Real Estate Pay-Per-Click Marketing Blog

In our last blog post we gave you some tips on designing your PPC landing pages. Once you have given your landing pages some thought and figured out what you want them to achieve, it’s time to work on getting visitors your website. Enter search keywords stage left.

What is a keyword?

A keyword is a word or phrase that people type into a search engine when looking for something specific online. For example, a property hunter wants to buy a property in Barcelona, so she fires up her favourite search engine and types in the keyword ‘Barcelona property for sale’. Maybe she already knows what she’s looking for and searches for ‘apartment for sale in Barcelona’, or even specifies a specific district of Barcelona by typing in ‘apartment for sale in Gracìa’. The search engine will display relevant search results and show PPC ads for advertisers who bid on the search keywords used.

The importance of choosing only the right keywords for your PPC campaign

When you run a pay-per-click campaign, it is crucial to carefully choose and bid on keywords that your potential clients are searching for. This is important because your keywords are part of the filter that helps make sure your ad is only seen by people who are likely to become your clients.

While it’s true that you only pay when someone clicks to your website, you still run a great risk of paying for useless clicks from curious people if your keywords are not well focused on your target audience. Besides, the major search engines like Google and Yahoo! take into account the relevance of both your keywords and your ads. This means that if a greater proportion of those who see your ad actually click on it, you will be rewarded with a lower cost-per-click for the relevant keywords.

How to find the best keywords to bid on

Step 1: Identify your target audience

Give a thought to the sort of people you are targeting. If you are planning a general pay-per-click campaign to generate leads for your estate agency, your target audience will of course be much broader than if you are advertising million dollar luxury apartments or large country estates. Keep that at the back of your mind as you think of what keywords they would use to search, but don’t let it limit you too much at this stage. You’ll have time to refine your keyword list later and even once your PPC campaign is underway and you can test what works.

Step 2: Brainstorm

Put yourself in the shoes of your audience and come up with a list of keywords they would use to search for the kind of property you sell. Consider different types of property, different locations, general terms like ‘real estate’ and ‘property for sale’ and even names of specific residential areas or developments. It’s a good idea to type up your list so you can copy and paste your keywords later and easily sort things around in the meantime.

We also recommend an excellent (and free) keyword generation tool called Good Keywords to help you build your keyword list. Using its phrase generation function, you can input up to three lists of keyword components (e.g. a property type list, ‘for sale in’ and a list of locations) and the program will automatically generate a list of combinations of keywords.

One little problem with this program that we have found in other keyword generators too is that it also outputs combinations you might not want. For example, if you input ‘villa’ and ‘house’ in list A, ‘for sale in’ in list B and ‘Barcelona’ and ‘Valencia’ in list C, you will also get ‘villa for sale in’ and ‘for sale in Barcelona’ as output keywords and must weed these out yourself.

Step3: Do some keyword research

There are several ways to discover new keywords you can use. One is to look through your website’s logs (ask your webmaster) to see which keywords people are searching on to come to your website. Another way is to run some web searches on the keywords you have so far and look at the top few websites to see what other relevant keywords they are using in their titles, description (the text that appears at the very top of the web browser), keywords tag (this one’s a bit more tricky because you need to look at the web page’s source code) and in the web page itself. You can also do this with your direct competition.

Step 4: Use the Yahoo! Search Marketing and Google AdWords keyword research tools to expand your keyword list

The Good Keywords program also allows you to input a keyword and search through Yahoo!’s database for suggested similar keywords, which are returned with monthly search counts. Of course, you will have to pick and choose through the suggestions to determine which apply to your business. Alternatively, you can use the free Yahoo! keyword research tool, which will give you the same results as Good Keywords.

Google also have their own free AdWords Keyword Tool. Although they do not reveal exact monthly search counts, you get a separate extra list of additional keywords to consider. This is usually only very generally related to your input, but often opens up a whole new avenue of keywords you may have overlooked.

Step 5: Edit and refine your keyword list

By now you should have a sizeable list of keywords that is rather broad in scope. This is the time to go through the list and separate the chaff from the corn, deleting those keywords that are irrelevant to your business or unlikely to result in conversions.

You will have to look out for keywords that are too general, such as ‘real estate’ or ‘property for sale’. Such keywords will attract clicks from a very broad audience who could be looking for property just about anywhere in the world. Even something like ‘real estate Spain’ is not a very good idea if you only sell property in a particular area.

If you target your PPC campaign to a very specific region, you might be able to use broader keywords successfully in certain cases, but more about that when we discuss language and location targeting. We’ll also be talking about the different ways your keywords can be matched to search queries, the benefits and drawbacks of the different matching types, and when to use what.

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Remember that drawing up a keyword list is not the end of the story. Only time and close monitoring and testing will tell you which keywords perform best for your business. And because online conditions such as your audience and your competitors are always changing, fine-tuning the keywords you use is an essential part of keeping your pay-per-click campaign running at optimum performance.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 17th, 2008 at 10:45 am and is filed under Pay-Per-Click Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.