🔥SEO vs PPC for REIs

[Angel-Ty L.]

This question gets asked countless times... Should I start with SEO or PPC? The answer to this is simple, do both. You have to have to be utilizing both to fully maximize revenue opportunities.If you only focus on PPC and not SEO you will be missing out on high amounts of traffic organically and vice versa

But how exactly would you do both?...

First, you clearly need a website and or a landing page set up to collect leads through the traffic that you get. Make sure the website is conversion optimized and has google analytics installed on the pages of your website. We are going to start out with PPC first since it has a very early break-even point where you will start to see a positive ROI on your ad spend. Once your website is up you will now be able to start running paid traffic and optimizing for SEO. Congrats!🎉

For beginner's sake choose whichever paid advertising platform you are comfortable with like (i.e. Adwords, Bing ads, Facebook ads, etc...). For this example, we are just going to start with Adwords. To make this sweet & easy I'm going to break down how to set up your first campaign in 7 simple steps. The main goal of this campaign is to get people to a form on your website/landing page to get pre-qualified.

• Choose campaign type and name. You're going to go ahead and select "search network" and then give your campaign a name. I personally name campaigns with the date and an abbreviated version of the goal (i.e. 1-30-18: SL-Pre-Qual).
• Select whatever geographic location your market is in. This will be where your ads will show
• Choose your bid strategy and set your daily budget. If you are brand spanking new to AdWords, read up a little on manual bidding before trying it, use automatic for now. As for setting up your budget, you will need to do the math. Check here for how to calculate a budget based on getting one deal (max invest. ✖ amount of deals wanted) ➗ 30 = daily budget
• Create your first ad group & write your ad. Create ad group based on relevant keywords. when creating your ad you're given
  • Headline: 25 character limit
  • 2nd line: 35 character limit
  • 3rd line: 35 character limit
  • 4th line: Display URL
• Enter Keywords. Start with a hand full of important keywords not thousands. Also, take use of Adwords match types. You can find a rundown of match types and how / when to use them here
• Set max CPC. Set your "default bid" distributed throughout the keywords rather than exhaust your budget for more expensive keywords. This is where proper keyword research comes into place.
• Review everything & Enter billing. Make sure everything looks as planned. More often than not people will have a light slip up and perhaps set the daily budget wrong, set wrong match type, etc...

Once your campaign is up and running make sure to monitor and optimize it

Now while simultaneously running paid traffic start working on SEO as soon as possible. Having good SEO allows you to rank #1 on google for keywords which accounts for near 30% of clicks. Remember, unlike PPC, SEO is a much longer process so the sooner you start the better.

*I won't dive deep into the SEO, being that I only have a basic knowledge of it *

Important SEO principles to remember...

• Highly relevant content. Googles crawlers are looking at the text on the page, the title, and descriptions that are given.
• Performance. Your site needs to be loading quickly. it also needs to work properly.
• Authority. Your site needs good enough content to where other sites link your website as a reference.
• User experience. The site needs to be navigatable and compatible with mobile and other devices. Users must find it easy to navigate and use. Not having this great user experience usually results in a high bounce rate, which negatively affects your rankings.
• Meta-data. Content on your sites should include title tags and meta description

This is a very general description but gives you the idea of what you need to be looking for.

To recap you need to be running traffic while also implementing SEO. If you are new to running paid traffic and SEO, then start with a smaller budget for PPC and implement basic SEO practices that generally anyone can do. later on, you will find it smarter to outsource your digital marketing which will enable you more time to focus more on investing but to also take your digital marketing to another level.

I hope I was able to provide as much value as possible with this mini-article. If you have any questions or concerns feel free to contact me. Also if you experience with PPC and or SEO chime in

-Angel-Ty Lebron