Bombarded by ‘human signs’ at my street corner made me realize just how powerful search marketing really is

Human billboards.  Sign flippers.  Human Arrows.

They’re all over, men and women holding signs — sometimes even boogieing — at street corners and busy streets.

I soon found myself thinking about the significance of search engines — and the magnitude of its potential to leverage businesses.  Think about the power of search marketing — Organic and Pay Per Click.  Search engines and human signs are similar in a way that they aim to catch a need when it’s ‘hot’ –when they’re most likely to buy a product or service.

Both seek qualified leads. But search has it better because instead of putting a catchy sign and hoping something sticks;  search engines (if right keywords are targeted) serve as highways where only qualified leads pass by, you just have to give them what they want.  Instead of standing on a street corner, you can have a city wide signage All this without boogieing on a street under the scorching sun (or the extreme lack of).

The advantages of search marketing are widely talked about; even elementary to some.   We’ve all heard it before, but do we really appreciate it enough to invest enough time and cash that actually hurts on the onset?

Effective Keyword Strategies:

• Focus on optimizing for specific brand-related keywords rather than focusing on broader, more competitive, and more generic keywords.  Instead of “Reno homes for sale”, it’s far easier (and sometimes more profitable) to target “Arrow Creek Homes” (a branded, luxury community in the same city).

• If you are a brand owner then you need to develop strategies to make the most out of it.  Because if you don’t, someone else will.  Don’t forget that competitors can buy your brand name on Pay Per Click advertising.

• Follow your analytics (what keywords your site attracts) and build out popular and profitable pages.

• If you have a good generic domain name like “Reno Foreclosures“, make sure to break  down the site into specific areas and build a page around it.  This will make it easier to rank the page and more importantly, make it easier for users to find what they’re looking for.

• Use a range of keywords similar to your core target keywords and you will show search engines that your pages are real and get more results from the additional keywords.  Make it natural and readable…

Example: <title> Reno Homes For Sale </title>

<meta description = “Search for Reno homes online.  We have divided the 10 major residential areas in Reno to make it easier for you to search houses in Reno via MLS”/>

• If your domain name matches the searched-for-keywords, this gives you an ‘unfair advantage’, as noted in this article “The House Always Wins”. Having a name that matches your keywords makes it easier to click on your listing.  Think of it as a hot dog stand on a popular public landmark — Venice Beach in Los Angeles.  There would be a lot  of foot traffic, chances are people would buy food at this hot dog stand solely because of it’s great, convenient location.  But are they going to come back? Well, that depends on the product and service if it warrants a repeat visit.  But regardless, you get an advantage on the onset.

• Be aggressive in building content 2-4 months before summer and build links to it.  Summer is the busiest season for most real estate markets — for both buyer and sellers.

Researching Keywords:

• In my opinion, the best way to assess market demand is to start a Google adwords campaign targeting your keywords.  You will get real numbers rather than estimates. It’s time consuming and will cost a few hundred dollars but if you’re really serious about starting in the right foot — go with this route.  Of course, you can also do this with an established site.  Build/add a page that relates to your target keyword.  Buy adwords and check your analytics data.

• Google Adword Tools

• Seobook’s keyword tool (requires registration)

• Wordstream keyword tool

Note: these tools can give wild estimates.  Use with caution and set realistic expectations by subtracting 50% from estimate.

Here are some key information you can get out of traffic reports:

• Most popular pages of your web site
• Browsers used by the visitors
• Referring sites generating traffic to your web site (like Google, Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo)
• Entry pages showing the first page visited
• Paths taken by the visitors
• Search phrases used by visitors to find your site
• Errors experienced by the visitors

The above can provide rich insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness. This can also be very handy during your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) efforts.

Another option to study web traffic is Google Analytics. Once you sign up and setup a profile for your web site, you will be given a Javascript code for placement on your web pages you want Google to report.

Once you know more about your site and the visitor behavior, you can sign up for Google Adsense program. This will let you pick ads to place on your site for which Google will pay you on a monthly basis if the income exceeds $100.

Now that you know some of the benefits, make sure to ask for web traffic reports from your host or your web master and have it delivered to you weekly via email. Spend few minutes to look at the key sections and make adjustments to your site; after few iterations you should see the benefits.

How about making it one of your new year resolutions?  Feel free to drop a line or two to share your experience with us.

While I picked up a lot of good information, there are a few useful websites that I’d like to quickly share with you that I discovered from Raincamp and even one that was launched today not discovered through Raincamp.

Xobni.com – Pretty simple reverse lookup website that’ll let you know if your clients are on social media platforms and other web services.  This tool uses your clients e-mail to locate them on these other websites.  This could be your opportunity to connect with potential buyers and sellers on a whole new front.

Hittail.com – Everyone these days can setup Google Analytics on a website however this website’s tracking code pays more specific attention to the long tail keywords your website is already getting traffic from and then breaks down the data into useful and easy to understand charts.  They offer a 60 day free trial and then the basic membership after that is $10 per month.

Slydial.com – Have you ever forgot about an appointment or for some other unforeseen circumstance have not been able to make a scheduled phone call? Slydial.com connects you directly with a person’s voice mail without even ringing their phone.  You can now leave messages without risking an awkward conversation with that person you were supposed to call but didn’t.

10Minutes.org – A quick and free way to save some time on your hyper local keyword discovery research.  No need to mess around with a spreadsheet application or text document to manually create a list of potential keywords.  Create dozens or hundreds of keywords to explore within minutes of using this really simple tool.

What’s remarketing you ask – great, glad you did. According to Wikipedia, Retargeting (or Remarketing as Google calls it inside Adwords) is…

is a form of online targeted advertising by which online advertising is delivered to consumers based on previous Internet actions that did not in the past result in a conversion (in other words, the action intended by the site owner, typically making a purchase)

The reason I wanted to start a discussion on retargeting was to see..

1. Does it work?

and

2. Are you doing it? If so, with success?

Retargeting From the Consumer Side

Here’s my personal story with retargeting:

About a month ago, I was searching for a new car – specifically an Infiniti G37. I didn’t plan on buying one anytime soon, but I was just starting to research. I was on Google and since my search yielded a very targeted paid search ad right to the Infiniti site on the G37, I clicked it. I arrived on the Infiniti site to browse for a few minutes and research. Then, I left.

Well, since Infiniti wants to maximize all their paid clicks, they were able to leverage Google’s remarketing platform to notice that I had clicked the Infiniti PPC ad, but didn’t (in the eyes of whatever Infiniti wants me to do) convert.

Since then, for the past month, every site that I visit that’s showing Adsense, I see something like so:

Photo Credit: Google

You’ll notice that I was on a site about C++, nothing related to cars in this case at all. Typically, Adsense is site sensitive and will serve ads to visitors based on the site’s content, except in the case of remarketing.

You will see ads based on the premise that you previously visited a site from a PPC customer of Google (Infiniti in this case) that didn’t achieve their goal. They do this in hopes to get you (the customer) to convert. So will I convert and give Infiniti my information so they can sell me a new car?

If they keep this remarketing campaign up, I just might indeed. See how this applies to the customers you’re currently losing that don’t convert once they click your PPC ad?

Retargeting From the Advertiser Side

Google makes this super easy. Basically, you select your campaign and then tell the Adwords rule that you want target visitors on the Google Content network (ie. Adsense) that you want to see your ads that previously clicked your PPC ad but didn’t convert. It’s that simple.

Now it’s your turn to share… are you using Remarketing? Is it working? What types of conversion rates are you all seeing? I’d love to see what everyone thinks about remarketing/retargeting in general…

Cheers, Matthew

I have come up with a list of different ways agents can drive traffic to their sites. I have put them in order of what I think are most effective and where I would spend my time, money and energy. I based my list on tracking the results through analytics of agents I have been helping. I would love for you to share methods you have had good success with and anything you think should be on the list.

1. Craigslist definitely is the best affordable way to drive a lot of traffic to your site and it is free. It has a pretty low average bounce rate (24%) compared to other methods. The average page views per user is 10, which is pretty good. Plus the conversion rate of sign ups is slighter higher from the Craigslist users than the Google CPC users.

2. Google Adwords is probably the most effect way to drive a lot of traffic to your site if you have a marketing budget. If the ads are put together correctly and land on the right page you will have a higher conversion rate. The agents sites I have been helping have been getting around a 20% Bounce Rate. The average page views per user has been 13 from the campaigns we have been tracking. Some of the agents I have been helping have also been using Homegains CPC product and the bounce rate has been running about 21%. The average page views per user is 16, but it is much more expensive than Google Adwords to get the same amount of traffic.

3. Syndicating listings through Real Estate Portals like Zillow & Trulia, Realtor.com, Listhub & others.  Although the traffic from these portals is not even close to Craigslist or Adwords, I would definitely still get your listings syndicated in as many portals as you can as long as they link to your site or at least have your contact information. The traffic from them was not significant.  Realtor.com drove the most traffic but had a higher bounce rate (48%) with a lower page view per user (2.3). Zillow was the next most effective source of portals with a bounce rate of 32% with 5 page views per user.

4. Social Media (Facebook, Twitter, Youtube & Activerain) can drive some traffic to your site, but the users appear to be less focused on buying or selling homes. Of the sites I tracked Facebook & Twitter actually drove more traffic then the real estate portals, but the bounce rate and page views were horrible.  Here are the stats:
FaceBook – 55% Bounce rate / 1.7 page views per user
Twitter – 78% Bounce rate / 1.3 page views per user
Youtube – 49% Bounce rate / 3 page views per user
Activerain – 44% Bounce rate / 3.6 page views per user

5. Directories like Yahoo, Dmoz and industry ones. These may drive some traffic, but  are more worth getting listed in for the link back to your site. It is a bonus if they drive some traffic.

The analytic stats used a combined average of the following 4 sites: St Louis Real Estate Today, Coastal Bay, The Desert On The Market & Home Sales San Diego.

It is very important when implementing any marketing campaign to make sure that you have some sort of analytics or tracking system in place. I prefer Google Analytics. It is free and you can set up goals to measure your results. If you do not have a way to measure your conversions, you will never have an efficient, effective & predictable way to drive traffic to your site.

These are the most effective ones I have been able to come up with that are track able through analytics. I am sure there are probably other effective methods of driving traffic to your website and would love for you to join the conversation & share them.

1. They focus more of their time on other ways of generating business.
This is great if you are able to have a more diversified approach mean while still converting a decent amount of business from your website. Some of the other ways of generating business (prospecting expired listings, FSBO’s, past clients and COI) are still highly effective if done consistently. If you are spending time doing any of these methods you may want to find a way to get them to start using your website as a tool. This could help convert more of those prospects.

2. They don’t have search engine traffic.
Possible Solutions: A. Educate yourself on SEO and either do it your self or hire someone to do it for you (focus on the low hanging fruit first). B. Think about doing some CPC campaigns, but only if your site is easy to use and set up to convert leads into business. C. Always promote your site through Craigslist ads, Facebook, Twitter and any other promotional stuff your are doing.

3. Their websites are too busy (noisy).
Possible Solutions: Try cleaning up your pages and not having so many widgets and clutter. You worked hard to get the user their for a reason (don’t distract them). Keep the page focused and clean. Make the property search the main focus not a hyper link to a search that is hard to locate.

4. Their sites are not easy to use.
Solutions: Make sure your IDX search is easy to use and gets the user into search results quickly.  If the user has to work at it, you are definitely going to lose a high percentage.  If you use a required registration make sure the user can see & knows what they are going get before you ask them to sign up.

5. Their follow up is weak.
Solutions: Follow up on email requests from the site ASAP. If you are not your competitors are If you require registration you should be calling them ASAP and asking them if there is anything you can do to help them. Most people really appreciate this and it will keep them using your site if it works well!

I am always looking for ways to get my conversions rates higher and new ways of generating business. Currently my team is generating about 90 – 95% of our closings from my personal site, which is well into the triple digits. We probably should be focusing a little more energy on other things as well to get a little more balanced. I would love to hear what you are doing to increase your business from your website and how others can increase their closings.

Content is king – If you have a blog, why not write a blog about some local condo buildings or neighborhoods you have intimate familiarity with?  Spice it up with some keyword phrases that you think people would use to find that building.  Add in some fun extras like Walkscore if applicable even.  Perhaps you want to get REALLY serious about this one neighborhood or building.  Start a new, separate blog that is focused only on this area.  Get a URL that is peppered with keywords as well but don’t get too silly because more isn’t always better.

Buy your way to the top – If you don’t have the time, skills, content, etc to pump up your SEO to the top of your tier, why not buy your spot via google adwords.  This is how the big boys play it but you don’t need the big budgets they have.  Use the keyword sandbox to find your long tail keywords.  Say that you want to sell in Beverly Hills.  You may first think about buying the keyword, “Beverly Hills real estate”.  That’s fine but you’ll pay an arm and a leg for it.  There were almost 15,000 hits on that phrase in April.  How about something like “Beverly Hills condos” though?  That has under 3,000 hits.  Better yet, snag a couple others like “Sunset blvd condos” etc.  The more obscure the phrase, the easier it will be to dominate it with less money.

Don’t bait and switch – The best-picked adword campaign in the world cannot save you if you don’t have a way to close ‘em.  Send them somewhere they would want to go.  Otherwise, you’ll just get a bounce and that will do nothing but make you poor quicker.   Don’t forget to track your results with google analytics.

Peyman Aleagha has even more ideas on how to use this strategy but I suggest starting small and tracking your efforts before you go nuts on this.

That being said, there are many more ways to advertise an open house these days.  Some cost money like the newspaper, sending flyers to other agents, etc.  There are plenty of free ways though too.  In many cases, I think the free methods may be more effective at marketing to your target audience but I have one paid method in here that I am experimenting with as well.  When I advertise an open house these days I:

Post it on my local MLS and my brokerage’s website (if applicable) – This is a no brainer.  If your MLS has a place to enter broker’s opens, you should certainly use it since many agents do check there to see when occupied properties will be available for viewing.  I’m with Windermere and they also have a place to post public opens.  Anywhere I can advertise an open house for free is on top of my list.

Use Postlets to create a Craigslist ad – I like Postlets because it creates very attractive ads in the first place.  It saves me a lot of time being able to copy and paste for Craigslist instead of trying to type up a text ad from scratch or busting out html on the fly.  Neither of those methods rival Postlets.  Check out my Postlets page for examples of what the ads look like.  This is pretty similar to what you’ll see when you use them to post your ad on Craigslist as well.

Use www.openhomez.com to syndicate the open house ad and track it – The jury is still out on this website as far as I’m concerned, but I’ve been giving it a chance lately and it has gained a few more sets of eyeballs.  It’s easy to use and the price is right so why not?  They spew out a feed on Twitter of all the open houses people input.  This can’t be a bad thing.

Zillow! – Zillow is yet another place to post open houses.  Once again, free exposure is a good thing so take all of it that you can get.

Advertise my open on twitter and facebook - Postlets makes this ridiculously easy but don’t forget to punch in the time and date that you will be there.  See my twitter for a sample of what my open house ads look like.  I use facebook to keep in touch directly with other real estate agents, past clients, friends and family.  It doesn’t hurt to share your open houses with them.  First off, it gives you something to write about.  Second, it lets them know you are still actively in the real estate business.  Third, you never know, they may just want to see it.

Change my blog entry about the listing to highlight there is an open house – I have started to write conversational blog entries on my blog about my various listings.  When I say conversational, I mean that it’s not just my MLS listing rehashed.  It’s neighborhood information along with other property or building information that you would not have room for on a normal flyer.  I make sure to pepper the entry with keywords that are used by people who might want to see my listing.  Here is the link to the listings I have posted on my blog so you can see what I’m talking about.

Direct market to agents - Other real estate agents are still your number one source of buyers.  I try to send out emails to follow up with agents who have shown the property already.  Also send out to agents who have other listings nearby.  They are not your competition, they can be your biggest allies and many of them would love to join up with you and hold their properties open as well.  Another idea is to check any data you may have harvested on Google Analytics.  Look to see which city most traffic to your listing has come from and focus your marketing effort on those agents.

Use google adwords to stir up some more traffic - This is one of my newest tricks.  I’ve started purchasing keywords on Google Adwords for certain properties I have listed.  I won’t post the ones I’m using here because I don’t want any of you skewing my data.   I’ll give you some hints here though.  Say you have a Brownstone in New Jersey for sale and you are going to hold it open soon.  You would want to go on google and use their Keyword Tool.  This tool allows you to see how much traffic various keywords are getting.  A couple of phrases I would try would be “New Jersey brownstone”, “Brownstone for sale”, “New Jersey townhouse”.  You can purchase ALL of these phrases and set a monthly ad budget.  This will keep your costs in line.  Aim the ad you create back at your conversational blog entry or somewhere else you’ve advertised your open house.  I plan to elaborate on this later in another blog when I’ve had more experience with it but my first impression has been very positive.

These are just a few of the things that *I* have been doing lately to stir up traffic to my open houses.  What have you been doing? I would like to hear; please post in the comments if you have any other ideas.

The Google Affiliate Network as part of the integration of DoubleClick, the DoubleClick Performics Affiliate Network, will now operate as the Google Affiliate Network for advertisers targeting users located in the United States.

The AdSense Referrals program enables publishers to apply for advertiser programs and get paid based on advertiser-defined actions instead of clicks or impressions. For further details, please visit: www.google.com/ads/affiliatenetwork.

AdSense for content ads *NOTE: If you have less than three AdSense for content ad units on a page, you may wish to replace the referral ad units with standard AFC ad units. If you currently use referral ads, either to promote Google products or offerings from AdWords advertisers, AdSense Referrals code will no longer display ads beginning the last week of August. Google is encouraging you to take the following steps before the product is retired:

1. Remove the referral code from your site(s): Remove all referral code from your sites before the last week of August, so you can continue to effectively monetize your ad space.

2. Run and save all referrals reports on your desktop: Create and save all reports related to the referrals program on your desktop, so you continue to have access to your valuable campaign information.

…..

Why is this happening?

We are constantly looking for ways to improve AdSense by developing and supporting features which drive the best monetization results for our publishers. Sometimes, this requires retiring existing features so we can focus our efforts on the ones that will be most effective in the long term. For this reason, we will be retiring the AdSense Referrals program. If you have any additional questions, contact the Help Center.
The Google AdSense Team”

So could this effect what you earn from your referrals? You might want to check your AdSense Account and make the necessary changes as announced by Google.

Source: Google

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1)  - MakeUseof.com – Blog/Website/Info Chest, that I would categorize as “Tech Crunch” lite! Great stuff, brought to you in a very simple format. A must read and must RSS for any fan of Real Estate web 2.0. Here is an excerpt from a recent post…

Become a Tweeting Twitterer with These Apps

from MakeUseOf.com by Mark O’Neill

Being the titillating tweeting twitterer that I am, I figured it was time for another brief round-up of some Twitter tools that have been doing the rounds in cyberspace recently. Twitter seems to be going from strength to strength and web developers are coming up with even more innovative ideas for Twitter web programs and software tools.

Here are a few that have caught my eye recently :

GroupTweet

This interesting service seems to be trying to make a dent in Pownce’s bubble. Or look at it another way – imagine sending out one big private email to everyone – or one big SMS. Now you get an idea of what GroupTweet is all about.

GroupTweet is for when you want to send out instant private messages to a select group of people. You would set up an exclusive Twitter account, send the private messages to that Twitter account as a Direct Message (which keeps the messages out of the Twitter public timeline) and GroupTweet then re-sends the message to everyone in the group as a new private message.

2) This post, via Agent genius, by Matt Rathbun where, in his words “I may have been a bit heavy handed”, not by my words. I believe he hit it right on the head! We, as Bloggers have to be cognisant of the actions that may result from our words. Not that we should “go easy” or throw “Soft balls”, but we must at all times maintain decency and decorum with our posts. Here is a piece from Matt’s post…

Another Hero Has Fallen

I know that many of us have written or read posts begging for “niceness” in the blogsphere, and I am sure many of us are tired of hearing the constant rants regarding the big meanies that tend to live to trash other people. I’ve read yet another ill intended blog last night, and I’m frankly sick of it. I have yet to figure out what benefit an author of these type of posts receives. In this case, it was a writer who I have ignored their past attacks and concentrated on the positive contributions (which were many) that I’ve seen them articulate. They were the single author that I had followed on this particular blog, because the sum total of the other posts were usually, simply nefarious. It is inconsequential to you the reader, or to the blog itself; but I have promptly removed this last blog author from my reader.

If you only had a heart

In reading this latest blog I had to ask a question. Does the author of these hateful posts realize that the target of their insalubrious writings have families? They are people, who in most cases, are simply trying to provide lodging for their families and groceries for their children? ….

Matt continues to eloquently state his, and many Bloggers, contentions. A must read!       and finally…..

3) Postlets.com – A FREE, I’m sorry? Did you say FREE? Yes, FREE Web 2.0 site that allows an Agent to enter their listing one time, and have it broadcast to 8 Major Listing sites, including; Zillow, Trulia, Vast, Google Base, and others. It even produces a code for you that will generate a nice HTML, Flyer if you will, that can be placed on Craig’s list(Another spot you must be as an Agent, or you are “Smokin Crack!”)

Real Estate Agents, please this time for sure…Listen, Learn, Grow, & Prosper!

 The Coach

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