Real Estate SEO

Archive for the ‘PPC’ Category

This blog is about more than simply Real Estate SEO. Our regular readers know that. SEO affects so many parts of your marketing campaign. Also, to get the most out of your investment in SEO, you’re going to need to need to make some other marketing and technology investments. Email Marketing is just such an investment.

For a long time now, we’ve been partnered with Constant Contact. We’ve done work with iContact, and we use Campaign Monitor regularly too. We’ve been designing email campaigns for years. Every one of these campaigns is designed to help our clients maximize the value of each contact in the email list. This is the reason email marketing is so important. It’s going to help you get the most out of your other investments.

In Real Estate, as in many industries, your SEO efforts are focused on finding leads and customers. Often we judge the effectiveness of a marketing media – be it SEO, PPC, or any other – based on the cost per lead. Now that you’ve paid that money for each lead, you want to maximize the conversion of those leads into customers. Email marketing plays a key role in doing so.

Every lead you get needs to be added to your email list. When they sign up on your site, they should be automatically imported into your contact list and be saved in your CRM system. If you’re using the ONE System by Boston Logic, this is already happening for you automatically.

Now that your leads are in the list, you need to communicate with them. Send them a newsletter. Send them nightly property updates. Add them to your drip campaign. Our clients with email campaigns are far more likely to convert their leads into clients. Alert! this is the conversion rate that really matters. Now we’re talking about client acquisition cost and this is really where the dollars and cents get counted…

A small example:

Let’s say you’re spending $10,000 per month on your online marketing campaign and this is generating 1000 leads per month. This means you’re paying $10/lead. Now, if you’re not emailing them, you might be converting your leads at 2%. So, for those 1000 leads you’re generating, you’re doing 20 deals. Your customer acquisition cost is $500.

Now, you implement an email marketing campaign. Say each month your list grows by 1000 email addresses. Remember, it costs very little to email each person. So, the incremental cost of adding each email address may as well be ignored for the math in this example. So, you’re collecting these email addresses and you send them a message on a regular basis. Over time, you see your conversion rate go up to 3%. Now, your cost per lead has stayed the same and you’re only paying a $333 customer acquisition cost and you’re doing 30 deals per month instead of only 20.

In this example, you can see that your marketing expenses don’t change all that much, but you do 50% more deals! And these numbers are realistic. These kinds of results don’t happen overnight, but they do happen. Your list is gold. You’re investing in SEO in order to get leads, but that’s not the end of the end goal, of course.

When you’re making your strategic SEO plan, think about how you’re going to maximize the conversion of those loads into sales. When you do, remember that email marketing is an important link in that chain.

Thanks for reading.

I couldn’t believe it when I read the findings of a study done by Real Estate Book. A national survey of “Top Real Estate Professionals” showed that 75% of marketing budgets were spent on internet marketing, personal websites, and print advertising. The study went on to say that these each made up 25% of the spending. Really!?!

That means that top real estate agents are spending at least HALF of their marketing budget online. This sounds almost too good to be true! We often have a tough time getting the offices we work with to spend half of their marketing budget on SEO, PPC, Email marketing and other online media. Maybe we’ve been preaching about this for long enough and real estate brokers and agents are starting to come around.

Other findings:
Not surprisingly, the study also showed that when ranked against one another, the media with the lowest value to those surveyed were traditional mass media. Those included radio and newspapers. I think that calls for repeating. Real Estate professionals will see the lowest value from traditional mass media, including newspapers.

We’ve said it before, a dozen times on this blog, newspapers do not provide good value for real estate marketing. Our clients still try to tell us that an ad in the New York Times or the Boston Globe will produce leads. Yes, of course they do, but look at what they cost you. Spend the same amount of money on real estate seo or on your Google Adwords budget and you’ll get far better results.

Monthly Budget:
The same study showed that the median real estate professional surveyed was spending $622 each month on marketing. They’re spending half of that on their website and online marketing. That’s $311 per month or $3700 per year per agent spent on the web. That means that the typical office employing 10 real estate agents should be spending almost $40,000 per year on online marketing. Now we’re talking. This math makes some sense. If your budget lines up with this kind of spending, then you’re on the right track.

Now, this money should not be spent by every agent on their own. You should be working together. The study said that these numbers were often based on what the office spent. So, this means that the office was putting their money behind a common campaign. We see fantastic economies of scale for our clients when they work together to invest in great real estate websites and well executed real estate seo.

Search Engine Marketing:
The Real Estate Book study showed that 61% of the real estate professionals surveyed, and these were top real estate agents according to the study, used some kind of search engine marketing. And 25% used social media sites as well. No wonder these are top agents.

…

Don’t get left behind. Get ahead of these trends. Realize what these numbers would have looked like just a few years ago and know that leading real estate professionals will continue to invest more and more into online marketing media. Be a leader, not a follower.

Thanks for reading.

At Boston Logic, we’ve always had a philosophy and it goes something like this:

“You’re in the real estate business, we’re in the marketing and technology business. You shouldn’t be expected to run your online marketing campaigning. That’s our job.”

Our clients take comfort in the fact that we know what we’re doing and they see the results, so they are happy and loyal. I bring this up because it illustrates an important reality about buying premium services. It’s unrealistic to become an expert before making every single purchasing decision. What you need to know is just enough to make an informed decision. Then, you can go back to doing what you do best, Real Estate.

The other day, I spoke on the phone with a real estate broker who had, unfortunatley, missed the important first step. He hadn’t informed himself enough and therefore had made a poor decision. When I asked him how his PPC campaign was going, he told me that he was encouraged by the number of impressions that his SEM manager had generated for him. So, I asked how many visitors this had brought him, what his click through rate was on the campaign, and what his cost per lead was. He had no answers.

When we’re managing a campaign, impressions aren’t a bellweather. Sure, they’re a part of the equation, but they are certainly no measure of success. This broker wanted to bring more visitors to his real estate website and sell more homes. He is spending money on a PPC camaign and he’s got no idea how it’s performing. All he knows is how often his ad is coming up.

If you’re looking for an SEM or SEO vendor, make sure that they are willing to educate you on the basics of how they’ll be doing their work. If they can’t explain it to you, then you should assume they’re hiding something from you because they probably are.

You need to be an educated buyer. Here’s a useful page about SEO vs PPC. Also, if you read this blog regularly, we touch on many of these topics and we’ll continue to educate you on real estate seo and ppc. If you want us to explain the basics to you, we’ll do so free of charge. Just drop us a line on the contact us page.

If I can leave you with one parting word today: Be an educated buyer. It will make you far more successful.

Have a good weekend and good luck with your SEO.

If you’re running an online marketing campaign, there are some equations that you should understand. These equations will allow you to understand the effectiveness of your website and the marketing media that you are using to drive traffic to the site.

Now, real estate SEM, that is PPC and SEO, are both online marketing media. So are banner advertisements and email marketing. You can use these equations to examine all of these and many other media. You can even judge the effectiveness of traditional marketing media. It all boils down to the same math.

First, let’s talk about your website. When a user arrives on the site, they are anonymous. If they register to become a lead (or customer in the case of an eCommerce website) we call this a conversion. The ratio of conversions to total users is the conversation rate of your website. So:

1. Conversion rate = Leads / Total Users

For example. If your site is visited by 1000 users and 50 of them register and become leads, your conversion rate would be 5%.

Next, it’s vital to understand your cost per lead. You should be able to calculate the cost per lead generated by each marketing medium in which you are investing. You can also calculate your overall cost per lead for your entire campaign. Tracking each of these number and optimizing them is the key to superior ROI

2. Cost per lead = Amount spent / Number of Leads

Conversion rate of each add is also vital. You could be trying to spend on PPC, but the ad you wrote is failing. Also, you might be sending email marketing messages that aren’t effective. To judge the effectiveness of the ad or ad copy, you’re going to want to know the click through rate or CTR:

3. CTR = Click throughs / Impressions

Now, when you’re running a PPC campaign, your impressions are free! PPM campaigns require you to pay for the impressions. You’re not guaranteed any click-through traffic from a banner or tower PPM ad. So, you better be tracking the CTR of that ad. If it’s not performing, you can change it or stop spending altogether.

When you’re managing your PPC campaign, you need to understand your cost per click. The Adwords and Yahoo Overture systems will calculate this for you. Overall, you should be able to calculate CPC for PPC or PPM advertising.

4. Cost Per Click = Ad buy / Clicks

If you’re spending on any medium, you can simply divide the amount you spent by the number of clicks or the number of visitors that it brought to your site to understand the CPC.

Combining these equations really gives us a way to measure our ROI:

5. Cost per lead = Cost per click / Conversion Rate

If that’s a little confusing to you, scroll up and have a look at equations 1 and 4. what we really want to know is, how can we get the most leads for our ad buy. So, let’s examine this marketing equation.  My goal is to minimize the cost per lead. So, to do this, I need to either raise my conversion rate or lower my cost per click. This will guide how you choose your PPM ads, your PPC bids, and even how much you want to invest into SEO.

I know this is a lot for some of you. Math isn’t everyone’s forte. If I went through this too fast for you, please drop us a comment and we’ll respond promptly.

I’ll be writing a post soon on how we improve campaign performance using these equations. Stay tuned

About a month ago, Rebecca composed a great post called “Real Estate marketing during tough economic times.” Apropos indeed, a client of ours called me the other day. He mentioned that the current real estate market was going to make him less lazy. He realized that he was going to need to be conservative and spend less. He’d have to dedicate his time rather than his cash.

The way to make this work in a real estate SEO campaign is obvious. Blogging is the answer. You can buy almost as many paid clicks as your budget will allow, but what happens when your budget shrinks? How do you keep those search engine visitors coming to your site? How do you keep your leads coming?

If you’re dedicated to blogging, you can replace those paid clicks with organic search engine traffic. No, you can’t flick the PPC switch off on Monday and turn on the organic SEO visitor stream on Tuesday, but you can start blogging regularly now and see the traffic in a month or two.

Also, start using social media. Twitter, Facebook, social bookmarking sites like Stumble, Reddit, and Digg, they’ll all bring you visitors. One of the largest traffic sources for this site is Twitter. Also, we post on Sphinn all the time since it’s highly applicable to our blog’s topic, real estate marketing and real estate seo. This brings us traffic too. Sure, the search engines are our main traffic source, but there are lots of others and we don’t pay for any of the traffic that comes to this blog, not out of pocket anyway.

Now, we’re not narrow minded. We know that time is money and if you’re going to invest your time into writing blog posts and using social media, one could argue that there’s still a cost. I couldn’t agree more. SEO is not free in any way. What I’m saying here is that SEO is an investment. Virtually all investments take time to mature and we have to invest with what we have. If we have cash, we can invest those funds in paid clicks. If we have time, SEO allows us to invest that time in order to achieve better search engine placement. This, in turn brings future users to your site, some of whom will turn into customers at a later date and bring you a pay check one day. It all started with your investment of time.

I’ve saved the best for last. This is time you have. I sometimes blog when I’m watching TV. I blog on weekends. I Digg at the end of the day when I’m too tired to be productive at much else. You can passively make this happen and invest yours in between time. So, even if you are busy, you still can invest in real estate seo. It’s not hard to keep a real estate blog going, it’s just a few minutes a day, if you’re a quick typer. This blog post took me about 15 minutes.

Lastly, we love to hear from you. So, please tell us, how are you saving money in your marketing these days? Also, if you have a question about whether or not you’re spending wisely, we’ll be happy to answer it.

Happy Blogging and Happy New Year.