Meta-Tag Myth (Article 2 of 2)

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If you read my previous publications, you know I do not believe Meta-Tags are the answer to getting motivated sellers to find you on the Internet. “What else can I do to get my investing business found on the internet?” Let’s go back to Google and “foreclosure help.” Remember we were talking about the organic results on the left hand side. On the right side you find “Sponsored Links.” These are known as “pay per click ads.”

All the major search engines have advertising programs. You place a bid based upon where you want your ad to appear. The higher the bid the higher your placement. This advertising is all keyword specific, so you can advertise for the specific term “foreclosure help.” You can also advertise for the specific term “foreclosure help in Greenville, AL.” which wouldn’t be a good strategy because most folks area not gonna ever search for “foreclosure help in Greenville, AL.” What’s really neat about pay per clicks is that you control where your ad appears, how often it appears, and how much you pay.

Before we get to how much you pay I want to introduce you to two terms. One of them is called PPC which refers to a “pay per click” ad. The other thing is CTR or “click through rate.” A click through rate simply means that for every hundred times that this foreclosure help ad appears, how many times visitors click on it. The better your CTR the more successful you’re gonna be in your internet advertising. Also for a lot of search engines, specifically Google, the less they will charge you to appear higher on the sponsored links. They take a combination of your bid amount as well as your CTR to determine where you appear.

The other term you’ll hear a lot is impressions. Impressions can simply mean how many times your ad appears. So this foreclosure help ad might get 300 impressions a day, and it might get 30 clicks, which means it has a click through rate of 10%. 30 / 300. We’ll get deeper into impressions at another time.

GEOGRAPHY CLASS
One other thing I want to share with pay per click ads is the geographic element. With PPCs you can pick specifically what IP addresses you want your ad to appear for. You can drill down to literally a 5 mile radius of your investing zip code and motivated sellers you want to find. ? You can really hone your marketing through PPCs by using a feature called “negative keywords.” Let’s say you were bidding on the term “foreclosure” which is a little bit broad. You could put a negative keyword in there like “deals”, so if somebody looks for “foreclosure deals” your ad doesn’t come up. If you’re looking for a motivated seller, you’re not gonna want somebody who’s searching for foreclosure deals.

PROS

So now that you’re introduced to pay per click ads, let’s talk about the benefits.

* Immediate results: With all the major search engines you can actually have your ads start appearing in 24 hrs or less.

Literally, motivated sellers can started finding your investor website by tomorrow morning! It’s not like organic optimization where it takes months and months; overnight boom you’re up.

* Clear & trackable results: All these search engines give you very specific results: how many times did motivated sellers click your ads, how much you’re paying per click, what’s your click through rate, where your bids appear, your bid position. The more you can track your marketing, the more successful you’re gonna be.

*Complete control: You can set a daily budget or monthly budget. You can filter out negative words. You have complete control over your marketing.? Little to no upkeep: Once your ad is up with a good CTR, you’re good. Just keep some money in the account for when you get clicks and they’re charged.

* Very small investments and no expertise: You can get started for just $50. Also since bidding is the determining factor, you can go to places where giant companies like AT&T are and outbid them. You can compete with the giants.
CONS

Why not keep it fair here.  There are a couple cons to pay per click ads.

* Because traffic is so targeted, you may not get much. if you’re bidding on “foreclosure help” within a 5 mile radius of Greenville, AL there might only be 5 or 10 motivated sellers a month who search for that specific term.

However, the great thing is, you only pay for what you get. So even if you spend an hour setting up a pay per click campaign, it’s not wasted money because you’ll never be charged unless you’re getting that targeted traffic that you agreed to pay for.

* You need to make sure you’re capitalizing on the traffic you are continually paying for. You pay per click. So you go on vacation and are not keeping up with your website. Things just look bad. They’re leaving and you still have to pay for it. ?

* The last con is that unattended campaigns can become sinkholes. Make sure that you check your campaigns periodically — every 10 – 14 days or so. But again that con is mitigated by the fact that you can shut it off in an instant.

* PROMISES PROMISES

So this leads us to what I promised you. Now that you understand organic optimization and pay per clicks I want to talk about the Meta-Tag Myth. Our personal competitors in the Real Estate Investing industry say “We’re gonna meta-tag your site. Pay to get your site meta-tagged.”

It’s a fallacy to think that meta-tags are gonna be an effective way for motivated sellers to find your investing business on the internet, because as we saw before, meta-tags and organic optimization is optimal for a national, not locally centered company. You as a local investor in say Trenton, NJ are never going to be able to compete with a national level foreclosure company. You’re gonna spend a lot of money and time getting no results. Then you’re gonna get frustrated and dump it.

We certainly don’t want that. Meta-Tags are valuable tool for internet marketing, but you can’t put all your eggs in that basket. Please be creative and utilize the other tools out there that are within your reach as a small company. It will work.

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