Real Estate SEO

Hey folks. For the local readers (we’re based in Boston) the 3rd installment of the course I’m giving for the North East Association of Realtors is happening this coming Monday. Here’s a link to the course outline. I’m looking forward to seeing you there.

The next session is going to be an in-depth look a the subject of this post. We’re going to be talking about traditional media as it compares to online media. Of course real estate seo is an online marketing medium. So, we’ll be touching on SEO and talking about how it stacks up against the other media.

Now, at Boston Logic, we’re on the side of those who proclaim the digital marketing mantra “Print is dead!” Well, maybe not yet, but it’s circling the drain.

The basic question is, why is this happening? Why is traditional media losing favor while online media is gaining a larger and larger share of the marketing dollar? From our perspective, there are two forces at work.

First of all, our lives are moving online. You need to market to the customers where they are. Your customers are online. Everyone quotes the fact that 80 or 90 percent of real estate buyers start their search online. But the reality is that we do a lot more than just search for property online. We spend hours each day online. We’re buying fewer newspapers, listening to less radio, and we use our TiVo to skip the commercials when we’re watching TV.

The result of this trend is that the number of impressions that each ad spot gets has come down. A TV spot used to be 25% more effective than it is today. And this is steadily declining. Newspaper circulations are falling off a cliff. The news is free online. The paper wastes trees. Pick your reason, we’re all just buying fewer newspapers at the news stand. All of this means that the value of these media is decreasing. So much so that lots of papers are cutting staff, closing their doors, or moving to a completely web-centric model. This means that they’re only going to offer their content online. Hallelujah.

The second reason that marketing dollars are going on line is accountability. Online marketing media, SEO, PPC, social media, banner placement, and email marketing, are all relatively easy to track. You can know how many visitors came from Google’s organic results to your site and how many of these users turned into leads or customers. This means you can calculate the cost of each lead based on the number of leads and your investment into SEO. Calculating ROI is even easier when you’re using Pay Per Click.

In stark contrast, it’s hard to know if a user came from a TV ad or just typed in your web address. Sure, you can print a promo code in the newspaper ad and use that to try and track effectiveness, but then you need to offer some kind of a discount and not everyone will use the promo code. So, you don’t know if your ad is a flop or if it’s actually performing better than your numbers are telling you, based on the number of folks who entered the promo code.

Most small and medium sized businesses don’t even try to track the effectiveness of their print campaign. To most business owners, marketing is a black box. You insert money on one end and hope that it produces business out of the other end. The black box provides little accountability and really doesn’t help you understand your ROI.

If you are one of the smart ones and you are working to understand the ROI on your many marketing media, then the results are probably quite clear. Most marketers know that they get better value out of online media than they do from traditional media. This is the nail in the coffin.

When the numbers tell you that SEO leads are costing you $5 and PPC is costing $7 but the newspaper produces leads at $35. Well, it doesn’t take an MBA to know that you should stop paying for newspaper ads and invest more of your marketing dollars into SEO and PPC. Everyone who runs the numbers is seeing this trend and they’re all moving online.

I could, very honestly, go on. This topic is quite broad. I’ll touch on it in another post soon. I’ll certainly be going into much greater detail on Monday. I hope to see you there! Thanks.

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