BiggerPockets

Get More Website Leads Using Paid Search Rankings...

There is no doubt that the internet is a HUGE source of quality leads for buyers, sellers, lenders, renters or whatever you are looking for to grow your real estate investing business.
But the question is… HOW?

Back in the late 90's this was a relatively easy process, because the competition was almost non-existent for anyone that had any knowledge of how to optimize a website and use some simple tactics to get visitors to your website.

However, with the ever growing amount of websites being published every day, the net is growing so rapidly that its becoming increasingly harder to get your sliver of the traffic pie unless you have an advantage.

See, many people are taught… or mislead that you can get your website on the first page of Google search in just a few days and that will get you all the visitors you need to do all the deals you can handle.

Well… that's just not true.

The truth is, that perhaps you can get a first page ranking for a keyword like "we buy houses toledo"… but I am willing to bet you, that you MIGHT get a 10 visitors a month to your website. The reason is… no-one is searching for that phrase… right?

Besides, you can typically only get a website ranked for one or maybe two keywords, and you have to spend a lot of time working on creating backlinks to your website, and adding content, etc. It's a tedious process that ends up causing you to become more of an internet marketer and less of a real estate investor.
And even after all your hard work with all this, you still have no guarantees you will get visitors… plus the search engines can change their ranking algorythims, and guess what? Back to the drawing board.

So… Is there a better way? YES… Paid advertising!

Especially Google Adwords. Google is the biggest search engine in the world by a long shot, and they have by far the most effective and powerful advertising system available. You can literally create an account and setup a campaign and have LASER TARGETED visitors to your website in about 30 minutes from starting the campaign.

If you have never heard of Adwords (https://adwords.google.com) … its basically where you pay to have your ad placed at the top of the search engines for any of the keywords you're shooting for. If you look at a Google search result, the top 3 and all the ones along the right side are "Sponsored Links"… those are paying advertisers.

You can also have your ad displayed on the millions of websites that are in the Google content network. In this case your ad will get displayed on any of the pages on websites in the network that are related to your market.
The BEST part about this service as it pertains to investors is… you can geographically target your ads. That means that you can setup your campaigns to only display in the city or town that you invest in.

This is HUGE… here's why…

Let's say that the most common keywords people type in when they are looking to sell a house are…

sell house
sell home
sell my home
sell my house
need to sell house

… and there are probably a few more. But if you created a Google search campaign, and setup the campaign to target those keywords… but only if they are located in your investing area. Then when anyone located in that area types in one of those keywords your ad will be right there at the top of the page waiting for them to click.

So now… instead of spending 3 months getting your site ranked for just one keyword, instead you spent 20 minutes setting up a campaign and now you have your site on the first page of Google for potentially 100 keywords or more.
This equates to potentially hundreds of visitors to your site per day.

The only thing that is going to limit this… is your budget. Because any keywords that are real estate investing related are going to cost at least $1 per click. But don't let this scare you. That's CHEAP, if you consider it from a cost per deal stand point.

If you are getting extremely motivated and targeted visitors to your website for $1 per click… think how that could play out:

If you send out 500 direct mail letters that cost you about $0.70 each to a list of people that MIGHT be interested in selling or buying a house that would be $350 with postage and all that. And if you got a 5% response rate that's 17.5 leads… costing an average of $20 PER LEAD!

But if you have an Adwords campaign running, and you are paying $1.50 per click, and your landing page is converting only 20% of those visitors to leads (submit a form, or call a number)… then its only costing you $7.50 per targeted lead… and remember… these people were on the internet looking for you. These are much more motivated and targeted leads for less than half the cost.

This does not even take into consideration that you can put banner ads on the content network on any real estate related website in your geographical area and get potentially thousands of visitors per month depending on the demographics of your investing area… and these clicks could cost you much less.

So, I have to ask? Do you want to spend months trying to figure out search engine marketing, networking on social media sites, creating and submitting videos, posting in forums, and all the other time consuming internet strategies (all good tactics by the way, but time consuming)…

Or would you rather create an Adwords campaign and start collecting leads in a few hours, and continue to get these quality leads day after day and free up your time so you can focus on all those profitable deals?

Comments

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  Zach Sikes — 11 months ago

  I'm a Realtor in Edmond, OK and I've tried Adwords in the past. It actually works very well, and drove traffic to my site immediately. The ONLY drawback is the price. You have to make sure that you have good content so that you can convert the leads.