At some point I'm sure I'll talk about PPC strategies however I wanted to contrast SEO vs PPC. PPC means Pay-per-click. All the main search engines provide some sort of Pay-per-click system. These result in text based content showing up on the search engines themselves and if you choose also as text based ads on other websites where the websites have decided to subscribe to the text ads as in the Google Adsense program.

First of all as a professional on the internet my personal opinion is that you should be doing both SEO and PPC. PPC works well especially with more obscure keyword combinations that you haven't optimized for on your site or for launching a site and making sure that you have leads coming in day one. It's easy to do, however you will need to have reasonably deep pockets if you only do PPC since your lead flow will be determined by the amount of daily or monthly spend.

When launching a new market often we will run the PPC until the SEO catches up with the PPC at which time we will either reduce and in most cases eliminate the PPC all together. This makes the marginal cost of our next lead typically zero which is huge since we can then reinvest what we would have put into marketing back into service oriented or brand oriented activities or better yet profit :D since at the end of the day isn't that why we are building our online brands anyway to make a profit and someday retire to the Bahama's or some exotic place....

If you are aggressively growing your real estate practice in the short run you will likely spend a similar amount on both your PPC as your SEO campaigns. Let's say you invest $2500/month in your PPC campaign to generate 150 leads per month. That means your lead cost is $16.66/lead. A typical SEO campaign may generate say 20 leads first month, 50 leads second month, 100 leads the third month and 150 leads the fourth month leading up to say 300 leads a month after 8 months.

At the end of 8 months you cut back on your SEO optimization efforts to say $700/month to maintain the 300 leads per month after that we can compare the following.



Obviously in the short run PPC will provide more leads for the dollars invested but even before year end and somewhere around month four your SEO efforts should overtake your PPC efforts meaning that your marginal cost per lead should be lower then doing PPC. Also around month seven or eight your average cost for all leads generated should be better then PPC. Now the question is where do you want to invest your long term efforts, on SEO or PPC? I think the choice is clear... This is the economics that we have built our real estate company around and you should to...

Obviously if you quit doing PPC your lead generating will drop to zero at the end of one year. If you quit doing SEO at the end of one year you will get leads for months if not years after your initial efforts. Now compare that to more traditional methods of lead generation.

(Disclaimer... The above is for illustration purposes only and is based on a SWAG [Scientific Wild Ass Guess] however you get the picture... SEO done right should overtake PPC and give you significant competitive advantages over your competitors which means growth in marketshare or profit or both compared to other agents in your market)

Labels: Business Development, SEO Strategies