Blogging or pay-per-click? Which is better for generating traffic to your real estate website?
Every now and again, we come across an article slagging pay-per-click advertising and promoting some other alternative way of getting traffic, like blogging. The main argument typically goes that you have to keep on paying for your pay-per-click traffic to your real estate web site, while traffic from your blogging is free.
Now, that makes just about as much sense as saying that you should not advertise your properties in magazines because you have them up on your website!
You see, both pay-per-click ads and blogging about real estate have their place in your long-term marketing strategy, because these two advertising methods target different sectors of your audience at different times in your marketing cycle.
Regular readers of our sister blog on real estate marketing will be very well aware that we constantly harp on the importance of blogging to establish a relationship with your prospective clients and provide a stream of fresh, new content for your website. We’ve said this time and again and again and it’s something we cannot stress enough.
Still, as we say at the end of our article on Why Ongoing Internet Marketing is Vital for Your Website’s Success, pay-per-click advertising has a fundamental role to play both in getting you instant and cost-effective traffic to your real estate website until your blog takes off, and also after that initial period to cover keywords that that your blog is weak on.
The one consideration that you must take into account about your pay-per-click campaign - as with any form of advertising - is that it gives you a good return on investment. This can be broken down into two parts:
1) Running an efficient real estate PPC campaign that gets you good leads at a low cost
Of course it is easy to go wrong when running your pay-per-click campaign, and end up in the red with little or nothing to show for your money.
For example, you can target the wrong keywords, pay too much for your clicks, or even have inefficient landing pages that don’t convert well into leads. That is why it is important that you put your PPC advertising in the hands of real estate pay per click managers who have a proven track record.
2) Ensuring that you convert leads into clients
Any lead you get - be it from pay-per-click, or from the natural search engines - is a potential sale waiting to happen. But like a seed needs to be nurtured into a plant, your lead has to be developed into a relationship with a prospective client if you are to make the most of your pay-per-click enquiries.
The bottom line is that people can go on forever discussing if blogging is better than pay per click or not. The answer will depend on the quality of the blog and on that of the pay-per-click campaign.
Yet it is not even a question of better or worse. Blogging and other SEO techniques, and pay-per-click marketing can both give you very good returns on investment, and if you want to make the most out of your online presence and attract as many potential clients as possible to your website, you should be doing both!