Search Engine Marketing 3
As a real estate agent, search engine marketing should be on the forefront of your mind. With each year that passes, more and more consumers are using the internet to begin their search for a home. Most of these consumers are well informed buyers; looking to initially begin by viewing homes for sale.
If you’re looking to put yourself in front of these web surfers, you will eventually begin to consider search engine marketing within your lead generation strategy.
In this series of posts, I will share my knowledge of search engine marketing with you over the course of a few weeks; each post will get more and more detailed and precise.
Search Engines To Consider
In January of 2008, comScore tracked that Google has received 58.5% of all search engine traffic. That number increased to 59.2% in the following month. This tells me that a majority of my search engine marketing efforts should go to Google.
Coming up second is Yahoo at 22.2% market share. What a big decrease! Google has literally become a house-hold name; “Google it..” you’ll here ever so often. I’ve personally found many agents still using a majority of their lead generation dollars (dedicated to online marketing) to search engines besides Google.
I’m not saying investing in Yahoo or MSN is a bad idea. Rather, it’s just not the most efficient use of your marketing dollars. Investing in Google’s marketing options is by far more cost effective.
Types of Search Engine Marketing
Generally there are two types of marketing you’ll consider. In no significant order, you have pay-per-click (PPC) and organic search engine marketing.
Pay Per Click (PPC) Search Engine Marketing
Pay-per-click is pretty much exactly what the name implies. When investing in this type of program you will pay a pre-determined fee each time someone clicks on your advertisement.
Google PPC allows you to create an advertisement that is seen on the right side of search results. Many other search engines follow the same system.
How do search engines know when to show your advertisement? This is where keywords come into play. When creating your “campaign” for PPC, you’ll choose which keywords you’d like to target and you’ll also choose a bid price. This bid price is the amount of money you’re willing to pay when someone clicks on your advertisement.
The more competition your keywords has, the higher bid price it may have. You’re always welcome to bid lower that the amount the top person is willing to pay, however your advertisement is likely to not be seen as it appears at the very end of a long line of people advertising for your same keyword.
If you want to appear first, you’ll have to pay for it. When I was bidding for real estate keywords in my market, I’d ended up paying around $0.50 per click. This can really add up after a while – especially if you’re in a big real estate markets. This is where Organic search engine marketing begins to get attractive.
Organic Search Engine Marketing
When you search for anything on a search engine, you’ll be presented with the usual “top 10″ sites that seem to pertain to what you’re looking for. These sites do not pay to advertise here; they are organically discovered and ranked by the search engines throughout the day. Yes; this means rankings can fluctuate on a daily basis.
Free you say? What an incredible idea! I’ll rank top 10 for any term I’d like and essentially advertise for free! Not so fast.
Organic search engine rankings are far more difficult to rank for. This is especially true when it comes to marketing a real estate site. Real estate sites are abundant on the internet; you’ll have plenty of competition in this area.
In search engine marketing and your business, I begin to take baby-steps into this area by discussing some of the key ingredients to creating a great site for search engines. Optimizing your website for organic search engine rankings is often referred to as Search Engine Optimization (SEO). We’ll get into SEO in a later post in this series.
Wrapping It Up
In this weeks post you’ve learned the type of search engine marketing you can pursue and eventually incorporate into your lead generation strategies. Next week I’ll talk in more detail about optimizing your site for search engines, and great ways to begin building your search engine rankings.
Have you begun to investigate search engine marketing? What kind of questions did you have?
Please feel free to share your thoughts by adding a comment below. Remember – in the coming weeks we’ll get more detailed. This post was aimed to get the ball rolling.
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In the beginning PPC is effective as it gets you lout their fast and it also gives you some numbers that you can track. However most people now do not click on PPC ads as they know they are ads. Eye tracking shows most eye traffic on the organic listings in the Golden Triangle. SEO is the way to go in order to dominate the search engines for your industry.
Good article. When will the next in the series of articles hit the press?
Thanks Jim. I’m working on it; been pulled away here at the office but I promise to continue this series very soon!