I/E Speaks

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.