Real Estate SEO

Posts Tagged ‘Leads’

Thank you to everyone who came to our latest LogicClassroom session on Maximizing Lead Conversion!

We learned about the importance of the consistency of the user experience from when they begin their online search to when then land on your website, and various ways to KEEP them on your site.  We also talked about  lead capture and management as well as how to leverage social media, email, and other marketing techniques to help convert your leads into clients.

Don’t worry if you missed this LogicClassroom session, you can view the slides below at your convenience. Enjoy!

Thank you to everyone who attended our LogicClassroom presentation last night. We discussed how and why to leverage different social media platforms for your business. Don’t worry if you missed this session – the slides are below for you to view!

Please join us for our next LogicClassroom session 2/9/10 on Search Engine Optimization 101. Please email Katrina to attend.

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.