Using search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN continues to be one of the most important ways to attract real estate prospects.
In the last couple of years this has intensified, making it hard to get and stay in the game. In particular if you are just getting started it is very difficult to get top rated in the organic listings of the search engine like Google and Yahoo. Unless your site was online before 2003 you have a little chance of ranking well in the organic listings.
There is an interesting way to deal with this problem. Buy an old domain and or real estate website and revitalize it with new up to date content, the subject of another article.
In the an earlier article about SEO I talked about using keyword research to determine which are the LOCAL geographic terms prospects buyers/sellers are more likely to enter into the search engine to find a new home or real estate agent. Using these terms you can now setup very specific local PPC search campaigns. All the major search engines have now setup functions to do this.
You may not like the idea paying per click but it's the quickest way to get into the search engines. It may also be the cheapest direction to take in the long run since you can immediately measure the success of your campaigns.
It turns out that when a searcher clicks on those upper sponsored links they are in the later part of the buying cycle. When buyers are in the exploratory stage of looking for a product or service they "wander" on the search engine results page (SERP), looking at organic links. But at the end they are in a hurry and want to get the task done.
This matches the buying cycle we have seen develop in the real estate market. Many people get themselves pre-qualified for their mortgage and lurk the real estate listings watching for the right property to come up. They may be using Realtor.com or a local real estate site. But it's at that point that they pounce, and then they are interested in finding an agent. It becomes somewhat of an impulse buy.
This means that you will want to be at or near the top of the SERPs for your local real estate search terms.
Getting to the top of the list can be done in one of three ways:
- Bid on generic search terms like "real estate," "real estate agent," or "new home construction" but on a very limited geographic basis. You must limit this to a specific zip code or town or it gets too expensive. Google gives you even more options but that will be covered in the next article.
- Bid on generic geographic terms like "Miami Beach," "Flagstaff," and "Bergen County," again on a limited geographic basis. You must also use negative terms in order not to attract people who are interested in travel information and not real estate.
- Bid on specific geographic real estate search terms where the searcher includes the name of the locale like "Westbury real estate," "Rhode Island real estate agent," "MLS Chicago." Here the user is limiting their search by entering the geographic local. This might be considered two types of sub-campaigns.
One would be local and the other would unlimited. If you think the type of ad and landing page will be different for a local person vs. someone looking to move in from outside the area then split these into two different campaigns. A local buyer is more of a "who you know" sell, for which you'll need references, maybe even on the landing page. The remote buyer might be more of a "what you know" sale. In this case you need an information web pages; schools, shopping, housing market, etc.
One big advantage to PPC over SEO is the landing page. You have complete control over the webpage the ad points to. As stated in item 3 above, you need different landing pages that depend on the key words the searcher enters.
For example, if someone uses a key phrase like "real estate agent" you would want to point them to the page on you website where you describe yourself and not to your home page. If someone were to enter "Orange County Condos" take them to an MLS listing, but limit it to listing condos only. Most MLS will allow you to do these type of custom pages/queries.
