Should Real Estate Offices Like Yours Still Be Focusing All That Ad $$$ On Pay-Per-Click? (Is Google Really Broken?)

Here’s a common, easy to execute formula for generating traffic and leads for your Real Estate website and business these days.

• Get a website with a solid property search function
• Hook up a Google Adwords Campaign and drive traffic direct to the search page.
• Wait for leads to be generated via the property search registration, and hope the office and agents can convert a certain percentage of these leads over time.  (Or at least try to contact the lead within a few months.)

This is a relatively progressive strategy when you consider that (sadly) most real estate pros still can’t tell you which ads on a google search results page are paid for, and which are organic. So, for the offices who are maintaining and increasing market share via this approach our hats are off…sorta.  A solid PPC strategy is a good first step toward bringing your office out of the stone ages by establishing some sort of effective web strategy.

But…

Throwing a large portion of your real estate marketing budget at the traffic generating “G spot” could cause you to overlook more sensible, longer lasting strategies that provide better ROI… and allow you to build marketing assets within your business that have the potential to have a much better impact for a lot less significant investment….

Is your pay per click approach providing you with a perpetual source of business, or does the formula above fall short some how?

Could it be that  your Pay Per Click campaign isn’t akin to putting all your eggs in one basket….where it’s quite possible that the 10-20-50 leads a day that your feeding your office with each day could suddenly vanish into thin air? Are you sure that what’s working today will still work tomorrow? And… if you do what every other broker in town is doing to generate leads, why would you expect to get better results… or attract better agents… or impress more sophisticated clients?

There Are Better Options… SEO What Next?

Of course you might be expecting that we’ll take this conversation into some viable alternatives to your real estate pay per click approach… and you’re right!  We will be.

(More on that tomorrow and over the next few weeks…)

In the meantime, here’s a juicy just released free report that’ll provide some nice background info for any of you real estate folks out there who want an interesting primer on generating traffic from google.

Perpetual Traffic Report