Digital real estate marketing strategies for 2020: Part IV

It’s acronym day at Easy Agent Pro as we discuss two factors critical to an effective digital marketing strategy for real estate agents: SEO and PPC.

Let’s take them one at a time, break them down and put them back together for you.

Miss our first 3 articles about the ultimate digital marketing strategy for real estate agents? Get caught up from the beginning here.

SEO digital marketing strategy for real estate agents

Short for “search engine optimization,” SEO helps you make the best possible use of your website by performing certain “tweaks.” These include (among others):

“Finding the terms and phrases (keywords) that can generate qualified traffic to your website”

according to the pros at Moz.com.

Other aims of SEO include making your website easier for search engines to crawl, gaining organic traffic through your content (as well as your keywords), improve your visitor’s experience and more.

SEO is a vast subject, full of details to learn, tactics to introduce and, in general, poses a steep learning curve.

SearchEnglineLand.com offers a very simple explainer video for those new to SEO.

We recently wrote a piece about how backlinking can improve your site’s SEO – you can read that here.

Need help finding the right keywords? Try the Alexa tool (they offer a free trial) and read the comprehensive guide on How to Do Keyword Research.

Here are some additional tips to help you choose the right keywords.

Unless you’re experienced in SEO, we recommend hiring someone to optimize your website. If done right, the service is worth the price you’ll pay.

PPC digital marketing strategy for real estate agents

PPC is short for “pay-per-click” and is a type of SEM (search engine marketing). Basically, it means buying search engine result visibility in those first few Google search results:

But the term “PPC” isn’t exclusive to Google Ads. Bing, Facebook and all other publishers who offer paid advertising opportunities fall under the umbrella of PPC.

It’s a surefire way to make it to the top of the search results for a chosen keyword or phrase, especially if the keywords are local.

The top 3 ads on a Google search results page receive nearly half of all clicks on the page, so it’s easy to understand how buying these ads can pay off. In fact, advertisers make $8 for every $1 they spend on Google Ads, according to Google.

But there are more reasons to at least consider giving PPC advertising a whirl:

• You’ll see results quickly
• Results are easy to track
• Traffic garnered from paid ads result in 50 percent more conversions than organic traffic
• Paid ads aren’t impacted by Google algorithm changes
• The ads can be hyper-locally targeted

PPC drawbacks

There are downsides to paid ads, however. The most significant of these, at least for real estate agents, is how often Google Ads prices increase.

When you’re paying a price per click (CPC), your cost is largely determined by the competition for your particular keywords and your ad’s (and site’s) Quality Score.

But there is one school of thought that goes something like this:

“Google is artificially creating bidding wars and driving up the CPC rates”

Pedro Sostre, Medium.com

He suggests that you “opt out of auto suggestions,” and on that I agree with him. I used PPC for a time in my writing business and it was amazingly effective.

That is, until Google started making suggestions. I listened and my results plummeted.

On a side note, consider using Bing paid ads. No, Bing doesn’t have nearly the search volume of Google, but it’s growing like crazy, especially among mobile users.

Much of this is the result of a change announced earlier this year in which Bing Ads became the “exclusive provider of all search advertising across Bing, Yahoo, and AOL properties,” according to Will Cozart at 3QDigital.com.

If you’re planning on experimenting with PPC in your real estate business in 2020, at least consider a small spend on Bing Ads.

Like SEO, there’s a lot to learn about PPC. SearchEngineJournal.com offers “A Complete Guide to PPC Marketing Basics” or check out “The Ultimate Guide to Google Ads for 2019” at Hubspot.com.

Great digital marketing starts with a great brand! Don’t miss our guide to real estate slogans!

What are the top real estate websites doing to grow? Here are some examples from the best of the best real estate websites

How do you get seller leads with Google Ads? In this video, we build a campaign designed to get seller leads: