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.

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.

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

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.