For those of you who aren’t familiar with Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, basically it consists of purchasing ad placement on search engines which are relevant to the term searched for.  You pay each and every time a searcher clicks on your ad thru to your site or blog.  Most of the time, you can find the PPC ads on the right side of a search screen and the unpaid or “organic” search results on the left.

The Major Players

The major players in PPC are Google with their AdWords program, Yahoo! Search Marketing (used to be Overture), MIVA, and MSN AdCenter.  In addition, there are a handful of smaller second tier PPC providers that can definitely deliver results, but just aren’t quite as prevalent in all circumstances.  Visit PayPerClickSearchEngines.com for reliable top 10 rakings of all the PPC search providers as well as any current discounts and incentives for signing up with them.

Part of the Overall Search Strategy

PPC Advertising alone can be surprisingly effective, but it works best when used to supplement optimized organic search results.  In a nutshell, the best thing you can do to improve your organic search engine rankings is to keep things natural but as niche-focused or targeted as possible.  As you build original and relevant reader friendly content on your site or blog, the search engines will automatically discover and list your site in their results.

Besides over delivering and seeking natural incoming links, there’s not much else to it.  Trying to force search engines to rank your site better usually has detrimental results – the best results are attained by publishing lots and lots of awesome content.  Yes, organic search takes effort and time, but fortunately PPC ads can be effectively used as a big part of your strategy for nearly instant results.

Gather Prospects

Try using PPC as a means of gathering prospective customers, not trying to just make an immediate sale (but wouldn’t it be great if it were that easy – place a small ad, a customer clicks and buys a house).  Your goal is to get hot leads to your site or blog and ultimately getting them on your email list or perhaps as a subscriber to your blog.  By doing this, you’ll be able to reach them over and over again, all as a result of the one visit you bought via your PPC ad that brought them to your site in the first place.

Starting Off With the Right Foot

Target locally.  If your area real estate market is Nashville, TN for example, then not only will you want to include “Nashville” and the names of any surrounding communities as part of the search terms you use, but you’ll also want to take advantage of and specific local targeting offered by the PPC provider you’re using.  Most of them have it – just read their tutorials for further details.  Since real estate is mostly a local business, keeping search local is incredibly important.

Be super specific.  Be as specific as possible in the PPC ads you write.  Don’t try and be everything to everyone, that’s not what searchers want.  Instead, don’t be afraid to set up multiple PPC campaigns with each targeting a specific niche that you represent.  Also, I wouldn’t recommend any type of branding type advertising with PPC – that’s best left to organic search.  For example, if someone searches for your name, it will probably already show up in the organic search results.

Try a single property strategy.  The single property strategy involves marketing one property specifically in your PPC ad.  In the ad, you’d feature the price, perhaps the address, and really abbreviated details.  The goal is to use local targeting to get the ad placed as high as possible when someone searches for a variety of targeted terms related to your locale.  By doing this, you’re putting one single property just a click away versus risking the loss of attention by asking a searcher to go thru an intermediary site first.

Budget and spend wisely.  Don’t get carried away by trying to buy your way to number one results all at once.  Instead, get a good feel for the PPC process and then gradually experiment with different terms and prices.  One the best benefits of PPC benefit is trackablity – it’s really easy to see which ads are working and delivering results.  But if you just try to be at the top all at once, you’ll probably just end up with an empty wallet.

Keep On Learning and Experimenting

This post is really only intended to be the very tip of the iceberg when it comes to implementing pay per click strategies for real estate business.  There are all kinds of really great specific strategies out there for you to experiment with once you are familiar with the basics.  And believe me, they really deliver!

So for now, get your feet wet and start with the basics.  Before long, I think you’ll find yourself becoming quite the expert at PPC and fully utilizing it to boost your bottom line.  Here are some of my favorite resources for further learning:

• Top 9 Strategies for a Successful Real Estate PPC Program
• 18 Tips For Writing Better Pay-Per-Click Ads
• Setting Up a Google Real Estate PPC Account
• 5 Steps to Pay Per Click Advertising That Works

Tags:pay per click ppc real estate marketing real estate technology