SEO and PPC have one thing in common — they get you to the top of Google search results.
In PPC, you are paying money to Google for every click that referred visitors to your website.
But with SEO, you either do it yourself or you hire an SEO agency to help you climb the search engine ladder to the top spot.
SEO can only be done to get your website to rank high on Google, Bing and Yahoo, and PPC extends beyond search engines; it can also be done on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google partner websites and other online channels.
Both SEO and PPC have one thing in common also, they help you generate lots of motivated traffic and leads from the internet.
There is no denying the fact that both SEO and PPC are the best marketing channels for any real estate agent because of their amazing features that allow you to target the right kind of audience.
Both will help you weed out bad audience (people who are not likely to buy or sell) and target the right audience (people considering or looking forward to buy or sell).
Rendering real estate lead generation services and doing both SEO and PPC for clients, I have been asked many times which of the two is best suited for their business.
Here is what I think about the issue as well as the advice I normally give:
PPC is for beginners, but not all aspects of SEO are for beginners
If you are new to real estate or have not started making reliable income, the best advice I can give you is to stay clear of SEO (but not all aspects of SEO should be avoided).
The part of SEO that has to do with link building or hiring an SEO expert should be avoided entirely by newbies or those who have not started making reliable sales.
But the aspects of SEO that have to do with internal optimization, such as creating awesome local content, improving website speed and creating good internal navigational links, are a must for every real estate professional because those things will directly affect your conversion rate.
Why newbies or agents not yet making reliable sales should avoid some portions of SEO
I wrote an article for Inman titled “SEO is a journey not a destination.” What many newbies fail to understand about SEO is that SEO will never give you instant results; it’s an ongoing process – it never ends.
It requires a minimum of three, six or 12 months of intensive SEO campaigning for your website to show-up on the first page of Google result pages.
That result also depends highly on the capacity of your SEO company, your budget and your competition.
So for a newbie or agents who have not started making reliable sales, churning out money monthly to pay for SEO services without seeing returns on investment almost immediately is emotionally challenging.
What a newbie or agent struggling to make sales needs is motivation in the form of quick results, which SEO won’t give, but PPC will.
My final verdict
Both SEO and PPC are good marketing medium, but PPC is suited for newbies or agents struggling to make instant impact.
Struggling agents should avoid those aspects of SEO listed above and use PPC to generate leads. After using PPC to generate leads and start making sales consistently, only then should you start thinking of hiring a SEO expert.
What do you think? Please share in the comments section below.
Ibemere Obinna is the CEO of Realtymarketingtool, a real estate marketing agency specializing in SEO services and PPC management (lead generation).