Real Estate SEO

Archive for the ‘PPC’ Category

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.

This post about the origins of Real Estate SEO is part of a series. I highly recommend you read this post first about the origins of direct marketing and SEO.

To summarize part 1:
First there was print, then there was the telephone and then radio and TV. Then, maybe 50 years later, along came the internet and search engines like Google and Yahoo. The search engine companies invented PPC platforms like Adwords and Overture. Placing a dollar value on search engine referral traffic (PPC) created a market for SEO services.

Now, let’s talk about real estate.

When the internet went public in ‘93, not everyone jumped on the band wagon. Lots of industries were slow to adopt, but within a few years, the dot-bomb bubble was raging. Around the same time, the real estate bubble was forming. Real estate agents were doing a lot of transactions. They hadn’t really adopted technology yet, but they were making lots of money. As the old saying goes, if it aint broke, don’t fix it.

Well, we all know that didn’t last. The Real Estate bubble did burst about 3 years ago. You couldn’t just put a property into MLS anymore and expect 3 offers at the first open house. So, realtors suddenly had to start to innovate.

Now, there were some early adopters in the real estate market. In fact, you can bet that in just about every major market there’s some broker or agent who bought [cityname].com in 1993. But since the market wasn’t spending on real estate technology, there wasn’t a whole lot of innovation.

Meanwhile, as real estate agents were making a lot of money and not using technology all that much, buyers were already turning to the internet. Really, there wasn’t a lot to find yet. Pretty soon over 90% of buyers were starting their search on the web. And we all know where we go to search, yup, Google, Yahoo, and the other search engines. If buyers are starting there, then I better be there to, reasoned the real estate brokers and they were/are right.

Well, while we were sleeping and making money without technology things really changed. So, about 4 years ago, Realtors discovered PPC in droves. I can tell you this because the calls started coming in and we were doing a lot of PPC work. Then, about 2 years ago, the Real Estate SEO market got hot. Real Estate SEO is still the rage, but Social Media is making a big push for the community’s attention.

Technology is being adopted by realtors at light speed (well, at least for this industry it is). The economy is pushing that shift. Why? Because the go-go bubble days are over and the real estate brokers and agents are realizing that they need to spend wisely and efficiently. They know that the best real estate marketing medium is the web and real estate seo is crucial. Of course, social media is cost effective and goes hand-in-hand with SEO. That’s why they’re both popular at the same time.

So, what’s next? Well, stay tuned.

Thanks for reading. If you have questions, just jot a comment and we’ll reply shortly.

We had a new associate start in our marketing department this week. Welcome Aurora. Expect to see her writing about Real Estate SEO on this blog often. Just as soon as we give her the keys.

So, I had the opportunity to teach a few real estate seo lessons. Where to start? Well, we start with direct marketing 101 (circa 1920) and we look at the history of marketing. Then we look at the development of the internet and how SEO, SEM, and social media became what they are today. Of course, we only spend maybe 30 minutes on the first 80 years, but they’re worth noting anyway.

So, 1920. There’s a real estate market, no internet, no Google, and no SEO…yet.

A wise man once referred to marketing as salesmanship in print. Now, this was said about a century ago. Today, we say that marketing is salesmanship through another medium. Back in the day, all we had was print. We had the newspaper and we had the mail (oh, and billboards too, but they don’t get distributed). The newspaper was the major mass medium and direct mail was just about the only direct marketing medium. Still, but no internet and no seo. The real estate market remained the same.

Soon, phones came around, but it took about 20 years for even 10% of homes in America to have phones in them. Still a direct marketing medium was born and phone calls allowed information to travel quite far, cheaply. Then came radio and then TV (told you we’d go quick). Two more mass media. Along with radio came the jingle and branding took a staring role. Still, no SEO.

The masses could hear or watch your ad now and the idea was to generate brand recognition. The selling points often went by the wayside. Also, mass media campaigns generally achieve VERY small conversion rates. When you reach 100 million viewers with a superbowl ad, you don’t need to convert even 0.01% to get a lot of new customers. Radio and TV grew. Budgets grew huge.

That’s the way it was from about 1950 til 1993. Then came the internet and soon the search engine. A few years later, Google and Yahoo! figured out how to make money in the search space. They figured out that they would sell the ad space next to the search results with paid results. Overture and AdWords were born, in that order. Now Google had a profit model (they hadn’t figured it out before then). So, PPC was born.

Here’s the key lesson in this part 1: PPC caused the SEO market.

Here’s how:
When Google created a bidding platform for PPC known as AdWords, marketers like Boston Logic started bidding on terms. The prices went up as companies realized that search engine marketing was a fantastic form of direct marketing. Soon, buying clicks got expensive. So, SEMs started to look back at the left 2/3 of the screen. They realized that the organic listings were FREE and asked a simple question: How do I get my site to come up over there? How can I stop paying for all these expensive clicks?

Thus, the market for SEO services was born. The value of SEO is completely derived from the value of paid clicks. If you can buy the clicks for less than the cost of your SEO expert, then you’re likely to fire them and just get a good PPC manager (they’ll cost you less).

The fact is that SEO is a better investment the vast majority of the time. So, business owners, realtors, and really everyone realized that SEO was the way to go. Thus the preponderance of SEOs nowadays.

OK, that’s it for lesson 1. This one was more about where SEO came from. Next time, we’ll get into the Internet and the search engine’s impact on real estate and the ongoing demise of the newspaper.

Ciao.

I frequently am asked how to optimize a Google AdWords campaign. So here are some simple basic tips on things to follow and look out for:

Pick up a book or do a Google online training on using AdWords (AdWords for Dummies is great…and no one will call you a dummy, I promise…knowledge is power), it will help you to get to know the lingo

1. Sign up for the standard edition, not the starter edition
2. Use the new user interface
3. Keep your content network in a separate campaign
4. Have a lot of ad groups, each with very targeted keywords
5. If you have real estate in different towns do a separate ad group for each town. If you have separate buildings, or building types then do a new ad group for each
6. Have at least two different ad variations for each ad group
7. Set up conversion tracking
8. Integrate Google Analytics and your AdWords account
9. Check your campaign(s) every day and edit bids continuously

PPC is a worthwhile expenditure if managed well. For branding campaigns especially PPC is great in coordination with SEO. If you have questions on managing or starting your AdWords account, Boston Logic can be of help.

What are some of the key practices you have employed that have resulted in successful PPC campaigns?

Photo credit: videovoo.com

A client of ours decided to invest in a tile ad on boston.com. For those of you who don’t know, Boston.com is the website of the Boston Globe, which is, in my opinion, the best newspaper in Boston. Every once in a while, a member of the sales team at boston.com or nytimes.com or some local newspaper calls one of our clients directly and convinces them to commit to a banner, tower, or tile ad on their website. Usually, it’s in the real estate section, which, of course, sounds like a good idea.  It’s an easy expenditure to explain and to get your boss to approve. If you’re the boss and you’re reading this post, DON’T APPROVE THIS EXPENDITURE.

Now, if you haven’t heard, the Boston Globe is under the threat of being shut down. The paper is owned by the NY Times company and they’re loosing money. So, the management over at the NY Times is threatening to only offer the online version of the paper if the Globe can’t cut expenses. The unions are fighting back and it’s getting ugly. If you read the globe, it’s a page 1 story just about every day.

Now, our clients get called by folks selling ad space on their sites all the time. We’re used to this happening and we often advise our clients against buying banner and tower ads alltogether. Every once in a while, they do it anyway and we have new evidence to show folks why it’s a bad idea.

Here’s an image of the page. On the right, you’ll see, outlined in red the placement of the ad that our clients decided to pay for. How much? They paid $1200/month to be on this page. Now this is the main real estate page on the site boston.com/realestate. It would stand to reason that this is the best page to be on for our clients.

The results
This ad brought a little less than 100 visitors to our client’s website during the month of April.  You only need a middle school education to know that they’re paying about $12 per click. If you’re familiar with CPC prices, you know this is extremely high.

For those of you who are not PPC or SEM experts. Here’s some more information. We are managing an SEM campaign for this client. We’re using Google AdWords and the client is paying for Google search traffic at $0.75 per click. That’s the average CPC (Cost per click) of the PPC campaign for the month of April. So, this means that our client is paying 16 times more for each visitor they get from boston.com than they are for visitors from Google who clicked on their paid placement.

SEM is by far more cost efficient than tile placement. This is pretty much always true. We’ve been preaching this for years. SEO can make your campaign even more cost effective, but the numbers, when you’re dealing with SEO, aren’t quite as concrete and quantifiable. Besides, this is the most recent direct comparable data that we have to show you. We literally pulled it down today.

In case you’re wondering, we used good ole Google Analytics to gather this data. It’s pretty clear that paying for advertising space in the real estate section of a newspaper’s website, unless it’s PPC, is a bad marketing investment. We see it time and again.

If anyone at the Globe wants to rebut these facts, I’m happy to talk.