Archive for Real Estate Website Tips
I talk to a lot of REALTORS®, and just about all of them have a problem marketing themselves. Most of the people I talk to know they’re good at what they do. They just don’t know how to explain that to others without thinking that they’re being rude and boastful.
The reason that you’ll hate yourself later if you don’t market yourself now is because you’re running a business. You can’t be competitive in the marketplace if you don’t find a way to market yourself without feeling bad about it.
Think about it. Would you buy a Coke if their ads said that they tried really hard? Would you buy Geico insurance if it weren’t for that cute little gecko telling you how great the company is? What if their only claim to fame was that they wanted to be your insurance company for life? Would you really care about what they wanted? And, I could go on, but I think you get the idea. So, how can you get out of this corner?
Clarify What You Are Selling
The first thing you need to be very clear about is what you’re selling. You aren’t selling houses. As a REALTOR®, you’ve got all the same inventory as everyone else. So, that’s not a point of differentiation.
You’re not selling yourself. No one is going to take you home, pay your bills, raise your kids or plan for your retirement. So, what’s left?
You’re selling the service you provide. When you’re in real estate, you’re providing real estate consulting services. You’re working with a buyer or seller to guide them through the process, anticipate and head off problems and make sure that they have a successful transaction. Those are professional services of the real estate variety.
Figure Out What Differentiates You in the Marketplace
If you’re selling real estate services, it’s much easier to market yourself. Mainly because you’re not marketing yourself. You’re selling what you can do for buyers and sellers.
From that perspective, you don’t have to convince people of how wonderful you are. You can back away from all the industry awards you’ve won, or talking to people about how smart you are or how hard you work. You can focus on the benefits buyers and sellers will receive when they work with you.
You’ll find the task of marketing yourself gets a lot easier when you focus on marketing your business and the benefits of the services you provide. There’s a tool you should check out: the We We Calculator. That calculator tests copy for customer focus. You can run the calculator on a web page or just text and ad copy.
When your marketing copy is focused on what you can do for your customer, you’re definitely on the right track!
Code Validators - Don’t Get Caught Up
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A client recently got pretty upset because he talked to someone from an “SEO” firm who told him his rankings would never improve until he got a better review from the W3C Code Validator. Wrong!
Don’t get caught up in all that mumbo jumbo. Code validators, like the one at Validator.W3.org, are great if you’re a web designer whose code isn’t working, or whose main goal is to ensure that his/her websites all conform to the latest W3C standards. And, that could be a big job because those standards change, you know.
I don’t dispute that your goal should be to have the cleanest code possible. But, I wouldn’t lose sleep over it. And, I’d never recommend that you accept that explanation from someone who is supposed to be increasing your ranking as to why your ranking is staying where it is or falling.
It’s an easy way out for someone to explain a shift in rankings without needing to get involved.
Saying that your site is no good unless it meets W3C standards is like saying your computer is no good unless it has the latest Intel processor in it. We all know that our computers are obsolete just about the time they hit our desks. And, none of us are going to go out and buy a new computer every week.
In the same light, no web designer is going to rewrite all the code for all of their websites to stay up with the standards.
After all, according to the W3C validator, Amazon.com has 1184 errors and 89 warnings. Dell.com has 217 errors and 52 warnings. Realtor.org has 246 errors and 132 warnings.
And, those sites are managing to limp along and get found in search engines. So, everybody can relax now.
If you’re using a blogging platform like Wordpress, you may be like me. I added the plugin Sociable to make it easy for visitors to bookmark pages and share the blog’s content on social networking sites.
However, I never really got around to adding that capability to our regular websites - until now. Today, if you visit our main real estate marketing website, or our Point2 Agent real estate website, you’ll see an “Add This” widget right under the menu on each site.
You can get one, too. It’s easy. . . and free!
AddThis.com
All you need to do is visit www.AddThis.com. You’ll find a pretty smart little widget available for free. The widget works well to let your visitors share your page with a very large collection of services. Beyond the basic functionality, here’s why this is a smart widget:
- The widget is automatically updated when new services are added to the AddThis Directory. You don’t have to worry about updating the code.
- The widget is automatically translated into the language of the visitor’s browser, and it currently supports over 50 languages.
- The widget customizes itself to your visitor’s preferences. If a visitor has two favorite places to share information, those two choices will be shown to them first!
- Analytics are available. You can choose to receive weekly reports showing the activity of visitors using the widgets. The reports will tell you things like which content is shared most often, which services are used most often, and some geographic information about the users.
I created two accounts at AddThis to track each of our websites separately. The widgets haven’t been active long enough to have any information yet, but if there’s anything interesting to tell, I’ll include it in a future post.
If you choose to, you can also customize the look of the widget. I didn’t do that because I think people are familiar with the default image, and I didn’t want to do anything to confuse them!
Have you been using this type of a widget? If so, let us know what your experience has been. In theory, it should increase traffic to your website as others find the content your visitors have shared.
This guest post was written by Kevin Kaiser of Military Homes,
specializing in getting military home buyers and sellers connected.
Why Your Leads Don’t Convert
Every real estate agent that has a website knows about SEO and driving traffic to your site. You know that a proper SEO campaign takes a lot of time and patience, but in the end, you’re rewarded with great rankings.
Now you’re getting hundreds of people to your site each day. Great news, but of those 250 people that visited your site today, only 15 filled out your form. And even sadder, none of them became a client.
What are you doing wrong? It’s hard to pinpoint the exact problem without knowing your site and your customers’ demographics. But, luckily you do know that (and if you don’t you need to find out). So here are some tips that have worked for me and can work for you when it comes to optimizing your conversion rate.
The Follow-Up
The biggest problem I found was what happened when I filled out the form on our site. I did it as a test to see how my team responded, yet I sometimes didn’t get a call back the same day. And I would fill out the form at 8 a.m.
This is a big problem. If I’m a customer, I’ve already moved on to the next site and filled out their form and whoever calls me back first will have the best chance of getting my business. This is where I decided that I would try out a little experiment with our site.
The Experiment - It was set up so that we would track:
- the length of time between when the potential client filled out the form and when we called them.
- whether they became a lead or not.
Once we did this for about a month, I had one of my programmers compile the data to determine when the delay in contacting leads turned them into dead leads. Do we need to call them right away? If not, how long can we wait?
What We Discovered - For our site, we found that if we called them within 4 minutes of filling out the lead form on our site they were 90% more likely to do business with us. That’s a great success rate is you ask me.
How to Get More People to Fill Out a Form
The next thing I decided to tackle was how to get more people to fill out our form. Our site now has a new design as were moving in a different direction than before, so you will have to visualize what I’m talking about. But in the end you will have to do your own testing because our customers are not exactly the same.
Using Google Website Optimizer, which lets you do split testing on your website, I drew up a different layout and made our form appear in our right sidebar column on our homepage. This increased conversions from about the 2% we were getting from overall traffic to about 5%. A big increase in leads just by making sure that we had a form on the homepage in plain sight instead of links to a deeper page with the form.
I wasn’t content still and decided that more testing should be done. So I sent half our visitors to a new layout that had a form on the top left side of the homepage and half to the page with the form on the right sidebar. Our conversion was higher by about 6% with the form on the top right column.
Still curious if I could increase it any more, I decided to try split testing one page with a form in the top left area and one page with a call-to-action button on the top left area and a short form in the right sidebar.
We were able to increase our conversion even more, to about 6.75% with a call-to-action button on the top left area and a short form in the right sidebar. I told one of my buddies who runs this great surety bond website. He implemented it and found that it works great for him. As of this date, he’s still using that layout if you want to see it.
Take Action Now
The major point you should take away from this is that you need to be testing your website and your business all the time. You can always make it better. The biggest excuse I hear from people about following my advice is that “I don’t have time”. Great, you must be really busy. But why not hire someone to do this stuff for you then? Often it’s because you don’t want to spend the money hiring someone else.
But, if you make the right hire, and they are able to implement the suggestions I’ve laid out above, the number of clients that start coming in should more than make up for the amount you will pay someone. All you need to do is hire a high school or college kid that knows what they are talking about and you will be set. I know that’s how I got my start.
Get the GreatSchools.net Info Widget
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It’s been a while since I posted anything about school information. But, you can review the information on this blog about GreatSchools.net cobranding. The cobranding opportunity allows you to keep visitors on your website while they review detailed school information.
If you’re not familiar with GreatSchools.net, I think you’ll find it to be a very good school resource.
- GreatSchools.net lists a wide variety of schools in most places — not only public schools, but a large number of private schools, also.
- You’ll find Parent Reviews, information on Test Scores, Teachers, Spending per Pupil, and District Overviews.
- The Compare feature is also very helpful for people relocating - it allows the visitor to compare area schools based on several criteria such as Test Scores.
I recently discovered that GreatSchools.net has developed a widget that you can place on your website. Learn more about the school widget.
While the widget does open a new window directly to the GreatSchools.net website, it is free! And, since the site focuses on schools, you won’t find advertisements from other real estate agents. So, I’m more comfortable with this widget vs one that doesn’t do much more than give your competition some exposure.
Give it a try. Let us know how you like it!
