Archive for Kevin Kaiser
This guest post was written by Kevin Kaiser of Military Homes,
where you can list or search military home listings.
Sixty-seven percent of all real estate websites and blogs are horrific abominations.
There’s no source for that stat, but it sounds about right. Real estate professionals were early adopters of the Internet and the power of online marketing. Despite the head start, many real estate web sites have failed to keep pace — and that spells trouble on the front lines, not to mention for the overall bottom line.
In a world of iPads and attention deficits, increasingly sophisticated buyers are no longer the exception but the rule. Real estate professionals have an array of tools and ways to reach and educate their consumer base. Today, about 8 in 10 buyers are using the Internet to look for homes and property.
So why is your site so stagnant? Usually there isn’t a single, straightforward answer. Like most things in life, it’s a combination of things bound together by a single overarching theme. In this case, the theme would probably be “You expect people to find you on their own and keep coming back even though you’re doing nothing to ensnare and engage them.” Here are five main reasons why your site is flailing and tips for improvement.
1. You’ve Written Off Basic SEO Activities
You don’t need to hire a consultant or spend hours hunting through online forums to learn the search engine optimization skills necessary to boost your site. Doing simple keyword research and keeping up with what people are searching for is not a daunting task.
Once you identify a new trend, change your internal linking, title tags, and headers to reflect what people are looking for. Two years ago it may have been “Los Angeles Real Estate” but know more people are just searching for “LA real estate”. Be sure your keeping up with the trends.
2. You’re Not Producing Enough Quality Real Estate Content
It’s not enough to slap together a post every four weeks and forget about it. The search engines and consumers demand relevant, worthwhile content. Share your expertise. Interview colleagues and explore the latest trends. Post hints, tips and insider insight. Embrace video. Give visitors a reason to come back.
3. You’re Not Thinking About Aesthetics
As with search engine optimization, you don’t need to spend a fortune on web development. But consumers in 2010 have expectations about how a professional website should look, from its layout and usability to colors, fonts and Flash. Now, you don’t need to build the next Trulia. But a sparse, joyless Blogspot hub isn’t going to cut it, either.
4. You’re Not Leveraging Your Credibility
Showcase your designations, awards and rankings. Create an “As Seen In” section on your site and show visitors where your work, quotes or logo has appeared. It’s almost as important as the “Featured Listings” buttons or blurb on your home page.
Given the economic distress of the last 18 months, consumers are looking for all the protection and certainty they can get. Ooze credibility, and your clients — current and future — will reward you.
5. You’ve Stopped Working on Your Real Estate Internet Presence
This is a rule of online marketing and one that applies to all industries and sites equally. This isn’t a “set it and forget about it” space. You have to commit to constantly tweaking, updating and feeding this beast.
Competitors appear out of nowhere, and the fickle search engines are always in motion. That doesn’t mean you have to work 18 hours a day with your eyes glued to a laptop or smartphone. But it does mean that caring for your web presence has to be part of your daily business routine.
This guest post was written by Kevin Kaiser of Military Homes Realty,
connecting military home buyers and sellers.
Why You Need to Distribute Your Listings On Niche Sites
All real estate agents want people to see their listings. The more views you can get, the easier chance there is that they get sold. But still there are real estate agents who don’t worry about putting their listing on other sites.
What I can’t figure out is why? Is it to protect them from being taken by someone else? Seems a little ridiculous, doesn’t it?
The marketing and social media point of view is simple and straightforward:
- Get your listings to as large an audience as possible, while staying specific enough to your niche.
Looking to tap into markets for condos or foreclosure purchases? How about rentals or military homebuyers?
You don’t want to waste a lot of time or money spreading your listing to sites that have little chance of leading to conversions. But landing a few key niche realty sites could really increase the number of times your properties are viewed.
If you are in a hot region for military homebuyers, hunt down some military sites and put your listings on those.
Do you work with rentals a lot? Try listing your property with Rent.com or find a local site such as RentList.net in Atlanta. What about condos? There are some great sites out there for these as well. The key is to find local sites since people search local terms a lot more often than perceived from the outside.
Putting your listings on the MLS is a big plus as well since tons of different websites syndicate these listings, helping you get in front of a large national audience. After that, the key is to supplement an MLS listing by listing on targeted niche websites that will get your properties in front highly targeted buyers.
Paying $30 to get the listing on that San Diego homes for sale website will turn out to be a good investment!
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.
