When you think about what it takes for a real estate agent to be successful on the Internet, what is the first thing that comes to mind?

Getting Traffic is Critical

For many people, the first thing they think about is driving traffic to their real estate web site.  And, certainly that is critical.  You can use Pay Per Click for some quick results and SEO (search engine optimization) to get your website ranked well on the SERPs (search engine result pages).

There is no chicken and egg issue here.  Clearly, the entire process of marketing on the Internet starts with getting visitors to your website.  But, once you’ve achieved a reasonable amount of traffic, your attention must quickly change to converting those visitors into leads, clients and closed transactions.

NOTHING Happens On Auto Pilot

I often see two types of assumptions about websites:

1. If You Build It, They Will Come.  Many agents and brokers I talk to have the mistaken idea that if you create a website, that site will automatically be found on the search engines and visitors will just naturally show up. When I first started working with agents, I got a few phone calls from panicked clients saying, “I just typed my domain name into Google and nothing came up!!!”   Now, each project description I send out has the following disclaimer where we mention that we optimize the pages we write for SEO:  “Please note: The SEO on the home page will set it up to be found by the search engines.  There are other SEO tasks that must be undertaken before the site will rank well.”
   
2. If They Come, They’ll Turn Into Clients.  Getting traffic to your website is only the first challenge.  After that, you need to focus on turning visitors into leads and clients.  Don’t be fooled into thinking that a professional-looking website and good information will necessarily get that job done. 

You Have to Work at Converting Visitors into Clients! 

You may have seen the tips on conversion on this blog from one of my clients, Priscilla Allen.  You’ll get even more of Priscilla’s tips from the article written by Mike Parker from Blackwater/Compass.

I think Priscilla has some great ideas.  Quick response, establishing a dialogue, and having a clear marketing message are definitely some of the essentials.

Six Reasons Why Agents Fail on the Internet

Ah, if only ranking on search engines and converting visitors were the only issues! 

My SEO partner, Mike Parker, recently wrote an article that appears on the Broker Agent Professional website (it used to be Broker Agent News, but I notice that the name seems to have changed).  He did a fantastic job of summarizing six key factors that contribute to Internet failure among real estate professionals.

Take a few minutes to read this article!  Avoiding these six mistakes will serve you well.