Real Estate SEO

Posts Tagged ‘real estate online marketing’

Overcoming blogger’s block.

I’ve been working at Boston Logic now for 2 months, 2 days, 16 hours, and 57 minutes.  As an online marketer, blogging is a part of my job. I know I need to do it.  I know I can do it…but what should I write? There are over 171,476 words in the English language (I Googled it), and it feels like there is  no original combination left.

I know I’m not alone out there. There are real estate professionals all over saying, “yeah yeah I know I should start a  blog”‘ or “yeah yeah I know I need to blog more”, but what’s stopping us? We’re busy, we’re unsure, and maybe we’re afraid. I’m not talking Robert DeNiro on your houseboat fear, but maybe just fear of commitment.  Fear of needing to write something every week.

We talk a lot about WHY blogging is important for real estate online marketing and what to do to optimize our existing real estate blog.

But what about HOW? How do we get over that fear. My suggestion—let go.

Write from your phone when you’re on the bus. Write from Starbucks. Write whenever you’re thinking about something. This morning on the bus with my coffee I thought—gees why haven’t I blogged yet? And look…a blog post.

Write after you show a listing and talk about the questions asked. Write after you read an industry article that gets you thinking.

Don’t spend 2 months, 2 days, 16 hours, and 57 minutes worrying about HOW. Just do. Your keywords and links will find there way in if you write about what you know—your neighborhood,  your business, your industry.

We’re in this together, so let go and let me know what you think.

Before I get into the substance of this post, I want to lay down some facts that we all should know. This is very important. If you’re investing in SEO, you must be judging the results and calculating the return on your investment. This is true for more than just SEO. If you’re investing in any marketing, be it online or off, you need to know what the results are. If you don’t know what’s working and what is not, you’re wasting your money.

Next, if you’re investing in SEO and the firm doing the work isn’t providing regular reports showing you what they’re doing and the effects of their work, then you should fire that firm. If they’re not willing to be accountable to you, then don’t pay them. They should be showing you where your users and leads are coming from and how they’ve improved your visibility. This is critical.

OK, now that we have those SEO truths established, lets get to it.

In Real Estate and when you’re performing Real Estate SEO you are really trying to do three things.

1. Bring the right users to your real estate website.
2. Convert those users into leads
3. Convert leads into clients who buy or sell a home.

Now, SEO costs money. So, we now have a few pieces of information which will allow us to calculate some key metrics in judging SEO performance.

If you take your budget - we do this on a monthly basis, but you could look at it quarterly or annually or over any period of time really - and you divide that budget by the number of users, you’ll get a cost per user. You can do the same with the number of leads generated. You can also do similar math by counting deals and dividing the budget by that number to calculate a client acquisition cost.

Now, it’s important to note here that visitors and even leads happen quickly where deals close months later. So, you’re going to want to look at when the leads were generated which resulted in the deals. This month’s SEO spend is not generating deals this month. Instead, it’s generating leads now which will turn into deals down the road. This is just another example of why Real Estate SEO needs to be seen as an investment.

So, if we now know our cost/user, cost/lead, and customer acquisition cost, we can now compare these numbers to other media or industry norms. For many campaigns, cost/lead will be a good indicator. You’ll need to do some in-depth analysis to calculate customer acquisition cost and you’ll need to stick with it for a long period of time and through several deal cycles. If you have systems in place, then you should definitely start tracking all marketing media down to customer acquisition cost, but realistically, for more than half of the readers of this blog, cost/lead will suffice.

There’s a lot more I could say about this topic. But I’m going to stop before this post gets any longer. I’ll write a follow-up in a couple of days. If you have any questions on how to calculate the ROI of your Real Estate SEO campaign, drop us a question and we’ll give you an answer. Thanks.

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.

Maybe you’re one of the lucky Real Estate agents? Maybe you’re the top producer in your office, the name on the sign outside, the envy of the rest of your peers. Well, and may not.

It’s a tough pill to swallow, but most of us are not the top producer in the office. There’s only one of those. In the US, there are 10 agents in the average real estate office. That means that 9 out of 10 agents aren’t the top producing agent. That’s OK. This post is for the 9 of you.

If you’ve been in the business for less than 3 years, if you’re having a slow winter, if you had a slow ‘08, then you don’t spend your whole day selling real estate. In fact, in this market, you might spend very little of your time actually selling property or working with home buyers. Your job, for a large part of your day, is to find clients.

If you’re really new to the real estate biz, then your full time job is to find clients, generate leads, learn, and cultivate your own brand. Some day, if you do this diligently and well, you’ll spend very little time looking for your next client.

I want you to know that Real Estate SEO is a fantastic investment of your time and money during this period when you have some time on your hands. If you work at achieving search engine placement now, and you have a quality website, then the leads will come. To quote a classic, if you build it, they will come. It’s true in Real Estate SEO, and you never know, old baseball players may come and visit you.

Anyway, let’s assume you’re one of the 9 real estate agents in the office that is not the top producer and let’s assume that you spend less time with buyers and sellers these days than you used to. You’re looking for a way to spend your time which will ad value to your business and help find you clients. Here are some things you can do:

• Start a real estate blog and post several times a week about your local market
• Create market reports on a monthly basis, post these on your blog and send them to your past and potential clients
• Create pages on twitter, facebook, and Linked-In and link your blog to those pages
• Make a goal of having 500 people following your business on Twitter.
• When you get to 500, set a new goal at 2000.
• Set a goal of having 500 fans for your Facebook page about your business
• Make sure you write a monthly newsletter.
• Set a goal of having 1000 subscribers.
• Make sure there’s a link to subscribe to your your email newsletter on your Twitter page, Facebook page, website, Link-In profile, and everywhere else you can put one.
• Add social bookmarking links to the pages of your site and the pages of your blog.

These are just a start. There’s a lot more you can do, but let’s talk about the effects you will see:

Many of these tasks will boost your search engine placement. This will, of course, help you generate leads, grow your email list, and engage perspective buyers and sellers. As you grow your email list, each blog post, market report, and newsletter will require the same work, but be more effective since it will be received by more people. The folks who follow you on twitter will be notified when you post on your blog. This will generate traffic for your site.

The more folks who are your fans, follow you on twitter, or on other social sites, the more traffic your site will see. Many of these are link building tasks. They will help boost your referral traffic and your search engine placement. I could go on. Suffices to say that your real estate seo campaign and your overall online marketing campaign will improve. These are not hard tasks, they just take time.

But let’s be honest, right now, you might have some time on your hands.

If you need help with any of this, just let us know. We’re happy to provide guidance and assistance.

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 campaing. 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 infomred 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.