Real Estate SEO

Posts Tagged ‘Leads’

We had a great turnout for this LogicClassroom session on effective blogging both in the office and on the phone. We explored the benefits of blogging for your business, including how to optimize your posts for SEO and how to turn a blog into a traffic and lead generation tool for your company.

I want to thank everyone who was able to attend. Don’t worry if you missed this LogicClassroom session, you can view the slides below at your convenience. Enjoy!

Our next LogicClassroom will be on 1/12/10. Learn how agents and brokers can leverage free social media to generate leads and a loyal client following. Please email Katrina if you would like to attend.

We received an inquiry through one of our websites last week. It read:

I want a site that generates buyers that want to communicate through email. I also want automatic email first contact.

We do receive inquiries like this all the time. I want to highlight a misconception that is evident in what the lead wrote to us.

Lots of new clients come to us thinking that a new site is going to be the answer to their prayers. A site that will generate leads. Now, websites do generate leads, but not on their own. If no one visits the site, then you’re never going to see any leads.

You can’t just build a new website and expect leads to just show up on your doorstep. You need to make sure that the site is part of an online marketing campaign. Thousands of realtors think that they need to have a site in order to do business these days. They spend little money on the site and they see almost no results.

You need to invest in marketing! Marketing should actually be the larger cost. i.e. your website should cost LESS than your marketing campaign!

Of course, we advocate investing in real estate SEO for the best long term bang for your buck. Building the right site will make your SEO dollars go farther.

As a final point, and one that we’ve made before, if you invest in SEO and your site isn’t built to convert users into leads, then your investment in SEO will really be a waste.

So, it’s crucial that you making both investments. Spend the money on a good real estate website design with great features and functionality and on a well implemented real estate seo campaign and the results will be extremely profitable returns.

I almost can’t believe that I wrote that headline?

Yesterday, I spoke with a guy who told me he wanted to run a direct mail campaign to drive traffic to his website and capture leads to “farm” (his word) into clients.

Now, first let me say that farming a cache of leads is a great strategy. You can source your leads lots of ways. We recommend a strong online marketing campaign including strong real etstate seo efforts, ppc, email marketing, and a highly accountable reporting system.

So, this guy isn’t completely off the mark. Yes, your database of leads and customers is gold. You need to nourish this list and grow it. The more qualified users you can drive to your site, the more leads you will generate. If your site is well built to convert real estate buyers, sellers, and renters into leads, then the more traffic you have the more leads you should have.

As we’ve mentioned many times on this blog, you need to consider the cost of each lead. What did you pay to acquire the lead? If you paid $4000 for 8000 clicks (that’s $0.50 per click or site visitor) on Google Adwords and that generated 400 leads, then you paid $10 per lead. Got it?

Well, let’s think about this direct mail campaign that the guy on the phone wanted to deploy. He’s going to spend money sending those mail pieces upfront. Let’s say he sends our 10,000 pieces at $0.40 each. That’s $4000.

Now, he told me that these mailings were going to direct the users to his website. So, how many of the recipients will actually go to a website on a postcard? Here’s where the plan falls off the tracks.

It’s not likely that many of the recipients will actually go to the website. I don’t know about you, but I toss those mailers in the trash. I pick up my mail on the way into my building and the next thing I do is filter out the junk mail straight into the garbage.

So, if our friendly realtor is lucky, he’ll get maybe 5 or 10% of the recipients visiting his site. If the site was fantastic and converted leads at 10% (which is pretty high) he’d have 10000 x 0.1 x 0.1 = 100 leads. That’s $40/lead. Honestly, the cost would likely be even higher.

Bottom line - For real estate marketing campaigns, SEM, SEO and PPC are far better investments than direct mail. And please don’t be fooled and think that you can generate web traffic efficiently using traditional marketing like direct mail.

Hopefully, we just saved you some time and money.

How to measure quality in a real estate  SEO campaign and in a SEO provider.

I’ve talked about similar topics before, but I wanted to lay it out succinctly for our readers since we get a lot of questions on this. The lists below are ways to judge and ways NOT to judge a SEO provider. They’re also metrics and methods for measuring the effectiveness of a real estate marketing campaign overall.

Indicators of good real estate SEO campaign performance:

• Leads generated
• Site traffic numbers
• Average number of pages visited by users to your site
• Average time visitors spend on your site
• Search engine ranking (placement) for a long list of terms

The most important things that a SEO campaign can do is to cause more visitors to arrive at your site and to generate more leads for your real estate business. Now, the number of leads that your site generates also has a lot to do with the design and architecture of your site. So, if the SEO provider has little control over these contributing factors, then the traffic numbers are the best indicator you have of quality.

I’d also be remiss if I didn’t touch on benchmarks for a moment. You must have benchmarks to measure against. If your site is seeing 150 visitors per month from Google when your SEO campaign starts and 1050 users part month 6 months in, this is strong performance. If your website was producing 1 lead per day before the campaign started and how it’s producing 10 leads per day, again, your SEO is doing a good job.

An indicator of a good SEO provider and of any real estate marketing firm is whether or not they provide these metrics to you. If they’re willing to be accountable to you, and they’re not hiding anything, then they have no choice but to show you good work. Otherwise, you’re liable to fire them when the contract is up.

Here are some ways NOT to measure performance of an SEO campaign or of an SEO provider:

• Whether or not you rank for 1 particular term
• Traffic numbers 3 months into a campaign
• The frequency with which reports are delivered to you.

Believe it or not, search engine ranking is NOT what makes for a good SEO campaign. Marketing campaigns MUST produce results. Results = revenue. Results and ranking don’t mean the same thing. As I’ve said before, ranking and a token will get you on the subway.

This same analysis must be applied to all real estate marketing campaigns, media, and ad buys. If the money ain’t producing the biz, then it’s not well spent. Ask the questions, do the math, get real numbers to judge performance.

How many ways do you think Social Media can contribute to good real estate SEO? Jot down a list and then compare it to mine. If I left off any major ones, please let me know. Here goes:

1. Blogs are social media. Blogs only get read when there’s new content. New content helps your search engine placement.
2. You can syndicate your content (let’s say from your blog) to social media sites. You could even feed your real estate listings, by RSS to your twitter and Facebook profiles.
3. Many social media site pages are public. These pages are bound to have links back to your site. Linking will improve your SEO.
4. Social bookmarking links on your site will produce back links from those sites (Digg, Reddit, Stumble, etc.) to your site. Again, these links will improve your SEO, your rank, and bring you more traffic and more leads. Remember real estate buyer and seller leads are the goal, not just ranking!
5. Users spend a lot of time on Facebook, Twitter, and many other social media sites. The referral traffic will help you gain more visitors, more clients and sell more real estate.
6. Promotions have more power with social media. Post a promotion on your site, edit your PPC ads accordingly to drive clicks, broadcast the promotion to your Twitter followers, Facebook friends, and LinkedIn connections and watch your traffic spike.
7. Remember that real estate SEO is about leads and customers. What you care about isn’t always ranking but leads and real estate transactions that come from those leads. Use your analytics system, like Google analytics,  to look at the social media sites that are driving traffic and leads to your site. My money says that you’ll see a good conversion rate on this traffic.
8. Chatter on Facebook and Twitter can fuel your blog. Look at what the people are saying about your real estate market, your real estate business, even you as a real estate agent. You’re likely to get inspired and find a topic to blog about. Also, here’s another post about blogging inspiration that could be helpful.
9. Social media is all about linking and showing the world what you’re up to. As a result, your friends and followers are likely to check out the stuff that you’re pointing them to. So, engage your community, send them to your site - full of great resources and information - and they’ll convert into leads.

Ok, that about exhausts my list of how Social Media can improve your Real Estate SEO. I’m sure there are many others that I forgot, but I have to get back to SEOing a couple of sites today. I look forward to your additions to my list. Leave them as comments please. Thanks.