Archives for July 2007

Using the iPhone to Follow Up on Real Estate Sales Leads

July 11, 2007 by Vinny Leave a Comment

With a whopping-huge touchscreen, and the capability to browse websites (and use their applications) easily, the time to take real estate lead follow-up to the next level has arrived with Apple’s iPhone. What we can create now are iPhone lead management solutions that run on Safari on a phone and look really nice. Never before has the technology been in place to efficiently tote around such an intuitive online device. Now the challenge lies in delivering applications that can make full use of the possibilities of the iPhone using the upcoming Safari API. Here’s an overview of where we’re taking things.

Imagine you’re on the road with a potential client. They are inspecting the kitchen counters on a home they’re interested in when your iPhone buzzes. It is a lead from one of your marketing programs! When a new lead rings in from a landing page, email, or instant chat session, you analyze the lead and quickly select from a number of fast responses; subscribe them to a customized daily listings search email, invite them to a nearby open house, send them helpful home-buying tips, schedule a free consultation, chat back with them, send them a personalized email, or possibly just call them right on the spot. No matter where you are, you will now be able to efficiently & appropriately reply to all inquiries that arrive.

If you’re looking for a team that can deliver on the promise of this new technology, look no further; our custom solutions will integrate the iPhone to do exactly what it is meant to do for real estate, make your life easier as a realtor.

My Declaration of Search Independence

July 10, 2007 by Vinny Leave a Comment

A common thread I’ve been finding on a lot of boards recently is incorporating more human input into the way the SERPs come back from Google, Yahoo, etc. Google especially has been experimenting lately with taking into account a user’s search history when deciding which pages are most relevant. The way it has been working so far is that if Google, for example, knows that you like to visit a particular widget site, it will be more likely to return that site in future searches that are widget-related, somewhat regardless of the overall relevance of the pages. The idea is that the sites that are popular to you are also more valuable to you for those terms.

What many SEO are saying is that this is the first step towards a search system standard that is more geared towards quality of content, giving people what they want, “change is good,” blah blah blah. But what I don’t see too many online marketing professionals airing (some are brave enough to question this new search direction) is the fact that any system that personally skews results based upon the popularity of a particular site is inherently flawed. What seems like a good idea at first can become a fairly large problem later on. Let me explain further.

At first, the search engines that integrate more user feedback into the results will see a significant return on their investment in terms of making searchers feel like they are being catered to. The sites that they have always found helpful will get pushed up in the rankings. And before you know it, the entire first page may be filled with familiar places to find information on widgets of all sizes, types, prices and so on. So everyone’s happy, right?

Well, what kicks in later is the fact that websites won’t be pressured to offer as fresh of content any more. Once they’ve gotten in with a high percentage of surfers, there’s no incentive for them to continue to build their site. So long as their readership continues to visit, they won’t slip in the “personal” rankings because they are popular. And the search engines will likely boost any site that’s massively popular in the natural rankings, leading to other sites with superior content getting the first page boot.

What’s wrong with this is that search engines should return results relevant to what the user searches for, not what they searched for in the past. If Google wants to remember the sites I visit, that’s fine. But here’s my declaration of search independence: allow me the choice to decide when I want Google suggesting ‘my favorites,’ because most of the time I don’t want the same old stuff.

Determining Your Market Share On Google Adwords – New Impression Share Metric

July 7, 2007 by Vinny Leave a Comment

It’s always most important to base all your Google marketing decisions upon what returns the highest return on investment (ROI), not whether your marketing reaches everyone in the search engine marketing world. That being said, have you ever wondered just how much of the PPC market you are saturating with your Adwords advertising? Tracking that would enable you to get a feel for the relative impact of your targeted campaigns on specific geographic areas, which can help you make decisions on where to boost your budgets, decrease funding, or reallocate elsewhere.

The great news is that the Google Adwords Reports tool now allows you to tell what your Impression Share (IS) is. According to the Google Adwords blog, it means the percentage of the time your ads show related to the total possible chances they could be served, based upon the account or campaign settings that the report is being run for. So you can run the report in such a way that you can find out what your share is for particular terms in specific cities, states, or countries.

We’ve already found it incredibly useful in the field of real estate, where knowing how much draw you have in different communities can make a world of difference. We’ve already been drawing up plans to refocus all our campaigns so that they more aggressively target the areas that our clients don’t have as strong a presence in. It has also been helpful in that we can be more direct with our clients as to how competitive their respective pay per click markets really are. It definitely takes some of the guesswork out to be able to say with confidence that your client has a very strong share in their market. So thank you, Google, for continuing to make the entire Adwords operation more transparent.

Definitely start using the Impression Share metric today, and report back any other helpful uses you’ve found for this new Adwords functionality.

Defend The Value Of PPC To Your Clients With Google Analytics

July 5, 2007 by Vinny Leave a Comment

These days it’s a popular thing, particularly among real estate agents, to go bashing pay-per-click as a legitimate marketing strategy. Two of the most popular criticisms I hear are that PPC does not generate a significant amount of traffic, and that landing pages don’t perform better then if we just sent all the traffic to their home page. The first thing I do when I hear either one of these is pull open Google Analytics (you did install that, right?) and see what’s what.

The new reports module for Analytics is freaking awesome. I have to say it again; it’s awesome. My favorite new ability is to be able to easily compare the performance of landing pages with the entire site. It’s as simple as clicking on the ‘Content’ button on the left-hand side and then clicking on the name of your landing page. What you will then see is an overview of that page’s peformance. You can choose to Analyze ‘Entrance Sources’ or ‘Entrance Keywords’ and be able to rattle off a number of impressive stats about the site in question:

1. The percentage of the site’s total unique page views that are generated through PPC that is funneled towards that landing page.
2. The bounce rate of the landing page vs. pages on the site as a whole.
3. The average amount of time people spend on the landing page vs. pages on the site as a whole.

Armed with these facts, most of the time what I can say to my client with supreme confidence is that PPC represents a large percentage of their daily traffic. I can also confirm with them that their landing page has a lower bounce rate than the site itself (because the marketing is so focused on delivering just what people are searching for). And that people are spending on average more time on the landing page than on the site itself.

Dropping those kinds of bombs on a client can certainly bring up some fiery questions about the quality of the site being advertised. In the end, when you are doing everything on your side to make sure that the PPC campaigns and landing pages are set up right, what ultimately makes pay-per-click ineffective is the product that is being sold. Sometimes there’s no way to ‘polish a turd’ enough to turn it into the Lexus the client wants it to seem to its visitors. In those cases, they are in need of a serious marketing consultation and revamping of the website so that it can deliver upon what is advertised so well.

Monitor Adwords The Right Way Or Face Wrath Of Reduced Quality Score

July 4, 2007 by Vinny Leave a Comment

In my line of work, you get a lot of people who are very anxious about their marketing; when are their ads serving, how frequently, for what terms, etc. I’ve had clients that have told me that they check out their ads throughout the day to make sure that they are where they ‘need to be’ (whether that’s actually the case or not). Well ever since I saw Google post on the Adwords Blog that improper monitoring of ads can cause significant damage to account performance, I’ve been harping to all my clients that their curious impressions may be doing far more harm than good!

First off, as many of us know already, Google adjusts quality score based upon the search account’s click-through rate (CTR). So the more times you view an ad without actually clicking on it, your CTR suffers. When this happens over the course of weeks, where a high-maintenance client feels the need to search for their ads hundreds of times, you can see how this can have a serious impact on CTR.

What I didn’t know until now was that Google will also adjust ad position based upon whether you click on an ad or not. So if you search for yourself at the top of the rankings time after time, and don’t click on your ad, eventually Google will knock you out of the top spot based on your personal preferences. Imagine how this only multiplies the anxiety a misinformed client already has about where their ads serve. Even if their ads are #1 across America, they might get to the point where they hardly see their ads serve on the first page at all.

Yesterday was the day to start informing all of your clients about the proper way for them to test out where their ads are serving: by using the Ad Preview page at http://google.com/adpreview. You can do all the same searches you normally would, but these impressions will not count against your statistics. Believe me, doing this has already started saving money for my clients and resulted in more cost-effective advertising.

From my experiences it appears that Google has a short-term memory when it comes to CTR, so you can start seeing the benefit of this pretty much as soon as you start using it. Although I’m still not certain how the personalized search functionality plays into this. You might have to clear out your browser cache if the ads still don’t serve in high positions on your machine. Please ad to this with anything you’ve noticed in regards to this.

Google Cracks Down On Linking Schemes In Real Estate SEO: It’s About Time.

July 3, 2007 by Vinny Leave a Comment

Marc Rasmussen’s fascinating blog post on his recent real estate SEO struggles with Google is a must-read for anyone doing real estate website optimization. It shows how you can really get caught with your pants down if you engage in linking schemes. And it also demonstrates how difficult it is to get your clients back in the SERPs if they are taken down.

Matt Cutts’ blog has some fiesty banter going on about Google’s real estate “shot across the bow,” specifically who it targeted. What Marc and many others are suggesting are that Google’s policy enforcement team are not penalizing all real estate websites equally for reciprocal linking.

What we will say regarding all of this is that Google did not penalize our real estate websites at all, simply for the fact that we never engaged in linking schemes because they are set against improving the overall user experience. Unfortunately people think they can get ahead and never get penalized for it. Google has shown in the past they won’t tolerate black hat SEO tactics that go against their webmaster guidelines, and this is simply another case of policy enforcement.

If you’re saying, “what’s wrong with having state pages on a Florida real estate website for out of state referrals?” Unless your site is a national vacation home referral website, there’s no reason to have state pages on it. The more relevant website will always be a website pertaining to a specific state. And why should a website that has more quality information on real estate in Florida be lower in the SERPs than a Florida site with less quality information on Florida and a bunch of information pages on other states with spammy reciprocal links?

Our ultimate hope is that Google doesn’t cave into these people asking for full re-inclusion because how is it fair to the people who play the game the way it’s supposed to be played if offenders can just find a sink, wash their hands, and then get back in where they started?

Basic Social Bookmarking To Hype Your Blog Site

July 2, 2007 by Vinny Leave a Comment

If you aren’t already using social bookmarking sites like Digg to advertise your great blog postings, then you might as well be writing your entries on a barn wall in rural Iowa with a red Sharpie because no one will read it. No matter how good a writer you are, most stuff will lose its freshness long before the search engines pick it up naturally. Social bookmarking sites step in and allow readers to review posts when they are recommended. People who are good at picking relevant, interesting/helpful articles end up getting other readers to subscribe to their choices. So if you’re writing about website SEO, then you want some good SEO experts to start recommending your work. It’ll lead to a whole lot of other people reading your posts. That’s why we’ll give your posts a good square kick in the marketing rear by getting you in the habit of submitting your posts to a couple of social bookmarking sites whenever you blog.

The good news is that it only takes a few minutes to register an account. We recommend picking a login name that contains keywords because an SEO article recommended by someone who has the name SEOMarketing looks like, at least on first glace, that it has more promise than one “dugg” by JoeBlow. When you recommend articles, the title and description don’t have to match the exact blog post. So you can use that opportunity to throw a good key phrase in there or two, and really make the post pop out any way you can. The goal with social bookmarking is to pique the curiosity of someone so they read your description, then travel to the blog, and also “digg” the article so that the hype machine continues to run. As with any kind of promotional campaign, you could lose people at any step of that process; so you’ll ultimately want to optimize each step to maximize your chances of getting more favorable reviews of your blog.

Finally, one thing you’ll want to do is some research. What kinds of articles are getting “dugg” more frequently in your industry. Of course you don’t want to retread, but it never hurts to steal some topical thunder and riff off someone else’s success story. Whatever you do, make sure all the posts that you suggest to the bookmarking site are relevant to each other, and also make sure to recommend other articles you find that are helpful; it makes your account seem less biased.

Google Adwords Content Network Campaigns For The Music Industry

July 1, 2007 by Vinny Leave a Comment

I moonlight as a singer/songwriter in the Los Angeles area. As an SEO/PPC expert, I’ve always wondered if setting up a Google Adwords content network campaign might be an effective way to get some new ears on my music. So today I embark on a SEM experiment that targets the fans I want to get. Explaining how I’m setting up the campaign is a textbook way to demonstrate what factors into a quality content network campaign. Even though this campaign targets the music industry, these same steps can be used to target any industry-specific demographic you’re looking to advertise to. This is also an open invitation to anyone who has already set up a successful campaign like this to add their two cents, although I suspect most music industry types aren’t the kind to share what they’ve found to work. That makes you ask why I would tell you what I’m doing? Well, I’m from the midwest, and we’re usually not the type to cut our wrists over helping others out.

First off, what I’ll do is figure out what kind of fans I want. A lot of people have told me I sound like a mix of John Mayer, Jack Johnson, Elliott Smith, and countless other male indie rock/pop artists. I want to get the general traffic that would dig that type of music, but I also want to target someone more specific as well. So what I’ll do is set up four initial groups:

1. Targeting John Mayer fans.
2. Targeting Jack Johnson fans.
3. Targeting Eco-activists (Note: I’m not a bleeding liberal, but as many of my Santa Monica neighbors, I strongly believe in paying due respect to mother nature).
4. Targeting fans of my favorite music.

Now take into consideration that content network campaigns must be set up entirely differently than regular search network campaigns. We’re not targeting as specific demographic, and we can’t be as specific to Google about the kind of pages we want to show up on. But the cool thing about content network is that we can use a bunch of general, broad keywords, and Google will take all of them into account as a whole. The result is that Google actually gets very close to figuring out the kinds of pages you’ll want to show up on!

For the John Mayer and Jack Johnson campaigns, I’m putting about forty general music keywords in, many of them pertaining to music genres that are similar to mine. I’m also throwing in some good action phrases like “buy music” and “listen to new music.” Then I’m adding a dozen or so additional phrases for each that pertain most to the individual artist who’s fans I’m trying to steal. I mean get to listen to my stuff. For example, for Jack Johnson, I’m adding phrases like “brushfire fairytales,” “jack johnson lyrics,” and “john mayer.” Why would I add “john mayer”? Well, it so happens a lot of Jack Johnson fans are also John Mayer fans, and vice versa. See how this works?

Next comes the text ads. You really have to consider exactly what kind of surfer is viewing the page. You want to try, as much as possible, to get them away from the content that’s more specific than yours. So your call to action better be really good and relevant. Here’s one of the ads I’m running:

Johnson’s Indie Alter Ego
Think Jack Johnson With More Umph
And Just As Much Heartfelt Writing.
ClinebellMusic.Com

Note how it’s targeting his listeners by giving them a frame of reference. Maybe they’d like someone with more umph? Actually, I don’t want Jack Johnson fans who don’t like a little umph listening to my songs because there’s less a chance they would buy my CD. So that’s why I’m still being very specific in the ad. I’ve got several others that ask specific questions like “Do You Like Great Lyrics?” and “Looking For New Artists?” in order to catch those people who are on specific kinds of pages. As with all ads, it’s usually a little trial and error to see what actually works.

As far as bidding goes, I’m starting out with a very low CPC. I don’t want to burn through too much budget initially. Even if my $.25/click max doesn’t yield impressions at first, that’s okay. I’ll just incrementally boost the groups until each one starts to get a healthy amount of quality traffic (leading to comments on my blog, MySpace adds, CD sales, song downloads, etc.).

I don’t have much time to go into all the details on the “Eco group” and the one targeting all the music I love, but the main differences between all of these groups are the dozen or so more specific phrases that give each group its own unique identity as a whole. In the “Eco group” I added phrases like “an inconvenient truth” and “save the world.” And for the group targeting people who’d like similar music to me, I just basically added my favorite bands list from myspace.

I’m really curious as to how this campaign will work out. I’ll definitely keep you posted, because right now I just don’t see really aggressive media targeting of the PPC markets.