I/E Speaks

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

Imaginations Everything launched a new site this week; www.katiemoss.com.

Kaite came to us wanting a site to show off her landscape garden business. She was looking for something simple, very minimalist, but with high impact visually.  After having an initial discussion, and sending her some pricing and direction ideas, we quickly settled on a flash presentation.

As the project moved forward, we also added our new photo gallery tool,  so we could upload over 60 images she had of her gardens, to use in working with clients when discussing future landscape projects. This gallery has a back end, and katie can continue to easily add images as she goes.

Though katie chose not to, the gallery tool also allows you to have categories, which we’ve added to another site http://www.citadelrenovations.com/gallery.html. Though the gallery tool has some restrictions, you can see it’s pretty easily adaptable to flow with a site’s look and feel.

posted by Kim Hadley

On-page Optimization vs. Off-page Optimization

On-page Optimization refers to the SEO techniques that you use on your web site. This includes updating keywords and phrases and removing those that are no longer viable.

Updating content such as articles, blogs and other important information. If your site details property values and tax assessments in various areas of your region, then regularly updating those values and tax information is a part of SEO.

Offpage Optimization refers to those techniques that are done outside of your web site and some forms of onsite maintenance. These include determining your page ranking in the search engines and checking out what your competitors are doing on their sites.

You will want to view their HTML codes, and determine if using them on your own site will be helpful to you. It would also include removing links to sites that are no longer active and replacing them with ones that are

Finding out how many inbound links they have is also important when sizing them up. Having a lot of quality inbound links can raise their visibility with the search engines and garner them a higher page ranking.

Both onpage optimization and offpage optimization are both important in a successful SEO campaign.

posted by Kim Hadley

Pay Per Click ads, or PPC, are those in which you pay an engine a fee to recognize your ad which is then placed under the sponsored listings section of search results page.

Each time a person clicks on the ad, you pay a fee to that engine. As previously discussed, popular key words are important in the search process.

Advertisers craft their ads using these key words and bid on how much they will pay to the search engine each time the ad is accessed by those searching the web.

Using Pay Per Click ads may seem a whole lot easier than learning and applying the other various SEO techniques. There are a lot of benefits to using PPC ads, including placement at a highly visual area on the search results page.

Another great benefit is that you can also exclude keywords and phrases. For example if your company does not handle apartment or house rentals, you can exclude the keyword “rental” when you submit your ad under “houses”. This will help to further target your specific audience.

On the same token, if your company does handle rentals, you can also use what’s known as broad matching that will allow renters to access your site as well as those looking to buy and sell homes.

While the benefits of PPC can’t be denied, this type of service may not be for you. A big reason for this is because some Internet users accidentally click on the ads.

That means you get to pay for their mistake. Another reason to not use it is because there is no guarantee that they will be converted to a client even if they purposefully click on your ad. Remember that Internet searches are looking to compare web sites.

They can click on your ad and then compare it to a competitor’s and decide to go with them. That means your competitor gets the business and you still get the bill.

If your company’s advertising budget is small, then PPC ads should be considered carefully prior to enlisting their use. It’s not much different than investing in the stock market.

If you can’t afford to lose the money then steer clear of it. There are other low cost SEO techniques that you can take advantage of that will not take a huge bite out of your small budget.

posted by Kim Hadley