As a marketer or a real estate Investor trying to land on the top position in Google, you may have noticed, the fact that it is so difficult to land on a top spot in the first page of Google results. On-page and off-page SEO efforts can surely help, but it may not be enough as the competition is getting tighter day by day.
As Google is frequently manipulating their layout and algorithms in terms of organic results, your results may get severely affected if you don’t upgrade yourself in line with it. This will ultimately adversely affect the volume and quality of leads you may get. Even though we are just picking Google to point out this fact, this is the same in case of other top search engines too as Yahoo, Bing, and many others.
SEO in the real estate industry
What we discussed above has a greater impact on the real estate industry, and the marketers are constantly scratching heads to explore new avenues and tirelessly working on their SEO strategies to find the apt mix for success. One such sure shot avenue which the marketers can keep trust on is PPC. Investing in PPC can significantly increase your chances of aiming at better search engine results for your real estate campaigns.
Here we are discussing some time-tested PPC strategies which are developed over time with consistent deployment and testing. These are also fine-tuned based on the changing market situations and the specific challenges of the real estate vertical. When it comes to real estate sector, the marketers need to consider it more diligently than much other industry based on its unique nature and the higher expectations users have about the ad campaigns bout properties and houses, etc.
Let’s discuss the challenges first:
#1. Real estate primarily is a local product
In terms of real estate promotions, your target audience may primarily be from the city itself. So, for the beginners, an AdWords campaign may be targeting the very specific audience which may be living in the city itself.
Despite this fact, there may also be users from other places too, for example, someone planning to relocate for job, family, migration, etc. Even though this is the case, the major focus primarily is the same city audience itself. The AdWords campaigns also needed to be planned accordingly to leverage this requirement at best.
#2. Homeowners may not rent
Even though this is unique among the apartment owners category, if someone owns a house, it is highly unlikely that someone owns a home further look for another property. Provided this, the challenge further becomes a question as to how to prevent the non-prospects from seeing the advertisements.
#3. Renters are under long-term leases
Even though renters are ideal candidates for home builders, the fact is that they are tied to long term leases like 6 months or 1 year, etc. These further make their eligibility a hit or miss at any given time. So, there is no clear-cut rule as to whom to avoid and whom to include in the PPC for real estate investors campaigns.
#4. All candidates are not ideal for home
Above all this set criterion, the customers also should be able to afford the cost in order to be eligible for the products. In fact, nowadays, credit checks tend to disqualify a lot of applicants both in terms of a new apartment or from owning their new home.
Considering this fact, the reassuring news is that AdWords is the platform which can help narrow the eligibility of leads by identifying the prospects and non-prospects. Provided you set up the campaigns correctly, it becomes much easier for the marketers to identify who qualifies and who doesn’t.
Let’s further explore the plan to optimize the PPC campaigns for real estate marketer.
#5. Bidding on the brand terms
This is one topic which raises a lot of discussions in the real estate spectrum as to whether to bid or not on the brand terms. The reality about it is that, in real estate campaigns, the process of lead discovery is unique and demands a lot of investments in terms of both money and time over branded terms.
Target real estate searchers identify the locations and communities to search for in a wide range of ways. They explore all the signboards, Craigslist, reference of co-workers, through friends and family, and channels Apartment Guide, etc, etc. However, even these sources don’t provide enough information they want to get, and this is where users tend to rely on search engines.
As a result, the needy will initiate a branded search on Google or other search engines to get more information. This also specifies that the shoppers who search for the brand names are more likely to reach to the hottest leads first. So, while planning PPC marketing, ensure that you capitalize on such lower funnel searches first.
So, if you don’t bid on the brand owned by you or select the appropriate keywords, the risks are:
The competitors may buy your brand name and relevant keywords, and they may appear above your search results on brand search results. The real estate aggregators may broadly bid in terms of apartments and houses with fine combinations of brand, city, and state keywords to take the top spots. Once if a consumer clicks through the ads, they get to just a click away from viewing the competitors.
#6. Geotargeting gets you a better score
You may leverage the benefits of the location option. I’m the settings to get the right people in or to catch those who show interest in. Geolocating makes it easier for marketers to target their audience better and enjoy more qualified leads. The marketing pros tend to use city targeting more effectively with nested bid adjustments to enjoy a bigger win.
Another pro tip is to define the negative keywords also to apply as it will help filter out the non-qualified leads. If you are not interested in a specific type of properties or homes, then you can list those as negative keywords.