The two main methods used to establish a presence on the search engines to attract buyers and sellers to your real estate web site are Pay Per Click-through (PPC) and Search Engine Optimization.

Pay Per Click-through (PPC) is the marketing method where you establish an account with the search engines and pay to be placed on the Search Engines Results Pages (SERPs). PPC is performance based; you only pay for visitors if they click on your web site's link, as it is displayed on the Search Results Page (SERP). You control which SERPs your company's link/ad shows up on by bidding on key phrases, for example "Los Angeles real estate" or "new construction Los Angles". Your link's placement on the page is based on the price you bid versus other bidders for the same search term. If you bid the highest amount, your link is placed in the first position on the page.

SEO is a form of reverse engineering. You try to make adjustments to your web site to make it attractive to the search engines so you get listed as high as possible for your search terms. There are two major aspects to this, On-page and Off-page. On-page adjustment is the craft of incorporating your key phrases within your web site in the right areas like the title and heading. Off-page adjustments are mainly getting other sites to link to your site so your site is perceived as popular to the search engine.

With PPC and SEO in mind, you need to ask two major questions. First, which search engines should I try to get my web site including into? There are thousands of search engines but are some more important then others? Do some search engines have a more significant Market Share?

Second, which search terms do people enter into the search engines to find residential or commercial estate? You need to know what search terms people enter for two reasons.

1. To bid on those terms using PPC.
2. To include those terms/phrases within your web pages using SEO techniques.

This is commonly called Keyword Research and again is prerequisite to a successful Search Engine Marketing campaign.

Search Engines Market Share

Perhaps you've received e-mail offering to register your web site with the top 10, 50 or 500 search engines. Frankly, the companies making these offers are misleading you. Perhaps, in the mid 1990's there were many search engines but today the industry has consolidated and the search engines that matter can be counted on one hand.

According to analytics company WebSideStory the top four Search Engines account for 93 percent of all search queries. They are Google, Yahoo, MSN and AOL. With the exception of industry specific portal/search engines a company's SEM efforts should focus on these four SEs. (Yes, Realtor.com and Homes.com are important real estate portals, but they are not search engines.)

The Search Engine market is complex and often overlapping, see the table below. MSN (Microsoft) in particular subcontracts all of its listings.

Search Engine Marketing's (SEM) two main techniques, Pay per Click through (PPC) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) are reflected in the chart below that shows the four major search engines. You might notice that there are notations. I can't tell you the number of times I've updated this chart in the last couple of years. I had to update it as I was writing this article!

Search Engine	Regular/Organic Listings (SEO)	Pay per Click Through (PPC)	Market share
Google	Google	Google (AdWords)	27
Yahoo*	Google/Yahoo/Inktomi	Overture**	26
MSN***	Inktomi	Overture**	24
AOL	Google	AdWords	16
* Yahoo purchased Inktomi (2002) and is starting to replace the Google listings with a Yahoo/Inktomi/ hybrid as of the publication of this article. ** Yahoo purchased Overture (July 2003) *** MSN, Microsoft, has their new search engine in beta see: http://beta.search.msn.com/

Keyword Research

When searchers enter a phrase into the edit box these days they enter an average of two to three words. This average has gone up over time, as people get more "skilled" at using search engines. They have learned that the more specific the search phrase the better the chances of getting relevant results. A recent study shows that about 50 percent of all searchers now enter from three to seven words as a search phrase. There is a general feeling within the Internet marketing community that the more specific a search query the more likely you are to have an active prospect on your hands. If you leave this article with any single fact this should be it:

Search Specificity = Active Prospect

How can you do keyword research? There are two major services to do keyword research. How to use these services is the subject of another article but they are Overture and Wordtracker. What they help you do is find search terms for your product or service. The way this works is like a search engine. You enter a basic search term and the suggestion tool gives you a list of related search terms and the number of times that search phrase was used within a certain time frame, like monthly. In the case of Wordtracker it goes even further. You get a special number, which is a competitive analysis. Overture's search term suggestion tool is free. Wordtracker has a usage fee. You can pay for Wordtracker for as small a timeframe as a day. The daily fee is around 7 dollars US.

In an average month between 900,000 to 1,000,000 searchers enter the search term "real estate" in Overture alone. If you add all the geographic terms people use, you have around 3 million queries per month. Taking our chart above in regards to market share we can easily double that number. So we have 6 million queries per month. Realtor.com claims 12 million visitors per month so I think 6 million is a very low estimate.

OK, so we have lots of people looking for real estate on the Internet. Let's get to the terms they use. Of course, there are other terms besides real estate, for example:

new homes
MLS
new construction
real estate for sale by owner

How did I find these terms? I used both Overture and Wordtracker to find the top search terms. I also checked the web logs of my real estate clients. Here's the breakdown based on the major categories:

Category	Search Term Examples	Percent
Generic	Real estate New construction Homes for sale Real estate agent	50
State	New York real estate Real estate NY California homes for sale	20
County	Monroe county real estate Rockland NY real estate Real Estate Orange CA	10
City / Town / Township / School District	Plainview NY real estate NYC real estate New homes Allentown	15
Brand	Century 21 real estate Remax real estate Coldwell banker real estate
5

A generic searcher will very likely end up on Realtor.com, it's in the first position of most search engines. But what's the first thing that searcher has to do. They have to enter a town or zip code to get local listings, which, of course, they get from a feed from all the MLSs, which in turn they get from YOU the local agent/broker. So you want to focus your site on the other 50 percent of the searchers that are more self-qualifying.

The hardest category to determine is local listings. But the estimate of 15 percent I believe is conservative. I want to warn you, you can't use either Overture or Wordtracker to accurately find the correct count for local queries, yet these are the queries you're most interested in and have the best chance of getting placed well on the SERPs. To borrow a phrase from politics:

All real estate is local

You'll also notice the national real estate companies don't have that much mind share. However, it won't hurt to have your geographic location and your brand combined as a search phrase.

What should you do?

1. Focus on local results for PPC; the click-through rates are generally cheaper.
2. Design your SEO around local geography, you have less competition.
3. Constantly check your logs for new search phrases.
4. Start a link campaign.