I thought I would describe my first job in the world of real estate SEO and real estate search marketing in case anyone can gain any insight from my experience. My first professional search marketing job was for a company that specialized in selling leads to real estate agents. I was actually highered on as IT, in charge of running network diagnostics and managing the phone system and so forth. But the company was small and I soon came to where many hats. One of them was to take over a $60,000 a month PPC account from an agency in 30 days. I had some familiarity with PPC at the time, but spent most of my free time learning web design and development. I had a web design and virtual tour business for real estate agents, and they were interested in marketing techniques as well. So I had helped set up a couple accounts and gave some general advice but never took on the accounts myself.

So I was surprised at all the information that was thrown at me in the following 30 days as I readied for the transition back to in-house ppc management. My boss saw my frustration and bought me a couple books, which I highly recommend to anyone starting out. They were “The Definitive Guide to Adwords” by Perry Marshall and the latest edition of SEObook. There was also an adsense book by some smug, kind of annoying guy if I remember right.

Anyhow, I read the books and got to work building out the campaigns, adgroups, keyword lists and writing the ad copy. My first impression was that this was alot more work than I had expected. The reality of managing thousands of keywords, in a couple hundred adgroups was impressively daunting. It quickly made me realize the importance being organized and efficient.

It turned out that I had some pretty good ideas as how to lower the overall cost per lead. I was able to lower the cost per conversion of the pay per click account by about 20%. Considering that we were spending $30,000 to $60,000 a month in pay per click advertising, that was an efficiency savings of $6,000 to $12,000 a month. I did this by implementing some of the techniques I had learned so far. The first was that I optimized the bid management process to shift more of the ad budget to longer tail keywords that had lower search volumes but higher conversion rates. Well, that was a little help. I was able to bring the cpc down but my lead volume was decreasing. A major portion of the leads were coming from 5-10 key competitive terms in each campaign. These terms were high volume and competitive. I found that there was considerable search volume on yahoo for these same terms and was able to purchase the same keywords at a significant discount. So by transferring some of the google budget to yahoo I also realized some savings.

I experimented with different calls to action in the ad copy. By indicating the purpose of the ad and the landing page in the copy, I was able to raise click through rates and conversion rates. I found that “Fill out a quick and easy form” in the copy was a great call to action because the searcher knows what you are expecting from them. They realize they are going to have to give out some information in order to find the information they desired.

I recommended and implemented some landing page changes to increase the quality score of the keywords I was bidding on. For instance, if we were targeting clients in a certain state, having a landing page specifically for that state helped to increase the quality score of the keyword. That allowed me to get a higher position for a lower price.

All in all, I was a positive experience and I learned a ton. I learned the PPC acount management and optimization was really just about hard work and attention to detail. There isn’t much magic to it, no matter how mythical and mysterious google appears to be. Learn to crunch a lot of ppc data in excel, learn to understand your key metrics and ROI goals, and optimize and test to reach your goals.

Of course there were challenges and things I could have done better. But I applied for another job with another company and I got the position. It was a position as “Paid Search Analyst” with a popular outdoor E commerce site. I would be in charge of a multi-million dollar PPC Account for 3 different websites. I’ll go over THAT experience in a future post.

As far as Real Estate SEO goes, you can learn more from our website at www.realestateseopros.com

- Aaron Evans