Real estate investor marketing with PPC and SEO can be extremely expensive, but when it’s well-managed the ROI can be insanely good.
Want to know what makes the difference between a giant suck-hole of lost cash versus a good investment?
Seriously, we *hate* to see people wasting tons of money on PPC – or anywhere else, really. But PPC is an especially big business – remember, Google makes over a billion dollars each month from advertising, so they’re doing something right.
In fact, they’re doing a lot of things right… which is why we don’t use their system to manage our PPC campaigns.
Do you really think AdWords is built to help you save money? Or is it built to make Google money? I think it’s pretty darn safe to assume that Google’s interface is doing a fantastic job of making money for Google. It’s almost as if they spent fortunes hiring the best minds on the planet to help them make money… oh wait, that’s exactly what they did.
So how do you beat ’em at their own game?
Well, to some extent you’ve gotta play with Google, not against them. Get nice and cozy like, learn their secrets. Google is a search giant – depending on how you slice the numbers – with at least 2/3 of all searches online.
That brings me to the secrets of getting great ROI from SEO & PPC:
Don’t put all your eggs in Google’s basket.
Over at our sister company Investor Carrot, our PPC Management Tool is a seriously cool piece of software that delivers your info across Google, Yahoo, Bing, AOL, and about 100 other powerful directories that are used by millions of people each day. Even though the traffic counts might look a lot higher elsewhere, when every lead is potentially worth thousands of dollars to your business, do you really want to risk losing them to other investors?
We’ll give you access to a 24/7 dashboard where you can monitor and track your results (more on that soon).
Get really good data, then use it.
To get great ROI, it’s really important that you monitor and track your SEO and PPC campaigns so that you can continuously adjust them to improve your results. Make sure that you’re optimizing and ranking for keywords that are actually getting traffic, or else you won’t get leads. Look at the offers that your competition is making on each of those keywords to make sure that your offer is more compelling. Test out multiple ads and landing pages in order to see what gets the best results.
Our team of SEO & PPC experts works closely with our tech and marketing departments to deliver the powerful combination of technology + creative that is essential to get huge ROI from online campaigns – and we constantly test ourselves in order to achieve continuous improvement on our already stellar results, because we know the value of great data.
Track phone calls, not just form submissions.
Are you asking the people who call you if they’ve checked out your website? Chances are good that they have. Most people these days will visit your site to make sure you’re credible before picking up the phone – and test results show that PPC ads online that have a phone number convert better than those that don’t. Our new PPC Management Tool uses some cool technology to track the number of phone calls that result from your PPC campaigns so that you can get accurate info to calculate your ROI.
Build a killer strategy, then implement.
Don’t be one of those folks who say “that didn’t work for me” after spending thousands of dollars to get poor results from PPC and SEO. Instead, start with a concrete strategic annual marketing plan so that you know exactly the steps you’re going to take each month and the results you expect, then measure your actual performance and adjust along the way. SEO takes months (even years) of hard work to deliver a steady stream of daily leads, and even a good PPC campaign will take some time to produce results. Plus, it’s really tempting to be reactive and make big changes when searches are down for a month or two. Don’t “try it out” – create a plan with solid steps and an annual budget based on real data, or you’ll be throwing money away.
Hire good help.
Do you want to pay someone to learn on your dime, or do you want great results?
It’s really a choice of investment strategy. If you’re investing in a business partner, relative or family friend who wants to become an expert at online real estate marketing, it might make sense to train ’em in house.
Some of our clients have invested their time and money training employees or virtual assistants to drive their SEO & PPC campaigns (they’re using our trainings to teach ’em). That’s cool, but we’ve learned that the time and energy it takes to train the VA is rarely worth the time… once some folks become SEO & PPC experts, they recognize how valuable this kind of knowledge is… and they start charging a lot more money, then leave for someone who is paying more.
Others simply don’t want to spend their time, and they hire us so that they can focus on doing deals. We’ve created great systems that leverage great talent and killer technology, so we can charge less each month than it costs to hire someone in-house. Even the investors who are paying over $20K/month for their marketing can’t get results like ours from SEO & PPC. Online lead generation is our focus and speciality, so we’ve learned a lot of great tricks to reduce the time we spend while dramatically increasing the results. That’s the benefit of experience and wisdom!
Focus on your niche.
If you’re a highly ambitious person, it’s exciting to make big plans.
But if you want great ROI, you’ve gotta focus and start small.
It’s hugely important to pick keywords that really reflects your target marketing strategy, or else you’ll end up with a lot of expensive traffic and poor quality leads. I’ve heard horror stories from investors who spent loads of money and time on SEO, then finally started getting leads… but they weren’t in her city, or even in her country. “Motivated Sellers from Around the World” sounds kinda cool, but for business… it’s a total waste.
For good SEO results, you need to focus your optimization efforts on local keywords that have good traffic counts. Just choose a few good keywords, really work hard to rank high for those, and only when you have conquered your niche, then start adding additional keywords. (For you military history buffs out there: how many generals have lost a war because they spread their troops too thin?)
With PPC, you can really localize the traffic using negative keywords, geographic limitations, bid rate and other factors that will dramatically improve the quality of your traffic and leads.
Of course, we handle all of that stuff for our clients, and we’re insanely proud of the results we get.
If you’re gonna try it on your own, be careful!
Like I said, don’t think Google is your friend… they’ve built the system with an insanely unfair “home court advantage”… it seems worse to me than the odds against beating the house when you visit a huge casino, but then again Google’s making way more money than any casino, so they’re doing something right.
We’ve been working on some insanely cool data comparing the search volume, competition and ad costs across every major US real estate market.
We’ve learned the hard way how tough it can be to compete in some of the trickiest places… and we know how insanely rewarding it can be for the investors who are able to crush it in the real estate game.
