Advanced guide to PPC for Realtors
This guide is not to be used for any Realtors who have not done PPC or internet marketing before.
To execute it properly it takes strong knowledge in e-mail marketing, PPC, landing pages and creating offers that convert.
(You can start small though)
PPC for Realtors in its current state
PPC for Realtors in it’s current state is a battle for maximum intent keywords.
Everyone bids for the most targeted keyword and variants of it:
- “Orange County Realtor”
- “California Realtor”
- “(your city here) Realtor”
- etc
Great! Except, every real estate agent in town is looking for these keywords too. Driving up the prices for these vital keywords and making it very hard to compete with. On top of that, sometimes you have to compete with Zillow/Trulia/Realtor.
If you have the budget for these keywords, keep bidding.
The strategy below is to be adding on to what you’re already doing or something for people who have a low budget and need to make the most out of their money.
The step before intent
What do people search for before listing their homes?
Probably not that much to do with real estate.
They are searching for things though, like local events.
Now you might say, well that’s low quality because you have no clue if they’re looking to sell or not. Correct!
But, you are going to pay a lot less for less competitive keywords which in return can make it worth it.
Back To The Basics
Being a great real estate agent has a lot to do with building relationships. You can form these relationships anywhere, how often do you meet someone in a coffee shop and end up doing business with them?
Not often but, you hear about it once a year from a local co-worker at least.
The point is sellers and buyers are everywhere!
In person you can’t really identify right away who is looking to sell or not but, you still value these connections because you know they might sell at some point or they might know someone they can refer you to.
What type of marketing materials do you use in your farm? I’ve seen agents do everything from local event guides to fridge magnets that don’t even make sense…. And it works!
So now that we established that relationships are important in real estate, let’s take another look at those keywords.
Low competition PPC Keywords
Find local keywords with no competition such as
- “Orange County events”
- “Whatever city your from events”
- “Orange County”
- “Motorcycle clubs in Orange County”
- “Mommy day cares in Orange County”
All of these get decent traffic and guess what… I can target them at around 0.10/c per click.
10 CENTS per click!!
Google is giving you the ability to targeted LOCAL people in your community for that cheap.
You just have to figure out what to do with the traffic, if you just send them to your website as-is… They probably will show up and leave with 0 interest.
Now about your website!
Here is where it can get a little bit tricky.
Side note – Keep in mind you want to brand your landing page, keep it simple but, also make it obvious that you’re a real estate agent providing these offers i’m about to mention.
You’re going to have to create a separate landing page for each group of keywords that you start targeting.
You can use a service like unbounce for this pretty easily.
They even have dynamic keywords which let you automatically change the writing on your landing page to the visitor who sees it based on what keyword they came from. Pretty amazing right? (The future is now!)
So, create a custom landing page for each type of keyword group that you do.
Include an offer on your landing page
If the keywords you’re targeting are for events, you’re going to want to build an offer around events.
The easiest way to do this is offer an e-book or a top 10 list that people have to subscribe to get. While making this offer it is very important that you’re offering something of value to them and convey it very directly. If people don’t know what your website is about because you’re trying to be clever, it’s been proven time and time again to not convert well.
Creating the e-book / list is simple:
- Start doing some research for all the events going on this year and open up power point.
- List all the events in power point
- Export as PDF
- Create a catchy title
- “The Best Events Going On This Year In Orange County” – By the #1 Realtor in Orange County
- Have an offer -> “To download, subscribe”
- Convert visitors
#Winning ! You see how this can start to be amazing?
You’re targeting specific local audiences and giving them something of value for free. If you actually put the time in and they enjoy it, they will already start to like you.
Quick example of what your landing page offer should look like:
Boring quick math
If you can get visitors for .10c per click (even less is possible with these types of keywords)
You would then be getting 10 visitors for $1
On a $10 budget, you would get 100 visitors.
A good converting site can convert these visitors into subscribers above 30%+
For $10 you are getting 30 local people signing up for your e-mail list.
Custom E-mail campaign
Now that you have these people hooked and enjoying your quality guide that they downloaded, you can start marketing to them through e-mail.
You campaign can be as simple as a follow up e-mail building a real conversation:
"Hey, I saw that you downloaded my event guide, hope you liked it!
I do a lot of real estate in the area and also offer a free home estimate, would you be interested in that at all?"
Or come up with something of your own based off building a relationship with them.
The point is, this is an easy way to start getting connected with local people on a affordable PPC level.
Some more quick examples
If you find keywords for local services that have very low pricing such as
- “Plumbers in Orange County”
- “Guitar teachers in Orange County”
- etc
My favorite tool for finding new keywords is keywordtool.io
Here is a quick example of keywords it found for my PPC campaign just by typing in my city:
To see how much traffic you’re getting from them and the price you just need to copy and paste them into Googles keyword tool
Or anything of the sort. You can make a list of people you know are trust worthy and then charge them to be on your list. Tell them it’s a one time fee for $X. Now you even have your paid ads, paid for by someone else. They’re getting potential referrals from you and you’re getting local leads. It’s a win-win.
How To Budget This
If you have a decent sized budget for PPC you should spend around 25% of it doing these type of activities. You always want your main budget to go to the high intent keywords because those have the highest value for you the Realtor and you know those people are looking to sell or buy.
If you have a very small budget, it might be a good strategy to think about doing this with 100% of your budget because if you can only afford 1-5 leads on your current site and it’s not converting well then, you’re probably wasting your money on these high intent keywords. Converting local people and trying to build a relationship with them as explained in this post would definitely be the better way to go.
I think we can all agree out of 100 random people, one of them will be looking to sell/buy or they will know someone that is. To get 100 local people signing up for your offers would only cost $32 roughly. Not to mention, the 100 opportunities you have to build relationships that were not there before.
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