Why estate agents can't afford to ignore Google Adwords

Most readers of this blog will know that there are two types of search results that can generate traffic for your estate agency on Google: unpaid 'organic results' and pay-per-click (PPC) 'sponsored listing' adverts.

It could be argued that Google spent 2009 de-prioritising organic results for local business searches. Take a look at the screenshot below - this is how Google search results look for one of the most important searches relating to your business, e.g. "estate agents crawley".

The vast majority of the links shown are from either sponsored links (green), or the Local Business Centre maps (blue). Only towards the bottom of the screen do you see the organic search results (red).

Despite this, a generally low level of competition and a highly targeted local audience, very few of the independent agents we talk to are making any use PPC advertising currently.

For a cost per lead of perhaps just 5-10% of the fees charged by property portals and a starting budget of perhaps £10-20 per month, your estate agency can start to generate traffic from vendors and landlords.

As this is just too good to ignore, this week I'm going to use a series of blogs to show you how to setup an Adwords campaign.

Today, we start with first three steps:

Sign up for an Adwords account. Although it's worth signing up with Yahoo and Bing later as well, to start with we'll stick with Google to keep things simple.

Don't worry too much about using the Adwords website for now. Instead, once you have your account, download Google Adwords Editor software. We will use this to simplify the process of managing your account.

Finally, to prepare for creating our adverts tomorrow, take a look back at the blog on search terms for estate agents earlier this month. Combine the results of this exercise with the keywords people are using to find your website already by looking at your Google Analytics reports. A good target is to aim for a list of 20-30 search phrases to begin with.