Real Estate SEO

Archive for the ‘Real Estate Market Trends’ Category

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.

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.

It happens to the best bloggers. Sometimes, you just don’t know what to write about. The first rule of blogging is that you should be creating original, engaging content on a regular basis. But how?

Here’s a simple answer. Start a conversation.

Craft your content so that it elicits responses from your readers. Then, you can react or respond to their comments and questions. Your blog readers will actually give you the topics you’re looking for. Problem solved.

Common question: Why don’t I get any comments on my blog?

If all you ever post on your real estate blog is factual or one way communication then you’re not going to get a lot of responses. Ask questions of your readers. Ask for their input. Your blog should be a conversation with your readers, and not a speech to the silent masses.

Be topical, this will help your Real Estate SEO the most.

In every market, there’s a hot topic! This might change monthly, or weekly, or even daily. If you blog about a timely topic, more people will be searching for information on that topic NOW.

Here’s an example, a client of ours has a real estate website in a town where IBM has a large office complex. IBM recently closed another facility and is moving those employees to offices in our client’s town. Of course, this will have an effect on the local real estate market. This was the post on the home page of his site for a week.

Think about all of the opportunities that this can bring him.

• People relocating
• IBMers who want to rent
• Residents who want to know how this might affect their property value

These are all great opportunities. If you can identify the hot topics and SEO your real estate site around these topics. you will see the benefits of traffic and an active reader audience.

In the end, this all comes down to the age old problem known as writer’s block. Maybe we should start calling it Blogger’s Block?

Tell us your story of blogger’s block and how you get around it. We’ll be sharing the conversation with all of our readers.

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.