I/E Speaks

Over the past few years of working with Real Estate Agents all across the US and Canada, I’ve been part of many a discussion around target, or niche marketing. Most realtors are reluctant to limit themselves to a specific niche on their website… feeling that a larger net cast will produce more fish.

I have seen the opposite happen. When I’ve worked with an agent, who is willing to take the chance, focus down on a market, rather than cast the wide net, success follows.

Creating a site that speaks to a target market, helps identify you as the expert. Being the expert doesn’t mean you have to give up the occasional listing that falls outside of your typical sale… it’s just about reality. If 80% of your clients are from a particular niche, then acknowledge that in your marketing plan.

Your website is your best weapon for target marketing, as you can speak a lot louder, and with more words than any ad in a newspaper. So whether your market is a specific geographical one, new buyers, downsizing buyers, or condos, take a fresh look at your site and see how you can find tune things to speak more to your niche.

Quality content is key to having a user focused site but having quality, compelling content will hold your viewer’s attention. Most real estate websites will include the agencies information and offer an interior search engines designed to show that agencies listings and/or an outbound link to the local Multiple Listing Site, (MLS).

You want your site to offer your viewer more than what the average real estate sites offer, and do so in a way that they stay interested in your site long enough to examine it fully and leave feeling they learned something. This gives you a better chance at having them return to your site more than once, it’s a way of earning their trust. It’s also a way of establishing your credibility.

The more informative your site is, the better your chances of converting users to clients. Your content should establish you as an expert in your field, the person people go to when they need information about real estate in your area.

Posting current real estate industry news is another way to display your knowledge and make your website informative. Perhaps an area of your town used to be primarily vacant land is now being developed into new homes. A blog can be a great way to present this knowledge, as it’s more news based, than static content.

When builders begin to develop an area, they often offer great deals on prices or extras in an effort to get the first ones occupied. Let your viewer’s know about any new trends such as a shift in the market that may turn it from a seller’s market to a buyer’s market or vice versa.

No one needs to tell you that a good real estate website should contain pictures of the homes that are listed. Take advantage of the newest technologies that allow a user to have a 360 degree virtual tour of the property’s interior and exterior.

Your website should also be a vehicle used to gain the trust of your viewer’s. Real estate is probably the biggest investment that people make and those people who are willing to let you handle their real estate transactions need to feel that they can trust you.

Viewers want more than fluff and if they feel that you will treat them with honesty, they will be more inclined to come to you for more information.

Showing that you have a good reputation amounts to more than just detailing your past success. With all of the emphasis on Internet fraud, people are less likely to believe what you say without something to back it up.

Including quotes from people who have used your services and are willing to share their great experience with you can have a section of all its own on your site. What’s important is to make sure that those people that you are quoting are willing to be contacted to verify what they have said.

Your content should not just be informative; it should also be entertaining, so that you can hold the viewer’s attention and get them to visit it again and again. This can be done with articles, blogs and newsletters.

Chances are you posted a picture of yourself that reflects you as the friendly confident person that you are and right alongside your picture is your company’s name and logo. That’s all fine, since certainly you want your site’s viewers to feel confident in your abilities, however in today’s society a lot more is going to be needed to convert your viewers to clients.

A) Analyze Your Site

One of the first steps to building an effective site is a careful analysis of your existing web site or the implementation of a new one if you don’t have one already.

On one hand having a site in place allows you the ability to figuratively take it apart and examine each aspect of it to determine its overall performance on the Internet. This is a good thing because you already have much of the systems in place and just need to clean them up, add fresh content and remove the stale ones.

On the other hand, building a site from scratch allows you to do it properly the first time around. This way you can build it using all of the SEO techniques, and lead generating understanding to build a site that works for you right away.

When viewing your existing site, take the following into consideration:

• Is it informative? If not, what’s missing?
• Is it easy to navigate the site or would prospects have a difficult time trying to find what they need?
• Is it a cookie cutter website, meaning does it look like everyone else’s?
• If yes, what can you do to personalize it?
• If you were a person who was looking to find a home in your area, can you find all the information that you need on your site?
• How well does the content reflect your company and how much is it contributing to the efforts in realizing your goals?
• Does your site contain informative information such as articles discussing the various aspects of real estate?
• Does your site contain blogs that are meant to both entertain and inform your viewers?
• Does your site reflect your area of expertise?
• How many leads have you obtained from your site and what is the conversion percentage?
• Do the linked pages load slowly, which is a quick way to annoy and lose your target audience?
• What keywords and phrases are you using on your site and how much of your content is relevant to those words and phrases?
• Factoring in these questions will help you to determine how to revamp your existing site or how to plan your new one.

Avoid Over Emphasis on Positioning

One of the main purposes of optimizing your website is to improve its position in the search engine rankings and thus on the search results page. While I encourage you to employ the various techniques to achieve this, it’s important not to over emphasize your website’s position.

It won’t help you to have your site returned at the top of the search engine pages if your site is not attractive to viewer’s, doesn’t provide the information they need or is difficult to navigate. It is important to drive traffic to your site, to be sure, but it’s only 10% of the battle. The biggest part of the battle is keeping them there, offering them the information they are looking for, and then encouraging them to communicate with you.

This is why before you start worrying about getting your site to the top of the search result page; you need to make sure its worthy of that position.

No one has to tell you that getting qualified leads is essential to any real estate practice. Since you already know that, I won’t go into all the reason that you need leads. What I will do is make suggestions on how to use your site to get qualified leads. 

First a dose of reality. Not everyone who visits your site finds it informative and initiates contact will be converted to a client. Probably not even half, a quarter or an eighth.  That’s the way it is in real estate whether your lead comes from the web or a human referral. However, despite the fact that your percentage of client conversion may seem to be low, consider it from the standpoint of commission earnings. 

If you only get two conversions from 1000 leads a month, a mere .002%, that still equals a very nice commission. Naturally the more leads you get, the more chances you have to convert them to clients.  There are those that will argue quality vs. quantity as far as leads go. Each may have a legitimate argument but the fact remains that being a successful sales agent also means playing the odds.  

This means that you want to get a large quantity of leads and then filter out the quality ones to concentrate on converting.

Converting them to clients will be up to you and your skills, but getting a large quantity to convert will come from your website.  Another consideration is prospective clients who may just have begun to consider buying a home but are not quite ready. People like this, whether they be walk-ins or have made an appointment are usually considered the bane of a realtor’s existence.  They have you drive them around all day, looking at houses all over town then say, “Thanks, we’re just looking”. Now the realtor has wasted the day and despite their best efforts at converting them, these same people may decide to use another realtor when they are finally ready to buy. 

A friend of mine is planning to move to Kentucky in two years and she’s already visiting websites of realtors in that area, looking at houses and trying to learn about the different neighborhoods.  She likes one site so much that she constantly visits it and because of the information listed on it, she’s considering buying land there now that she can build on later instead of waiting two years to move and then purchase a home.

This is one of the beauties of lead generation from the Internet.

People can browse houses online and then come back to you when they are ready without you ever having to leave the office. The trick is to make them come back to you.  Three ways to do this is by the use of email links, freebies, newsletters and information request forms.

The Internet is called the information highway and in order to travel it effectively, you will need to gather some information yourself. The best place to start is at the website that you already have in place. Look at your website from the standpoint of your prospective clients.
    
Another important piece of information is finding out what your competitors are doing. Go onto the web and type in various keywords and phrases that prospective clients may use to find real estate in your area and see whose site pops up. We will delve further into competitor snooping techniques in later blog posts.

Gathering information is only one piece of the puzzle. Your site needs to give information to the viewers and it needs to be the information that they are looking for, not just useless fluff.

There are many ways to make your site more informative and do so in such a way that will cast you as an expert in your field. Two such ways are by posting articles and blogs.

These informative tools contribute to your site and finding sources to post about will be important to your online success. You will need to surf the Internet for e-publications that discuss real estate trends.

This will give you a constant source of fresh topics for both your articles and your blogs. Having a site with fresh and informative information is not only important in establishing a quality site, but it’s important from a search engine perspective.

posted by Kim Hadley

There was a great comment on a post of mine on Active Rain about how a site can work for you in generating leads. It lead me to want to write about my experience as a web designer, working to get my clients sites working for them in that way.

My background is that I’ve been a graphic artist for over 20 years. I come into web design from that perspective, so I’m very interested in sites that have huge visual impact. Am not at all a fan of the templated site, more impressed by a nicely designed site that draws a person in to stay awhile.

Working for the past 9 years with real estate agents, I know just having a visually stunning site is not enough. There has to be content, and substance and value to invite leads.

The internet has been around now for enough time for us all to be wise consumers. Your website is often the first impression a potential client has of you. They don’t get your voice, how you come across, a strong hand shake, they get your index page.

That index page needs to do the talking for you.

The rest of the site needs to engage and inform, as well as give people what they are looking for. If it does all that, you’ve got leads!

The reason I don’t like templated sites, is they don’t do that. They are generic, and in that don’t “speak” to anyone. You need to take a good look at who you are trying to engage, and speak directly to them. Whether you are specializing in high end luxury homes, or first time buyers, your site has to make that person feel like you get them.

You achieve this by good design, and strong content. We work hard with our clients creating a site that is visually strong, has good content, valuable information, and LOTS of call to action. Every market is different, every client base different. So once a site is launched, and getting traffic, we often re-visit, revise, and re-work. That’s an important step in the success as well. You have to always keep your clients in mind, and always work to cater to what they need. You do this in business naturally, your site has to do this for you.

posted by Kim Hadley

Real estate profits are based upon the commissions obtained through the sales of property. Your question now is how you can use your website to help you garner more sales. Increasing sales by use of your website will consist of converting viewers into clients.

Figure out what your percentage of offline prospects, (walk-ins, or those responding to mailers and other offline advertisements), that are converted into clients.  Use this as a baseline for what you hope to expect from your online conversions. Naturally, the two will go hand and hand and the combination will increase conversions in both areas but for now use this percentage as a starting point to focus on. 

If possible, post a phone number on the site that is different than the one that is used in the office, so that you will be better able to track and differentiate your online conversions vs. your offline ones. 

If you have already had a website in place and it has been already been effective in conversions, figure out what that percentage is and determine how much you want to increase it.  You should also examine each section of the site and try to determine which section is most responsible for the site’s success and why that is. Be realistic when setting your goals.

Start small and work your way up. A very important step when detailing your goals is to recognize how much business you can effectively handle. You may be inclined to just shoot for the moon and employ all of the SEO techniques and bring in as many customers that you can.  Real estate is a service oriented business so ask yourself how many people can you service while maintaining your professionalism and providing quality customer service. This is especially true if you are a one man shop or an agent building your own page. 

Reputation is a big part of your business and you’re only as good as your last deal. The last thing you want is to have too many clients to handle effectively which will negatively impact your reputation.  That means all of the work you put into your site was for nothing because instead of being looked at as an expert in your field, you will become known as the agent who can’t get the job done instead of the one who can. 

You need to have a plan to handle the excess and you may want to consider partnering up with another agent and building a joint site or having a trusted associate that you can direct excess clients to. If you take this path, then make sure you have an agreed commission split worked out and do so in writing.  Another reason to start the ball rolling slowly is time management. Consider the life of a real estate agent.

You work irregular hours based upon your client’s availability, spend time seeking listings that will hopefully match what they are looking for and spend time carting the clients too and from those listings.  Having a sudden influx of new clients can severely impact your usual schedule which is erratic at best. You will need to be able to ease into your sudden increase in potential clients so that you can take the time to convert them into actual ones.

posted by Kim Hadley

Working hard to drive traffic to your site is a goal we all try to achieve. Once that traffic is there, the second biggest effort we need to make is to get that traffic to stay on the site and eventually engage with you. Fill in a form, send an email or pick up the phone is the ultimate goal of any site. The start page is the entry point to your site, it needs to work the hardest for you to engage the viewer.

Take a good look at your start page? Does it have impact? Does it draw you in, make you want to move into the site? Does it have strong “call to action”? All things you need to look at, evaluate and evolve. When we get it right, we call it a sticky page, meaning a viewer coming onto that page will move forward into the site.

As a graphic artist, I’d like to seen a front page visually stunning, a lovely first impression. I also know from years of working on websites, that we sometimes have to compromise design to get that stickyness. A challenge to meld the two! Not all audiences are alike, and often we work a front page several times before we get it right.

One such client was Tamara Inzunza, www.movingtonova.com. We had a fairly lengthy beautiful flash intro when we first started. Some keyword rich content, and some call to action. Several versions later, her site ended up with larger boxes, which hold links to informative and well trafficed parts of her site. Other clients we’ve worked with have managed to have streamlined index pages that don’t have any of those ingrediants, yet somehow they still work. www. soldbyspeed.com is one such site. Simple text navigation under a flash intro seems to work for his target audience.

Point is we evolve post launching a site to get the formula working for our own brand of audience. Point also being that a well thought out start page can make or break the site, and coming to a good start page can be more of an evolution than something that’s created in an instant.

posted by Kim Hadley