Real Estate SEO

Archive for the ‘PPC’ Category

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.

This post is going to address a couple of major SEO topics. Why am I tackling 2 in one blog post, because they jumped off my computer screen in rapid succession!

First, I’m going to call out another snake oil seo salesman. The first thing I saw was that their ad read “Good SEO = More Traffic.” This immediately screamed AMATEUR SEO. Then I clicked through to their website (yes, the PPC click probably cost them a couple of bucks) and I started reading. I immediately thought, this was not written by someone who speaks english as a first language.

I couldn’t believe it, I was reading what was supposed to be marketing copy and I could immediately tell that it was written by someone who wasn’t qualified to be writing it. So, I clicked on the contact page on the site. Sure enough, they gave an address in Mumbia, India.

The company is called Convonix. I’d never heard of them before, so that’s why I decided to click on their ad. It’s a bad sign when we’ve never heard of an SEO firm. We’re pretty well aware of who the players are in the industry. It’s not hard for us to suss out the riff raff. Like I said, I knew they were snake oils salesmen. Here are two major reasons why.

“Good SEO = More Traffic” is how their PPC ad read. THIS IS FALSE!!!

GOOD SEO = MORE CUSTOMERS

Results are what matter. I would shout this from the rooftops if I could. Any SEO firm that’s trying to sell you on placement is behind the times and should not be allowed to practice SEO. Who cares where you place and how many users come to your site if you don’t gain any customers as a result? Good SEO = Revenue. Good SEO = Business Growth. Good SEO = Speaking the language.

This brings me to my next point on SEO and really marketing in general. Years ago, one of the fathers of direct marketing described the practice of marketing as “salesmanship in print.” In the 21st century, we can expand this definition to say “salesmanship through another medium.” The medium could be a website, print, radio, you name it. The marketer’s job is to help promote and sell the offering.

Now, let me ask you bright people the following question. Is it wise to have someone who doesn’t have a good command over the language write your marketing copy? Do you want the content of your website to be written by someone in India? Will they understand idioms? Slang? Irony? Let’s remember, when we talk about SEO, content is King! The answer is simple. You need someone with a healthy command of the language to do the SEO work. SEO is not something that should be outsourced to Mumbia or Paris or Moscow. Marketing requires someone who knows your language and your market and SEO is marketing!

This is twice as true for the real estate industry. You need someone who speaks your “language.” I’m using the word language a little more loosely here. The language of real estate, which is required for good real estate seo, is specific to the industry, your geography, and to your market. The home buyer or seller, whom you want to click on your listing in the search engine results, is going to search using works and phrases particular to the real estate industry. They’re also going to use real estate terminology specific to your area and the current market condition.

This brings me to my last point. We’ve had clients in the real estate industry ask us how we can work with multiple real estate companies in the same market, which we do all the time. The answer is pretty simple. You can work with a real estate seo firm, like Boston Logic, who speaks the language, with domestic staff, who know the real estate vertical extremely well, or you can pay someone else to ride a learning curve on your dime. Also, it’s a big market out there. If we can help a few clients in each market gain more market share, then we’re doing our job.

That’s what good SEO equals…more market share. Not just more traffic.

How much should I be spending? We get asked this question all of the time, in one way or another.

• How much do I need to spend in order to be successful?
• What budget do I need to allocate for SEO?
• How much should I spend per day on PPC?
• What does it cost to get onto page 1?

It all boils down to the same question: What does it cost to run a successful search engine marketing campaign?

I’m sure that you won’t be surprised to know that there isn’t just one answer to this question. First of all, it depends on who is asking the question. Next, you need to understand the marketing you’re in. Then, you need to do a little math.

Let’s examine one case:

If you’re a broker and you’re looking to invest in real estate seo in order to provide your office with leads (Real Estate brokers asks us this question most often) then the answer starts with another question: How many leads/week do you want to give to each of your agents? 7 leads? 10 leads? 20? These are all fine answers. If you said 3, then I don’t think I want to work for you and your agents are about to leave you for the broker across the street or across town who actually tries to help his agents succeed by leveraging the web. If that sounded a little harsh, well, I’ve seen it happen a number of times and I’m watching it happen in our clients’ favor every day.

Anyway, I digress.

If you know how many leads you want to give each agent/week or per month, then you have the first number you need in determining your SEM budget. Let’s assume that you have 10 real estate agents working for you (this is the average size of a real estate office in the US).

Now, it’s time to think about your market. How much does it cost to source a real estate buyer or seller lead online in your market? Well, this is where guys like us SEO consultants come in. We can help answer questions like this. A mature real estate SEO campaign in a market of medium competition will generate leads at approximately $4 – $7/lead. If you’ve been SEOing for a while, then you can do even better than that. If you’re in a metropolitan real estate market and there are lots of firms competing for search engine placement, then this cost can climb significantly. For the purposes of this example, let’s use $5 per lead.

So, if you have 10 real estate agents working for you and you want to give them each 7 leads/week that’s 300 leads per month. At $5/lead, you should allocate a budget of  at least $1500/month.

Ok, now, if you go looking for a real estate seo provider out there and someone tells you that they can provide seo services and they don’t talk to you about your business goals in a way similar to how I just did, then you know that they don’t understand the business that you are in. They don’t know the real estate market and they don’t know how to generate real estate buyer and seller leads.

One last point here. Frequest readers of this blog know that we talk about the fact that SEO is an investment. You’ll notice that earlier in this post I referred to “Mature” SEO campaigns. If you’re asking how much to invest, you should remember that investing in real estate SEO, like investing in real estate, is not going to bring you returns over night. Superior performance takes time and consistent investment. Proper planning, strategy, and implementation will maximize your investment in real estate seo. Just don’t expect it to make you a millionaire tomorrow.

That’ll take at least a week.  )  Thanks for reading.

This is an ongoing debate among real estate brokers and agents.

Here’s the situation, you’re marketing your real estate website online, you’re investing in SEO, maybe you’re working with PPC, maybe your office site is getting hundreds of visitors every day. The question is this: When do you ask the user to sign up? How do you acquire the most leads and, more importantly, customers? Which is your priority, quantity or quality? Let’s explore:

When a buyer is looking for a new home, they’re going to be looking for information. Most often, they’re going to want to search for real estate that’s on the market. Maybe they want market data or some other kind of information beyond simply listing search results. At any rate, they want to visit a site and get some information. Knowledge is power and they want to feel empowered.

Now, there are some horrible website vendors out there who sell websites that require the user to sign up to access just about every part of the site other than the home page. You make the user sign up to search, to get a report, to get a home valuation, to do just about anything. These sites will kill your prospects of achieving good search engine placement. Remember, the search engines will not fill out forms. They will not hit the submit button. In short, they won’t know about the majority of your content. If you want to optimize your site for SEO purposes, make sure the search engine robots can get to the information using regular html hyperlinks.

Now, when we build sites, we usually put the sign up in one of a few places:

1. Sign up before the user can see search results. Yes, most visitors to your site will want to use the property search. So, it makes some sense to have them sign up in order to search or to see the results of their search. There are two major objections to this method
   1. Plenty of other sites don’t make the user sign up to see their search results and lots of users don’t want to sign up for anything. They prefer to remain anonymous. So, you risk loosing the possibility of converting this user into a lead and sending them to your competitors’ sites.
   2. If you make a user sign up just to browse, they’re somewhat likely to give you fake contact information. This is a risk. Our experience shows that when a site forces a sign up earlier in the search process, then they see more fake leads who are tossing bogus information into the sign up form just to get to the good stuff. Now, you may be willing, as many folks are, to sift through these fakers in order to get to find the real leads. There’s nothing wrong with this tactic.
2. Allow the user to browse and only ask them to sign up to use advanced features
   If your site is built well, then it should provide the user with many different interactive features. This might include the opportunity to register for an account, save favorite listings, save searches, sign up for nightly listing updates by email, schedule a showing, inquire about a listing, etc. Lots of sites allow the user to browse the search results without registering. In other words, the user doesn’t convert into a lead until they’re ready. The argument in favor of this strategy is that the user who inquires or requests a showing is a better lead. The argument against is that you’ll see fewer leads.  Indeed, when someone requests a showing or more information or signs up for nightly email listing updates then they are indeed a more qualified lead. That said, there are lots of folks who don’t want to sign up until they’re ready to buy and using strategy #1 above may turn these folks away.
3. Hybrid approaches to lead gathering
   
   1. You can give away some information and require the user to sign in for more. Lots of sites don’t give away property addresses, for example, until the user has signed in.
   2. Another approach is to allow the user to use the site for a while – say giving them access to 2 searches or 4 listing details pages – before requiring them to sign up. This is sort of like tempting the user. You show them that there’s a lot of inventory and features for them to use and entice them to sign up in order to stay inside the promised land.
   3. One of our favorites is to show the user the search results, but to then use something called a Lightbox in order to ask them to sign up. That’s when the screen goes dark/opaque and the user is presented with a sign up box.  They can still see that search results are behind the sign up and they’re more compelled to sign up to see what’s just beyond. Again, some users may just click the back button and go back to the search engines to find another site where they don’t have to sign up at all.

Customers come to us all of the time and ask about the best ways to implement lead acquisition within their site. It’s not a simple question to answer. If you have a lot of agents to satisfy, we recommend going for quantity. Make the user sign up early in the search process. If you have a lot of traffic and you want to get the best quality leads farther down the search road, then ask them to sign up later in the process.

Overall, your site must be engaging and the user needs to want to stick around and come back again. If you’re not designing for a superior user experience, then you’re just not going to get the leads that you need out of your real estate website.

Hey folks. For the local readers (we’re based in Boston) the 3rd installment of the course I’m giving for the North East Association of Realtors is happening this coming Monday. Here’s a link to the course outline. I’m looking forward to seeing you there.

The next session is going to be an in-depth look a the subject of this post. We’re going to be talking about traditional media as it compares to online media. Of course real estate seo is an online marketing medium. So, we’ll be touching on SEO and talking about how it stacks up against the other media.

Now, at Boston Logic, we’re on the side of those who proclaim the digital marketing mantra “Print is dead!” Well, maybe not yet, but it’s circling the drain.

The basic question is, why is this happening? Why is traditional media losing favor while online media is gaining a larger and larger share of the marketing dollar? From our perspective, there are two forces at work.

First of all, our lives are moving online. You need to market to the customers where they are. Your customers are online. Everyone quotes the fact that 80 or 90 percent of real estate buyers start their search online. But the reality is that we do a lot more than just search for property online. We spend hours each day online. We’re buying fewer newspapers, listening to less radio, and we use our TiVo to skip the commercials when we’re watching TV.

The result of this trend is that the number of impressions that each ad spot gets has come down. A TV spot used to be 25% more effective than it is today. And this is steadily declining. Newspaper circulations are falling off a cliff. The news is free online. The paper wastes trees. Pick your reason, we’re all just buying fewer newspapers at the news stand. All of this means that the value of these media is decreasing. So much so that lots of papers are cutting staff, closing their doors, or moving to a completely web-centric model. This means that they’re only going to offer their content online. Hallelujah.

The second reason that marketing dollars are going on line is accountability. Online marketing media, SEO, PPC, social media, banner placement, and email marketing, are all relatively easy to track. You can know how many visitors came from Google’s organic results to your site and how many of these users turned into leads or customers. This means you can calculate the cost of each lead based on the number of leads and your investment into SEO. Calculating ROI is even easier when you’re using Pay Per Click.

In stark contrast, it’s hard to know if a user came from a TV ad or just typed in your web address. Sure, you can print a promo code in the newspaper ad and use that to try and track effectiveness, but then you need to offer some kind of a discount and not everyone will use the promo code. So, you don’t know if your ad is a flop or if it’s actually performing better than your numbers are telling you, based on the number of folks who entered the promo code.

Most small and medium sized businesses don’t even try to track the effectiveness of their print campaign. To most business owners, marketing is a black box. You insert money on one end and hope that it produces business out of the other end. The black box provides little accountability and really doesn’t help you understand your ROI.

If you are one of the smart ones and you are working to understand the ROI on your many marketing media, then the results are probably quite clear. Most marketers know that they get better value out of online media than they do from traditional media. This is the nail in the coffin.

When the numbers tell you that SEO leads are costing you $5 and PPC is costing $7 but the newspaper produces leads at $35. Well, it doesn’t take an MBA to know that you should stop paying for newspaper ads and invest more of your marketing dollars into SEO and PPC. Everyone who runs the numbers is seeing this trend and they’re all moving online.

I could, very honestly, go on. This topic is quite broad. I’ll touch on it in another post soon. I’ll certainly be going into much greater detail on Monday. I hope to see you there! Thanks.