Battle for Keywords, Building the Ultimate Lead Machine

Excerpts provided herein from AgentCampus Search Marketing Tipwire Volume 1. To subscribe to this free newsletter and get how-to information on marketing your real estate business as well as valuable free discounts for real estate license and continuing education courses, visit www.agentcampus.com and sign up from the home page.

The Battle for the Keywords...

The online advertising industry is predominately controlled by Google and Yahoo. Up-and-coming players like MSN and Ask have also joined the battle for your advertising dollars. We'll explain over the coming months how to optimize your online paid advertising program at low costs for big results.

According to a 2006 survey by media research firm Borrell Associates Inc., the real estate industry was expected to spend about $11.6 billion on advertising in 2006 -- that amount has grown less than 4 percent in the past four years -- and the online share was expected to reach $2 billion in 2006, and to eclipse newspapers' advertising share and top $3 billion by year by 2010, Borrell reported. The online share of real estate advertising, which was 3.5 percent in 2001, is expected to reach 32.1 percent in 2010 (Source: Inman News).

Kate's Top 10 Considerations for Search Marketing

By Kate Morris - Web Marketing Manager, 360training

1. Identify your most important pages (index, products pages, etc.) and the keywords associated with them. Use those keywords in ppc campaigns, alt tags, and meta tags (see below).

2. Add an alt tag to every image. Make sure the keyword matches one of your keywords for the page.

3. Assign specific keyword and description Meta tags to each important page of your website. Making the keywords and descriptions match the page and it's content, and not just the site.
4. Start a Google PPC campaign. I don't work for them, but trust me, at this point, Google is just a good place to start in PPC.

5. Have specific landing pages in your PPC Campaign. If your ad says "Widgets for $25", the page they land on should be about that widget for $25, not your index page.

6. Make a custom 404 error page. This makes it so that when a visitor stumbles on a missing page, they see a site map, whatever you like, instead of a blank error page.

7. Have a sitemap that is accessible from every page.

8. Have your webmaster sign your site up for Google Webmaster Tools, and create a Google Sitemap. It's written in XML and read by all major engines.

9. In the words of Google, Don't be evil. Don't listen to "webmasters" who want to hide keywords or links. Deception is never a good idea.

10. Make your site interesting to the READER, not the search engine. You can rank on the top of search engines but if people don't like the site because it's optimized to computers, you've missed the point. Get to the point, keep things simple. Use images to bring color and focus to specific areas.

Building the Ultimate Lead Machine
By Albert Lilly - Chief Marketing Officer, 360training

You've seen them in your inbox, your mailbox and likely at ever conference you've attended recently. Offers to boost your online lead prospecting and services to increase your website's online position in search engines.

One of biggest factors to a successful online marketing program is Search Engine Marketing (SEM), what I define as a combination of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and Search Engine Optimization (SEO). When executed properly, SEM can yield big results at the lowest cost-per-lead and net you the most coveted customer sought after today: the online consumer who comes highly qualified and ready to buy.

Whether you're just getting started or a seasoned veteran in the dynamically changing real estate market, one thing is for sure, SEM is here to stay. Regardless of your experience with SEM, there is always more to learn. This article will cover some core issues you need to consider when approaching search marketing yourself or if you're outsourcing it to a 3rd party.

First thing first - IT ALL STARTS WITH YOUR KEYWORDS! The keywords you use on your website and in your online advertising are the 'DNA' of your search marketing program. There are tools we use that give us the search demand of any given keyword. One such free tool is http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/. For example there are over 8000 searches every day for 'austin real estate' and its various iterations such as 'austin estate real texas'.
Holy smokes, 8000 searches a day, what does this mean for you? Just imagine if you practiced in Austin, Texas and can capture .5% of these possible leads, that's 40 new prospective Austin home seekers on your site a day! Position your website properly and you can get the traffic on your site. Getting the traffic to your website is half the battle. Getting your site visitors to register or give you their personal information is an entirely different ball of wax that we'll cover in future versions of the AgentCampus Search Marketing Tipwire.

Now for the clincher, of those 8000 queries of possible customers hungry to get their new home, there are even hungrier agents and brokers competing with YOU to get this traffic. Hence, it all comes down to the battle for the keywords both in your paid search efforts and your organic search engine optimization. If you've gotten to this point you may be thinking: "so what! what do I do?", "I don't know much about website programming", "this doesn't make sense to me" or "someone else handles my website for me".

See our earlier post by Kate Morris (Web Marketing Manager for 360training) for her top 10 considerations for search engine marketing. Discuss this with a techie buddy or your webmaster. We'll also cover each of these considerations in further layman term details in future versions of the tipwire, so stay tuned!