All Forum Posts by: Sean Dolan

@Eli Rose see above.

As I'm sure you know, PPC is going to be expensive, and the learning curve will be steep for you to self-manage, but it's doable. With a 1,000 budget, it's going to be hard to find someone that's good at PPC charging under $500/month for the management fee alone. You get what you pay for with PPC management, like you would with a lawyer. Good lawyer gets you more money, bad lawyer gets you less money.

Finding those 'hidden' long-tail PPC keywords is harder than it used to be. With modified broad match-type, we can target any phrase with the keyword: +sell +house +fast, and enter the auction on any long-tail you find that contains those words (in any order). But, there may be some phrases with traffic, that are outside of the obvious guesses, and maybe pick up some leads that way.

Whatever you do, make sure you have conversion tracking in place, as well as call tracking (dynamic, so the number changes based on the user's source). No point in spending a lot of money, getting a lead, and having no idea what settings in the account brought you that lead. Your sister-in-law can probably set those up for you.

If you're going to learn it yourself, I recommend "Advanced Google Adwords" Third Edition by Brad Geddes.

As for the long-tail keywords you mentioned, the reason you're having trouble identifying bid estimates is because there's very little traffic for these phrases. See below.

In the term "Sell My House Fast Kennesaw" you're defining the geography in the search term. People are more likely to type in "sell my house fast" without the geographical specifier. As an advertiser, you can limit where your ads geographically show up, so you can target the term "sell my house fast" limited to the geographical area (maybe a radius of 20 miles) around Kennesaw. 

As for the bid price, you'll probably be in the $10-$20 per click range, depending on where you want to show up on the search results page. Google doesn't have that specific information for Kennesaw, but that's what I'm seeing across Georgia in general for "sell my house" terms. Either way, you can start low, and keep bidding higher until you start getting traffic. 

Good luck!

I have 5-6 people who would love to get together. The Hive in Katy would be a nice spot to meet. They have free co-working on Fridays. $30 per hour to rent a conference room if needed. I rented a conference room a couple days ago, and was pleased. Does someone want to spearhead this and put a date on the calendar? If not, I can.

@Jordan Decuir

@Scott Costello No response yet, but it's the weekend. I've looked up SEO analyst certification, and there are a few providers, but most of them are packages that sell training, ending in a certification, but that can't be limited to only 50 qualifiers. It may seem like I'm being overly critical, but it's important to me that businesses are honest. Claiming a truck is "Truck of the Year' by Motor trend, allows me to at least evaluated Motor trend's basis for making that decision. Someone claiming they are one of only 50 certified SEOs, without any source to evaluate, (not on their website, not on the CEOs Linkedin, nowhere) leaves me with some questions. 

Congrats on your rankings! Those are some pretty good terms. Glad to see you uniqued the content (As did the #1 ranked site:http://www.webuynjrealestate.com). If you guys are uniquing your content, choosing your metatags, doing your own link building, I'm left wondering what Investor Carrot is providing in terms of SEO. Url structure/slugs? It's a built on Wordpress, so most of that is handled in Wordpress. 

And if they are claiming that duplicate content isn't an issue, there's plenty of information available on that. Google has been cracking down on duplicate content since February 2011: http://searchengineland.com/google-forecloses-on-c...

From the 2011 article:

"We’re evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content. We’ll continue to explore ways to reduce spam, including new ways for users to give more explicit feedback about spammy and low-quality sites." -Matt Cutts, head of Google's Webspam Team (at the time of the article)

You can learn more about the panda updates here. The jury has been out on duplicate content for some time. http://searchengineland.com/library/google/google-...

I would recommend anyone else with an investor carrot site to unique the content as well.

Scott Costello What's your website, and what are you ranking for? I read through the terms of service and noticed you can't use their content, but if their content is the same on all pages they generate, that creates a major SEO issue, regarding duplicate content. I do take issue with someone claiming they somehow "rank worldwide" or have achieved some sort of certification in SEO, in such an unregulated industry. When they don't even cite the source of that certification, that's a red flag for me. I tweeted out to Generation Web marketing asking them to cite the source of the certification Hopefully they can provide it. ( https://twitter.com/_seandolan/status/695809424997244928 ) Hopefully they respond and clear that up. Really hope you can share the keywords that are bringing you SEO traffic to validate your claim! That would certainly make a good argument for investor carrot SEO.

Look up Google Grants. They offer up to $40k in Adwords spend, for absolutely free. :)

Investor carrot SEO is powered by a company called Generation Web, which touts that their CEO is "1 of 50 who are SEO certified" - in 10 years in the industry, I've never heard of an SEO certification - is there anyone from Investor Carrot who can fill me in on what this certification is, and who certifies the applicants? Sounds kinda shady, but I'm open to any explanation.

I haven't used investor carrot, but I'm curious what happens after you stop paying the $50/month or the $99/month? Do they take your site back? Anyone know?

Rob Grove There aren't any reliable hard and fast numbers on that. I have a few campaigns generating $80 cost per leads, but on average on all accounts averaging around $220 cost per lead (Adwords, Youtube, Bing, Facebook, etc) This is in the Houston market. Expect to pay $500+ per lead starting out. Look at your search term report religiously, daily, and add negative keywords that don't convert. It gets cheaper the more you learn what doesn't work, and cut that out. The rest is up to you as a salesman. If your close ratio is low, it costs more overall per home bought, if your close ratio is high, you can afford to spend more. Happy to answer any more questions.

@Rob Grove

Also, I would recommend that you advertise on an exact match phrase in Adwords, like [sell my house fast], limit distribution to 20 miles radius from your driveway, pay the $35/click or whatever it costs, for 10-20 clicks, and see if your website is even converting those leads. Make sure you have call tracking on your website, so you can identify calls coming from Adwords. 

So often people put the cart in front of the horse, they market the hell out of their website, to find that their website isn't converting those leads - what a waste of money. I guess LeadPropeller's proposition is that these sites do convert, but it's still worth testing. I myself haven't used Lead Propeller's websites, so I can't speak on it. 

For $350-$800 you can conduct a test of your website to see how it performs to the exact market it should perform for. If it doesn't, you need to fix the website's conversion issues before you spend any more money marketing the site. 

Below just references where I got the $35/click estimation.