If you took a sneak peek into thousands of apartment websites’ analytics accounts you might find that they tell a similar story. Most of their website traffic is coming from Google. Google is arguably the most important marketing channel for apartment marketers today, but it’s also one of the most difficult to compete in.
Tablets are becoming more and more commonplace both in work and at home, and they are now the ultimate companion device for consumers as they watch TV.
In a new report from Flurry Analytics, tablet users are shown to use their tablets throughout the day, but during the primetime hours the usage spikes.
What does this mean? It means tablet users are using their devices as they watch TV. They’re searching, networking and playing games. Their high engagement during the primetime TV hours means that you have an additional way to get their attention instead of just TV commercials.
Imagine you run a primetime TV spot at 7:30 p.m. on a local news channel. An interested customer sees your ad, grabs their tablet and looks you up online. You have two opportunities to grab them while they are searching for your business.
The first is with a search targeting campaign. Also known as paid search, search targeting puts your ad at the top of search engines. This gives you the chance to reach people as they look up your business.
The second is with Retargeting. Retargeting displays ads to people after they visit your website, allowing you to remarket your business to them. So if the interested tablet user searches and finds your website, but leaves without taking action, you can still reach out to them through a Retargeting campaign.
Tablet users have high primetime engagement, and tend to be older and more affluent than other demographics. It’s time to target tablet users with search and display ads.
Don’t think of search engine optimization as the end of your online strategy. SEO should play an important role, but don’t get caught up in the hype of so-called “free traffic.” In fact, you are paying your SEO company to get you that “free traffic” every month.
A great alternative to spending money on SEO is SEM. Don’t listen to companies who say their SEO is foolproof. Purchasing ads in Google AdWords is the only surefire way to appear at the top of the search results.
The fact of the matter is that SEO is still a guessing game, and that’s the way Google likes it. Google doesn’t make any money off of SEO. Therefore, it doesn’t make sense for them to help websites optimize for higher search listings.
A simple search engine marketing campaign can help bring your website more traffic than you would get normally. Plus, in a report from Google, 89% of traffic gained from a search campaign was lost when the ads were paused. That means that an SEM campaign lets you reach an entirely different audience than you would get from organic results.
If you’ve never done SEM, give it a shot. Go to Google AdWords and create a test campaign and bring some new traffic to your website.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is not a one-time event where a computer geek comes in and rewrites a few lines of code on your website, even though that may need to be done. SEO is more about content, relevance, vision and hard work.
SEO is simply the efforts put forth for organic search results in your market(s); it is the
Find the help you need to shape the vision necessary to slowly and consistently drive your business to the top of the pile for your market. Bring in a hired gun that sees more of the Internet than you do. You may want to consider a copywriter as well.
As you go along, you’ll find that leaving lots and lots of content on the Internet will help your company website find its way higher on the search engines.
