Real Estate Pay-Per-Click Marketing Blog

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!

Time and again, we get asked the same old question: Which way to go, a pay-per-click campaign or hard SEO work and a good dose of patience to get a good position in the natural search rankings?

Of course, the answer is that you need both. Getting good search engine rankings is an essential part of your long-term Internet marketing, while pay-per-click will give you the immediate and targeted results you need to get your business going strong online. Once your website begins to achieve good search engine rankings, you can slow down on the pay-per-click, or even keep it as long as it is giving you a positive ROI.

And just in case you were wondering, we do practise what we preach! Last November we decided to modify our website www.payperclickmanagement.eu to focus on a combination of pay-per-click and real estate keywords (instead of just pay-per-click). After all, 99% of our clients are estate agents and that is what we specialise in.

Ever since then, our partners at Sorted Sites have been busy doing some serious SEO work for us and the results are coming in even faster than we had ever imagined! Take a look at some examples of our Google rankings as of today.

We have our three websites www.payperclickmanagement.eu, www.pay-per-click-manager.com and www.sortedsites.info in 1^st, 4^th and 5^th positions for ‘estate agency adwords’! (Click images to enlarge)

www.payperclickmanagement.eu is in top position for ‘estate agent pay per click’.

www.sortedsites.com is top for ‘pay per click in spain’.

www.payperclickmanagement.eu has 3^rd spot for ‘property pay per click’, 9^th spot for ‘real estate pay per click’ and 10^th spot for ‘real estate adwords’. We’re still not satisfied with the last two, but we’re working on it!

There is a very fitting parallel between the economy and jolly old Darwinian evolution. At the end of the day, it’s not just the fittest who survive, however, but those businesses that are most able to adapt to the changing circumstances of the harsh, real world. And there is nothing like a recession to bring out the most resilient businesses that are smart enough to know how to weather the storm, leaving the others behind to wonder what ever happened to the ‘good old days’.

Please don’t kill your business

Every business has its own strategies for trying to cope with a recession like the one that is currently hitting real estate markets in Spain, the United States and other parts of the world. Some close down offices… others fire staff… But all too often, the first thing to go when the purse strings need tightening is - astonishingly enough - the marketing and advertising. It actually seems as though the knee-jerk reaction of many business decision-makers to a looming recession and tough times ahead is to put the company out of its misery!

When the going gets tough, the tough get marketing

You see, never is your business in more dire need of good marketing than in the middle of a recession. When times are tough, it is more important than ever - absolutely vital - to figure out how you can spend your money wisely to attract as many clients as possible to keep your business afloat. Your first instinct may be to put your business into hibernation mode and hope that the rough times pass quickly by, but that will only weaken you further and leave more space for your competitors to thrive.

Go for marketing that can be proven to work

If you’ve never done it before, the recession is a perfect time shape up your marketing. Trim off the extra fat that is not performing and make sure that every bit of advertising muscle is pulling a dozen times its weight or more. This is the time to shift to a more accountable form of marketing where your strategies are tried and tested, so you can be sure that every Dollar, Euro or whatever you spend is paying you dividends in the form of good leads that you can follow up and convert into sales.

And now for the good news…

There is one way to market your business online and know exactly what you’re spending, exactly what you’re getting back and what you have to do to improve your results - run a Pay-Per-Click marketing campaign.

Pay-Per-Click marketing allows you to direct your advertising money right at the people who are already searching for your business and most likely to become your clients. What’s more, you only pay for results - people actually visiting your website looking for your services. And best of all, with PPC advertising, you can know exactly how each and every one of your advertising campaigns are performing down to the keyword level, so you stop burning money on what doesn’t work and invest more in what is.

Nip your recession in the bud!

The recession is now, and now is when your business must get that extra boost it needs to survive! So contact us right away to discuss how a Pay-Per-Click advertising campaign can get you that instant business that you need so badly!

Not only will we advise you on the best way to set up your PPC campaign itself, but we will also examine your web pages to make sure that they work well to turn site visits into those leads you want. Don’t dilly dally! Contact Touchdown Pay Per Click Management now!

What if you could advertise your real estate agency on the Internet and…

• …target your ads directly to people searching for property in your area?
• …only pay when people click your ads and visit your estate agency’s website?
• …track the performance of each and every ad and every cent you spend?

Just think about it! When you run a property ad in a newspaper or magazine (or even publish your own real estate magazine) it’s not easy to know how well your advertising is performing. In theory, you could, of course, (and probably should) set up a manual tracking system to determine how many enquiries your ads are generating. After all, this is the only way to know what works so you can do more of that, and what doesn’t work so you can stop flogging a dead horse with your cash. But let’s face it. How many estate agents actually do this?

The good news is that running a pay-per-click advertising campaign on search engines like Google and Yahoo! brings that very sort of control within your grasp! With a properly set up pay-per-click campaign, not only do you just pay for the Internet traffic you receive, but you can also know which ads, which keywords and even which pages of your website are performing best so you can focus your available budget on what’s most profitable to you. What’s more, with pay-per-click advertising it’s also possible to automatically track specific actions your website visitors take, such as contacting you by means of an online form or subscribing to your property newsletter.

Of course, there will be additional outcomes of a click that are more difficult (though often not impossible) to track because they do not happen directly through your website. An example of this is a visitor e-mailing or phoning you directly. However, by tracking the conversions from clicks to online enquiries, sign-ups, and so on, you can still get a good picture of how well your estate agency’s pay-per-click campaign is doing. And just as importantly, you will find out how effective your website is at converting visitors to leads.

Well, that’s just a little idea of what pay-per-click advertising is - and a little taste of how powerful it can be when it comes to effectively advertising your real estate agent business online. As you might expect, running a successful pay-per-click campaign is not just a question of pushing a button or two and hoping for the best. But fear not! We’re here to help both through this blog as well as through the real estate pay-per-click management services we offer as Touchdown Pay-Per-Click Management.

Watch this space!