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Improving ROI on Corporate SEM/PPC Campaigns

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If you take a close look at your company’s PPC accounts and the way they are currently configured, most of you are probably not getting even close to the max ROI, and there’s a lot of things we can do to improve upon their performance. Many of these things won’t take long to implement and see results of, while others (including developing and split testing multiple landing pages, text ads, and terms) will help out big time in the long run. Here’s where I’d start as far as making changes goes:

1. Set up separate landing pages and campaigns for each product line to better target demographics and turn them into leads at a higher rate.

2. Split test different text ads and landing pages to find out which ones are getting the most leads.

3. Refine bids to place emphasis on terms that are getting the highest number of leads.

4. Experiment with content-only campaigns to find out if they are effective or not from a lead-gen standpoint.

5. Run Analytics on all the landing pages to find out where you might be losing leads.

To be honest, doing all of these things right is a job in and of itself. Yet if these things are done, we can assure you that the return on those resources will be quite measurable in terms of the volume, cost, and quality of leads you receive after.

We know that you may have been running these campaigns in a set way for awhile now, and that making any big changes would require sufficient planning. Perhaps it would be best for us to have a meeting to discuss how best to go about implementing them? Please use our contact form to receive your free SEM/PPC management consultation.

 Corporate SEM/PPC Campaigns at BigSERP.Com

How Do I Start Marketing My Products and Services Online?

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There are many small businesses that remain offline with their marketing efforts. But as time passes, the ROI for online streams continues to grow exponentially, making the “jump” more enticing than ever for traditional marketers. With the ability now to specifically and aggressively target people who are actively searching for the products and services you offer on a minute by minute basis, it’s easy to see why internet marketing is such an attractive alternative to print media.

The heavy trending towards search engine marketing (SEM) and website search engine optimization (SEO) couldn’t be more obvious in the way we go about our daily lives now; we use web browsers to research and purchase most everything we want or need today.  There’s no doubt you need to go after this highly-qualified, cost-effective traffic. But for those of you who don’t have extensive experience running successful online marketing campaigns, this transition can be daunting.

Beware: there are a lot of expensive mistakes you can make, on your own or with the wrong company. Some of these mistakes will just cost you a lot of money with little to no return on investment (ROI). Some will cost you way more time than you have to spare. Others may actually get your web presence banned on the search engines entirely. That’s why you’ve gotta put your SEM and SEO campaigns in the capable hands of professional strategists. Regardless of how familiar you are with online marketing, we can assure you that a blend of the following tactics will give you the best results:

  1. Pay-per-click (PPC) or SEM – to instantly get your site ranked through paid search.
  2. SEO – to optimize your site from the ground up so that it will eventually be indexed naturally.
  3. Content Building – to increase the informational depth of your site so you rank naturally.
  4. Inbound Link Generation – to make your site an authority so you rank even higher naturally.

Three out of the four strategies are long-term ones, but our comprehensive solutions offer ROI “right out of the box.”  For more information on how we can start to get your products and services online and out the door to paying web surfers, please use the form on this page to receive your free initial marketing consultation.

10 Steps to Getting Your Landing Page Bounce Rate Under Control

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Nothing can undermine the effectiveness of a pay-per-click (PPC) marketing campaign like a bad landing page (also called “marketing page” in the industry). You could send the most qualified traffic to it, only to have your hot prospects bouncing off to a page they can truly relate to. Since we don’t want you to do that, we’re giving you ten quick and helpful tips that will improve the quality of your marketing pages so that you don’t have to worry about throwing your money away.

1. Make It Specific
What demographic are you targeting? Where do they live? What kinds of unique products and services are they looking for? A good landing page will clearly answer all of these questions for a unique type of visitor that you are driving to it via PPC keywords and text ads. Never think of a landing page as a multi-purpose page. A real estate broker who tries to sell homes in all of Arizona on one page will have a much harder time convincing potential clients that he is a local expert than one who sets up a custom-tailored marketing page for every community in Arizona he serves.

2. Make It Current
You don’t have to real the news headlines and update your landing page every day, but it never hurts to ride the waves of holiday sentimentality and construct pages that run promotions geared towards those nationally treasured occasions. Also, stop using “Welcome to Anytown!” on your landing page, it’s not 1997 any longer!

3. De-Sleaze It
Unless successful sales tactics for your industry dip into car salesman-like depths of moral compass, there’s no sense to try and amp up your landing page with cliched buzz words. Believe it or not, the first thing web shoppers are trying to do is quickly find out if your site is “full of it” or not. If the marketing page contains little factual information or appealing offers, you can rest assured that your visitors will bounce faster than one of those rubber balls you buy out of a quarter machine at the grocery store.

4. Earn the Trust of Your Visitors
Is your landing page doing all it can to assure those who see it that you are worthy of their trust? Do you have current client testimonials on it? Do your forms contain privacy disclaimers and anti-spam logos? Is a human picture on it? Making the page as “human” as possible with pictures, quotes, and statements that bring the complexities of your online order system down to a better comfort zone will only increase your conversions.

5. Follow Eye Drift
Ah, the magic of our ingrained cultural tendencies. Since the western world reads from left to right and from top to bottom, it surfs pages nearly the same way. Below your header, if you have one, you should always have the most important image or offer in the upper left corner. That’s where people are looking for grounding, that this page contains exactly what they were looking for. To the right is where you want to hit them with an opportunity to convert immediately, if you haven’t already given them the chance. A side note with eye drift: even though the above example is two-column, single column formats can work really well too with this because they force the visitor to follow the page straight down.

6. Label It Properly
Did you title the page with the keywords and text ad offer that referred the visitor to it? Are your meta keywords and description also in line with them? And what about your h1 tags? If you don’t make sure the entire landing page delivers the right language to the visitor, not only does it increase the chances that they will bounce, but there’s also a good chance the search engines (like Google) will penalize you with a poor quality score for having what appears to be an irrelevant marketing page to the keywords you’ve bid on. And the end result of that is less visitors at a higher average cost-per-click (CPC).

7. Keep It Above the Fold
If your visitors can’t see it right away, there’s a good chance they won’t ever. Don’t ever assume that even a majority of your traffic will take the time to scroll down the page. Put everything that’s important in the top 500 or so pixels of the page. That way you can rest assured that most browsers will display all the information you need your prospective buyers to consider, and maximize your chances of making an impression.

8. Ample Opportunity to Convert
What good is all the information your qualified online shoppers are looking for without frequent and compelling chances for them to do business with you right away. Unless your industry usually makes “soft sales,” we recommend hitting people with an offer right after your first piece of information. Whether it be a picture of your featured product, or a well-worded introduction to your company, it never hurts to let the people who are ready to buy now do so.

9. Optimized Forms
Are your forms asking for too much information? Do they ask for information over several forms, allowing for individual customization of each user’s opt-in to your offer? The more you make the forms simple, nice looking, functional, easy to understand, and capable of reacting correctly to input, the less likely you are going to have people leave the page because your page is either too confusing or intrusive.

10. Make It Legible
This could very well be the most important tip in the list. Are your fonts white on black, black on white, or another high-contrast pairing? Do you avoid the overuse of italics and small type size? Are your paragraphs well-formatted? Are they free of spelling and grammar mistakes? If all of these conditions are not met, you are selling your campaign short by making your landing page difficult to read, and therefore less compelling.

BigSERP runs effective internet marketing campaigns of all shapes and sizes, operating on the west side of Los Angeles, California.

Using Robots.txt To Disallow Domains From Spidering Your Site

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As SEO practitioners, there’s often a good reason to exclude a certain search engine or site spider from looking at your pages. For example, some people who do not want their site archived over time by Archive.org will take action to block them from doing so. That’s where the robots.txt kicks in; set one up on your server, and most websites will adhere to your commands as far as what they are allowed to spider on your site. If you wish to prevent a specific site spider from indexing your website’s content, then configure your robots.txt file this way:

<

p class=”article_code”> User-agent: Name_of_Robot
Disallow: /

Here are some of the most common site robot names that you might want to exclude:

<

p class=”article_code”>Archive.org: ia_archiver
Google: googlebot
Yahoo: Slurp

 Regardless of what you’re trying to do with robots.txt, the most important thing is to make sure you’re doing it right. A small typo in your config file can cause disastrous results. So make sure to use the following resources to set yours up properly.

<

p class=”article_code”>For thorough lists of robots files you can exclude, check these sites:

http://www.hostsun.com/gr/bots_index.php

http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/active.html

For thorough documentation as to how robots.txt files work, and how to properly set them up, check out these sites: 

http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/faq.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots.txt 

What Passing Score Is Required For Yahoo Ambassador Status?

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For those of you wanting to be considered Yahoo Ambassadors, certified in using Yahoo’s new (and hardly improved) pay-per-click (PPC) account management system, you must pass their online test. What we’ve had a fair number of people ask us is what they need to score in order to pass the test. Well, we’ve taken the test, and can say with certainty that the passing score is 85%. Now if you’re wondering how hard it is to get that score, well, let’s just say that it’s considerably less difficult than the Google Qualified Professional Exam.

12 Effective Calls To Action For Real Estate Marketing Campaigns

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MLS Access Itself No Longer Compels Prospective Buyers To Register

I’ve got a question for you. Why on earth would anyone looking to buy a home ever fill out a form without getting some value demonstrated to them first? With so many realtors and brokers still relying on archaic landing pages that only offer the promise of access to the local MLS, it’s no wonder they are seeing fewer and fewer legitimate leads coming in through their pay-per-click (PPC) and natural campaigns.

We work with a lot of real estate agents, and can tell you with certainty that the home search trends are changing. What generated a lot of inquiries six months ago no longer applies; you simply must offer something above just access to the MLS to impress visitors enough to compel them to fill out a minimal form. So we’re not just talking about MLS access. No matter what area of the country you are in, you will benefit greatly from a thorough analysis of the services you can offer and therefore entice your prospects with. We’re happy to provide you with our suggestions as to some additional functionality, services, and offers you can add to your site to really knock their socks off.

  1. Email daily listings updates. Using professional design templates that reinforce your branding every step of the way, set up drip campaigns that send out your latest listings as they hit the market. Visitors can easily opt into these emails with a simple form.

  2. Tips & articles. Covering the entire home buying and selling processes, offer hip, timely, and area-specific tips and articles as a package. Place them in an area of your site that requires registration to access.

  3. Free home appraisals. This makes a great call to action on your landing page which can be used to initiate a referral (if they are out of the area you serve) or sale on your part. Simply provide a form that asks for enough information and package it attractively as part of your complete service.

  4. Free loan pre-approval. This helps get the whole process going for home buyers. If you can integrate your MLS data to feed them properties in their price range immediately after they register, that works best. We recommend adding your choice lenders to your blog community.

  5. Remodeling tools and resources. There are a lot of people looking for a fixer-upper. Or they may want a specific type of counter. Regardless, if you can refer them to some great professionals in your area, that works best. We recommend adding local remodelers to your blog community.

  6. Calculators. People love to crunch numbers as they are looking. Just don’t make the mistake of letting your calculator take them away from the listings they were looking at; use a popup window or javascript app to run the calculator, or even build it into the side of the HTML design template so that everything they need is right there. You could have a dropdown for the different kind of calculators you offer, and then have it process the numbers for whatever specific task they want it for on the page.

  7. Local home market reports. If you can offer fully customizable market snapshots for your area of expertise, then that’s a great way to show that you provide cutting-edge real estate tools. These reports work on an opt-in basis much like daily listings updates, and return value to prospects while reinforcing your branding continually. Definitely work this into your calls to action.

  8. Team up with a moving company. Find a great local moving company and get them involved in your blog community. This is that extra step you can take to show that you cover all the bases. It also shouldn’t be hard to work out some type of referral program with them that you can advertise. For example, many realtors will pay for moving expenses with the close of a house because the mover will give them a large discount for the referral. It never hurts to make a few calls and connections with this.

  9. Involve local schools. Find out all the information you can about your local school districts. Get a couple members of local parent boards to join your blog community. Of course, you’ll want to make sure they’re happy with the schools before you allow them to participate, but having them there will add additional value to your blog as a complete resource on the area.

  10. Local real estate blog. Here’s the kingpin, which we saved for close to the end because you need everything to work in concert to form a comprehensive resource that will be of value to your prospects. Don’t set a blog up because it’s the trendy thing to do, do it because it’s the easiest way to get a bunch of professionals together to collaborate and reinforce your marketing. Add the following local professionals to your team: real estate lawyer, all the agents in your office, a mortgage expert, an escrow specialist, trusted community members (including those from parent-teacher boards), and anyone else who would add some local personality into your blog.

  11. Foreclosures information. This is becoming a boom market, so any information you can pass along regarding how forclosures work in your area would be great to advertise; especially if you can create a forclosure resources section on your site that contains articles that require registration to access.

  12. Socially responsible real estate. Many agents are trying gimmicky marketing strategies, but this one actually is gaining some traction in left-leaning communities. If you can say you’ll donate a percentage of your commission to the area’s favorite local charities, then that’s something you may benefit from. Just don’t make it the main angle of your marketing.

Bonus Call to Action: Maps of active listings. It cracks us up how many real estate websites still don’t use maps to show where their featured listings are located. It’s not that hard to set up, and you’ll be able to advertise that you can easily print out maps to all of your local listings. And yes, people are so lazy that they might bounce when they see you don’t have maps.

Using the iPhone to Follow Up on Real Estate Sales Leads

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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

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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

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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

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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.