BRER Real Estate Marketing Blog

The February newsletter is now available.  Here’s a preview:

• You’ll learn about how to write a listing description that sells.  The words and visual images you include in a listing description can make a difference in how fast a home sells, and in the selling price.  Find out what to use and what to avoid!
• You’ll learn about a tool you can use to get instant access to visitors while they’re on your website.  Quick response is critical, and there’s nothing faster than instant!

Subscribe to the newsletter to get your own copy of the monthly e-mail publication delivered right to your mailbox.  And, check out this month’s edition.

I get this question a lot:  Which is better for driving traffic - Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or Pay Per Click (PPC)?

My answer is:  They are two different things, each useful in their own way.

SEO is a long-term strategy.  For the long-term health of your real estate website, you need to implement an SEO strategy.  It should start before you create your website, and continue on for the life of your site.  The objective of an SEO strategy is to achieve “natural” or “organic” rankings in search engine results pages (SERPS). 

When you look at the result of a search you do in any of the three major search engines (MSN, Yahoo and Google), you will typically notice Sponsored Listings across the top of the screen and down the right side.  Those listings are usually the result of PPC marketing.  The sites shown in the main body of the page are there as a result of good SEO.

There are always costs involved in implementing an SEO strategy.  Whether you do it yourself, and invest your time, or hire someone to assist, and invest in paying their fees, there is a cost. 

Some people call SEO-generated traffic free.  That couldn’t be farther from the truth.  All those sites you see at the top of the SERPs got there because someone was working hard behind the scenes to make it happen.

PPC is a tool.  Done properly, PPC can generate immediate traffic to your website.  And, assuming that your website is set up to motivate visitors to contact you, PPC does generate leads.

Like all marketing, Internet marketing is all about numbers.  You need a critical mass of visitors to your website to have some of them turn into leads.  And, you need a good follow up system to turn those leads into prospects.

Based on that fact, you can imagine that using PPC to generate that critical mass of visitors could get very expensive.  So, you want to be conservative in your use of PPC.

Another question I get a lot is:  Which should I do first:  SEO or PPC?  I would encourage anyone with a website to focus on SEO when you’re setting your site up, and continue to pursue your SEO strategy on an on-going basis.

Here’s one example that shows why starting SEO early is important.  An critical part of SEO is establishing incoming links.  And, the search engines assign weight to those links, in part, on how long the link has been in place.  So, if you wait a year before doing any SEO, you’re already a year behind.  Putting some effort or budget toward even a small bit of link building will serve you well over time because your links will have time to gain authority based on how long they’ve been in place.

If you have the budget (or time) to do SEO and PPC at the same time, that’s great.  You’ll get some “right now” traffic with the PPC while your SEO strategy is building toward success.

If you don’t have the capacity to do both, then I always suggest being pragmatic.  If you’re in a situation where you need to generate revenue quickly, then PPC would be the best approach.  Keep in mind, though, that a site needs a critical mass of traffic before leads will start being generated.  So, if you’re going the PPC route, set your budget at an amount that will be effective.

If you have the luxury of letting the site traffic build through SEO efforts, then that’s where I’d start.  SEO will bring continuing benefits to your Internet presence in terms of ongoing traffic; I think of it as an investment.  PPC, while it will introduce your services to visitors who may return to the site, I still think of it as a cost because it doesn’t have the long-term impact that SEO will have.

The moral of the story?  Don’t try to choose between SEO and PPC.  Develop a long-term SEO strategy, and use PPC as a tactic that will help you meet your goals!

I spoke to an associate, Sam Chapman, who markets Austin real estate using a Point2 Agent website.  Sam called after reading the January Build Real Estate Results newsletter to give me some feedback about his experiences in improving his search engine rankings. 

Here’s a success story worth sharing.  Sam’s site is now #5 on Google for the search term Austin Real Estate, and he’s a very happy camper. 

From my perspective, I can see that Sam laid the groundwork for being noticed by the search engines and relating to his site visitors.  He replaced the content that comes with the Point2 Agent website with his own original content, and he wrote the content in first person, as if he is just talking to each visitor.  He added some pages on specific locations in his market area, and he also updated each page’s title and meta tags to correspond to the content of the page.

Right now, Sam’s site has about 1500 incoming links recognized by the search engines, so he’s been busy following an SEO strategy that won him a variety of incoming links.  And, these efforts got him solidly onto the second page of the Google search results.

Here’s what he’s done lately that put him over the top - onto the top of the rankings on the first page of the search results:

1.  He cleaned up the code on his Point2 site.  It’s true that the coding for template sites like Point2 is more complex than a hand-coded site.  However, the search engines do a pretty good job of dealing with Point2’s standard code. 

Sam’s problem was that he, like many new webmasters, had copied some content from Word documents straight into his website.  The content looks fine when you do that, but a large amount of extraneous code comes with the content from a Word document.  So, cleaning up the code can make the search engine’s job a lot easier.  And, in fact, Point2 even provides an icon on the editing toolbar that will help you streamline the code on your site.  (Learn the right way to add content to your website)

2.  He started a Point2 Blog.  Last November, Sam took advantage of the new integrated blog Point2 introduced.  He started publishing a blog post every 1-3 days.  Right now, his blog is a PR3 page.  And, he uses a long-tail SEO strategy in choosing the topics for his blog posts.  That means, he determines what seemingly obscure search terms his site is found for, and writes blog entries optimized for those terms.

3.  He maintains an ActiveRain blog.  Sam also has an active blog going on the ActiveRain site.  This has provided him with lots of good opportunities for cross-linking to his real estate website using targeted keywords in context. 

Actually, I think everyone in real estate should participate on the ActiveRain site.  The search engines love the site, and the cross-linking opportunities are outstanding.  Not to mention the enjoyment of participating in a vibrant community of real estate professionals.

While cleaning up the code on his site probably had a positive impact on the search engine’s ability to crawl his website, the only other things he’s done differently lately relate to his use of blogs.  So, for those of you real estate professionals who are wondering whether you should dive into the blog craze, maybe this success story will give you an additional push.

More details about blogging and long-tail SEO are to come.  Stay tuned.