I/E Speaks

Including informative articles on your website is another great way to add content to your site. If your real estate firm has gotten positive press exposure, include those articles on your site.

These articles can be for contributions made in the community and if you haven’t made any, then start to do so. It doesn’t have to be huge, but should carry positive significance, such as buying the uniforms for a little league team or holding a fundraising barbeque for your local school district.

Articles also give you the chance to give users information that they may not find on other sites. The economy has impacted how much a person can afford to pay for a home so even if they have three children, they may be willing to make do with a two bedroom home.

One of their biggest questions is going to be if their furniture is going to fit. This gives you the chance to post articles about what will fit in rooms of a specific size.

So for example if you have listed a home that has a master bedroom that’s 10 X 15, you can make a note that this room will fit a queen sized bed, a dresser and two end tables.

It might sound a little silly but people really want to know these things and even better, they may not have thought about it and now you’ve done them a favor by bringing it to their attention.

Articles can also be used to further your reputation as an expert in your field. Read up on current trends in real estate and write your own articles on them.

Do a series on how to avoid foreclosure or why a house in jeopardy should be sold by the owner before the bank comes in and takes it. Make the articles compassionate and informative.

Many people who find themselves in this type of situation are so burdened by the emotional aspects of it that they may not realize that they have significant equity in their home.

If you are strictly a selling agent, you can post articles on how to get good deals by buying homes that are subject to foreclosure.

Articles can also contain information on mortgage interest rate trends and how to determine what a buyer’s closing costs are. The topics are endless and will allow you to keep fresh content on your website.

If you have a hard time forming written sentences, not to worry. You can find article writers on the Internet who will charge you a fee to write the articles for you.

To save money, you can look for existing articles on the Internet and have an agency rewrite them for you at a cost that’s lower than an original article.

by Kim Hadley

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.

If you are building your site from scratch and you can’t quite figure out where to start then consider this: What is the real estate industry all about?

The obvious answer is buying and selling real estate. While that’s true, it’s not the real basis of the industry. Being a real estate professional is about service. It’s how well you service your clients that will lead to actual sales.

Viewers of your site are not just looking for homes; they are looking for a realtor that they feel will provide them with good service, support and advice. This is why its essential to build a user focused site based on those principles.

The typical marketing strategy in the past for realtors has been to market YOU. Your Ability, Your Prowess in sales Your Success… YOU. No longer is that the case.

With the wealth of information at hand, and the ability for someone to actually “shop” for a realtor online. All people want to know about you is what it is that you can do for them now or in the future and they want to be able to determine that by the content on your website.

So the first step in building a site is to ask yourself, what kind of content, tools and services can I put on my site that will answer the question for them?

Long time client Jan Horn (www.janhorn.com) was looking for new look for the site we had designed for him back in 2003. Initially we had come up with a site for him that had a fair amount of content. With most realtor sites, we want the content to feed the search engines need for words they can scan to rank the sites.

Since Los Angeles is a very competitive market in terms of getting ranked high in the search engines, and since the client’s is working a niche market of architecturally significant homes, we decided to create a new site for hi that spoke more to that market, than play the search engine game.

We don’t often take this approach, but in Jan’s case it made sense. We work very hard at working with our clients to come up with individual solutions for their business, and for www.janhorn.com we came up with a site that’s as stunning as the homes he represents.

We’ve begun blogging over at MotherHood Incorporated, so check us out. Motherhood Incorporated is a great new resource for women who wish to raise a family, but still keep their hand in the work force. Imaginations Everything will bring the perspective of a small business owner, and all the tips and tricks that have come with being in business for 10 years.

As a small business owner, Imaginations Everything relies on a virtual work force, and what better one than women who have skill, expertise and experience as that work force.

www.motherhoodincorporated.com
www.motherhoodincorporated.ca
www.motherhoodincorporated.com/wordpressgeneral 

The best way to make your website user focused is to find out what your potential clients really want to know. You might think that as a professional, you already know this information but don’t be so sure about that.

Times change and so do the questions that people have. Also, everyone is different so they have different real estate needs.

It might seem natural to assume that most families want the white house with the picket fence and a big back yard. This may not as true as it used to be.

There are a lot of single parents out there, many holding more than one job and they don’t want the hassle of having to take care of a big piece of property.

One of the best ways to determine how to make your site informative is to query your past clients. Send them a survey and ask them to list what their top ten considerations were when buying or selling their homes. This way you will start off with great ideas on how to build your user focused site.

Don’t forget your friends and family. Even if they don’t yet own a home, it’s another way to get an objective point of view and they may give you fresh insight into what your site needs to make it more user focused.

You can also ask them to view your website and determine if it would hold their attention and give them the information they felt they needed if they were considering buying or selling a home.

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