev work into their search – stretch out into the future.

One more thing. Do you remember the web before Google? Trying to find stuff was next to impossible. Google came along and they made it possible to quickly search and find what you need. Then they made AdWords and PPC took off and a market for SEO was born, and now search is a huge paid medium for both ad buy and SEO services. All of this tells me that the world wants to be able to search the web – we want it to be fast, easy, accurate, and vastly comprehensive. We want portability and personalization, and we use these tools all the time. Google will continue to provide a quality system to do all of this – and most of us will keep using Google for a long time.

For those of you who attended our last LogicClassroom – Intro to Google Adwords, we had a great real estate SEM question in regards to keywords that you utilize in your Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns:

If you are targeting users in another country for your business, do you use foreign language keywords?

For Google PPC Campaigns, one of the recommended strategies is to target users with whom you do your business – for many businesses, this may mean international targeting.

Languages with Google PPC

• Keep it Consistent – You should target the language that your ad is written in. So if your ad is written in English, your PPC campaign should target English-speaking users. Google will not translate your ad for you.
• Keep it Organized – If you want to target users that speak another language, create a separate PPC Ad Campaign for each language.
• Keep it Focused – In addition to targeting by language, you can also pair this with location targeting. Users can potentially speak different languages in many different locations, and language targeting  gives you an great way to reach your users even if they’re located in non-native areas.

Think about it this way: if you are a company based in the England and want to target the English-speaking population of Italy, you can set your PPC country targeting to Italy and your language targeting to English. When Google detects that a certain user in Italy speaks English, your PPC ad can be shown.

International Targeting

International targeting means that your PPC SEM campaign targets more than one location. Let’s say that a business might want to target several countries where customers speak the same language (such as targeting English-speaking users in the US, Canada, and Australia).

Again, setting up a separate campaign for each main location (such as each country) and selecting the relevant language for each campaign is your best option. By creating these separate geographic campaigns, it will be easier to manage your account and track each region’s ROI.

You can also create very targeted and customized campaigns by tailoring your keywords and ad text to each market. In response to our question, make sure that each keyword list and ad text for each ad group are in one language. This will show the ad in the same language in which the keyword was entered. So if a user enters a keyword in Spanish, the ad will appear in Spanish.

1. Over 70% of online consumers start their search for products, services, and information by typing in what they need on a search engine. You probably can’t afford not introducing your company and yourself to this process (AND an enormous new audience!)
2. Most internet users don’t bother clicking past the first couple search results pages (many don’t even bother reading past the first one!) so it’s clear why a good position on the first page is paramount to your success.
3. Unlike paying for a banner advertisement or a sponsored listing on a search page, you can’t buy a good position in the search engines. What you can do is invest in SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to target visitors, provide publicity, exposure and revenue.
4. While you cannot actually buy the keywords that will optimize your website, it helps to imagine that you are in fact paying for them. This will help you narrow down your list until you have the ones that will most effectively drive traffic to your site and provide the most return on investment.–  For example, “BC apartments” might have a TON of global searches that aren’t relevant to a Boston
   broker because they could be searches for apartments in British Colombia rather that Boston College.
5. When choosing a keyword, you must understand that the more popular the keyword is, the more competitive it will be to achieve a high ranking for it. Typically, very general keywords tend to be more competitive.  For instance, “Apartments” is extremely hard to rank for, but “South End Apartments” is much easier to achieve a high ranking for.  Take advantage of the free Google Keywords Tool to determine a keyword’s difficulty rating in Local and Global Search Volumes.  If you are a local company, place your focus on ranking high in your Local Search Volume and don’t worry about how you rank globally.
6. Don’t be afraid to use specific keywords. With the advent of Google Instant, online consumers are naturally becoming more intelligent searchers.  The search results morph in real time for each letter typed into the Google search box, so often consumers end up typing in very specific search terms.  Search results now will appear and change almost instantly as the keyword phrase in the search box is edited.  This will start getting rid of the need to scroll through pages of results; rather consumers will just refine their search and focus on Long Tail Keywords.
7. After you determine how competitive a keyword is, you have to figure out how much traffic it will drive to your site. Luckily, there is no need to hire a psychic to predict the success of each keyword.There are two ways to predict the traffic from a keyword:
   1. Use industry standard keyword research tools such as Overture or WordTracker. These won’t be 100% accurate, but they offer a basic estimation of traffic flow.
   2. Set up a Google Adwords (pay-per-click) campaign that ties into web analytics. While Pay-Per-Click advertising is not the same as SEO because it is paid for, you can use Adwords to see the exact keywords that were typed in the search engine by a visitor.  To start out, make sure to check the setting “broad match” so that you allow a variety of keywords to prompt your advertisement.  While you have to pay for this service (you can rank for the first paid advertisement slot within 24 hours) it will help you learn about the keywords that will benefit your website.
8. After you pick your keywords, it is important to make sure you aren’t just shoving keywords into your site without good content. Even if your site is easily found by search engine robots, you must have unique, correct, specific, and appealing content in order to entice online consumers to actually stay on your site.  Updating your content often is also important; if you regularly update your website, you are giving consumers more reason to return. One of the best ways to ensure new content is to blog.  We recommend blogging at least twice a week to keep a constant stream of content flowing.  Search engine robots will also visit your site more often as it is updated, leading to a quicker index in the future.

   

9. One of the hardest parts of SEO is acquiring incoming links. The only way you can make sure that other people link your website is to have good content. This is something that is sort of out of your hands, but by networking and blogging, you can often acquire incoming links.  It is important to create social media accounts on popular websites and add links to your website on your profiles.  Good websites to make accounts on are Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. It is also helpful to add your website to directories like Yelp, Google Places, Yp.com and industry-specific directories like Angieslist.com. You should also register your website’s blog on blog directories like Blogcatalogue.com.
10. Do not try to fool the search engines. While it may seem appealing and easy just to stuff your website full of keywords to up your traffic, it is the easiest way to get your website penalized or even banned from search engines completely. Search engines need their results to reflect accurately on content, not on link farms, alt text spamming, cloaking or keyword stuffing.

Helpful Links

http://www.roi-seo.com/seo-choose-keywords.html

http://ezinearticles.com/?How-to-Choose-the-Right-Keywords-For-SEO&id=4254547

http://www.content4reprint.com/internet/webmasters/why-use-seo-search-engine-optimization.htm

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 compliments 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We’ve written about 100 posts on real estate SEO, how content is king and how this can help your real estate marketing campaign online. I’m not going to tell you again, how important it is. You know by now.

We’re also aware that we’re presenting what can be a daunting SEO task. It’s not always easy to come up with original stuff. But we don’t want to push this challenge under the rug. Instead, we’re going to help you overcome the obstacle. In fact, it’s not an obstacle at all.

If you’re running a good online real estate marketing campaign, you’re not just looking for ranking, you’re leveraging social media, you’re using email marketing, you’re probably investing in real estate SEO and probably real estate SEM too. Now, here’s the big secret. All of these will help you generate content.

Let’s examine each:

Social Media
Effectively leveraging social media requires a few things. First of all, your profile should be up to date. This might prompt you to also update your bio on your website. Freshening up the pages of your site on a regular basis will help maintain, if not improve, your SEO placement. Also, if you tweet, then you blog and this content can go right into your blog. You can also setup your blog to syndicate to Twitter via RSS.

Email Marketing
By definition, when you broadcast an email newsletter, you’re going to have to write some content. eNewsletters are an essential component of any real estate marketing campaign. So, make sure you’re writing them. When you do, take the content and post it on your site, maybe just make it a blog post. You’ve already done the hard work.

Leverage your team
Your team should already be motivated to work on your online marketing campaign. If you all pitch in, the work gets easier. I’m talking about more than just dividing up the work of writing new content, though this is a great idea. I’m talking about leveraging your SEO Army. Everyone in your office should be updating their profile, twittering, using Facebook, and yes, sometimes generating a blog post or two.

PPC/SEM Ads
Believe it or not, the content in your PPC ads can be repurposed. The headlines and those 35 character ads are selling points. If you’re managing your own SEM, then think about expanding on what those attractive headlines actually mean to your business and especially your customer. If you wrote that content to attract users to click, you can use it in your site too. It makes for great headlines, call-outs, bullets, and more.

OK, I hope you’ve learned something. You are probably already generating the content you need to achieve great real estate SEO and boost your real estate marketing campaign. Now, all you need to do is put this all into practice.

If you have some ideas that I haven’t mentioned, pleasse leave a comment to share with our other readers. Thanks.

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