BRER Real Estate Marketing Blog

 This guest post was written by Sam Chapman.

 Your Primary Keywords Don’t Drive the Majority of Traffic

Most good real estate webmasters understand that the majority of traffic driven to their sites is not from their most key search terms.  For example, the terms Austin real estate, Austin TX real estate, Lake Travis real estate and Austin real estate blog generated only 13% of the visits to my site in September, 2008.  That percent would be higher if I eliminated the statistics for visitors who didn’t use a search engine to get to the site, but still, this is pretty interesting.

Use Long Tail Search Terms to Increase Traffic

So what is my site found for?  Long tail search terms.  If you don’t know what the concept of the long tail is, here’s a good article on the subject.  

Some of the long tail terms I get found for are Hamilton Pool, Austin MSA, Circle C homes, Apache Shores real estate and Spanish Oaks.  The latter three are all Austin area subdivisions.  Getting found for Hamilton Pool is OK, but it nothing compared to being found for real estate related terms.

The Power of Community Pages

Now that you know about the long tail, let me share something about how you can generate long trail traffic. I set up a main page on my site called Austin Neighborhood Listings that links directly from my home page.

On that page are links to neighborhood specific pages, categorized by geographic area. Each page has a few paragraphs of content talking about the neighborhood and then framed IDX search results showing homes specific to that neighborhood.  The content before the IDX search frame is critical, as search engines can’t do much with information inside frames.

Here is where things get interesting.  Remember that my main terms result in about 13% of page views?  More than 10% of the page views on my real estate website are these neighborhood specific pages.  

Not many real estate agents optimize for specific neighborhoods, so this is a great way to get long tail traffic.  Visitors also navigate to the neighborhood pages from the link on the home page so this is also a great way to make your site more sticky and keep people on it longer.

Adding neighborhood pages can accomplish several things:

• It can give you pages about specific neighborhoods, which human visitors love. 
• It can give you more pages of unique content, which search engines love. 
• It can give you great internal links to neighborhood pages with appropriate anchor text, which is good for human visitors and search engines. 
• It can give you the ability to generate long tail traffic, which is great for you.

In case this tells you anything, I am getting a listing in Apache Shores this week from someone who found my Apache Shores Homes page last weekend.

In order to frame the listings, you need to have a good third party IDX provider that allows customization of the IDX link that will show homes by neighborhood. The IDX vendor also needs to be approved by your Board as a third-party vendor.  Check with your Board to see who the approved vendors are and check them out. 

If you can do what I did, start building neighborhood pages on your real estate website.  You’ll be happy that you did.  If you want to see what I am talking about, visit my Austin real estate website.

This guest post was written by Sam Chapman who
markets Austin Real Estate and publishes the Austin Real Estate Blog. 

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I was looking through my website stats today and noticed something that I had not seen before.  It was the graph of visitor loyalty. 

Website Stats:  Visitor Loyalty

This basically measures how often people come back to my website.  The majority of visitors use the site once and don’t come back.  Many of these visitors probably find the site in  a search for some long tail terms, those searches not related to real estate.

Finding a website about Austin real estate rather than Hamilton Pool photos, for example, a visitor would probably look at the page I have for that subject, leave and not return.

People who visit the site 2-4 times, and that is a fair number of visitors, may find the site when searching a subject that returns a blog post and they may revisit my blog a couple of times.  Of course, these visitors could be looking for real estate in Austin and for whatever reason not come back. 

These might be people considering a move, real estate agents in other areas just checking Austin out, real estate agents who are studying my site to get ideas for their sites (yes, they really do this) or people just studying different markets for whatever reason.

The Thing That Caught My Eye

The thing that caught my eye was the number of visitors who spent time on my site 15 to 50 times.  When I compared this year to months prior to May, 2007, I noticed a big difference in the frequency  of people spending time on my site 15 to 50 times.

Then it hit me.  May of 2007 is when I switched from the Austin Board of REALTORS® IDX search to the WolfNet IDX search.  The ABoR feature isn’t a great search feature (no offense intended).  WolfNet is more feature rich and is more user friendly. 

The WolfNet search also allows visitors to save searches to come back to later and also to save listings as favorites.  These features provide a stickiness factor that wasn’t on my site before.

The number of people visiting my website more than 15 times after implementing an improved IDX search was up over 5 times compared to before.  That is a huge number.  The number of leads I have gotten since implementing a better IDX feature and the quality of these leads is also up.

Moral of the Story?

If you are a REALTOR®, you absolutely must have a website.  If you are a REALTOR® with a real estate website, you absolutely must have a great IDX search.
 

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If you’d like to see your guest post (and links to your site) on this blog, contact me today!

A Message from Kathleen:  If you read Sam’s last post here about how he quadrupled his Internet leads, you’ll know about the changes he made to his website that had such amazing results.  Now, he’s back to let us know how that increase in leads has translated into business.  And, you’ll see some of my comments in italics.

I put a call to action on every page of my Austin real estate website in the top right corner.  It contains a link to an MLS map search, my contact information, a link to email me, and a link to my blog.

I did that at the very end of November, and immediately started getting more calls, emails and registrations on my site than ever before.  Since I started tracking on February 1, I have received 143 phone calls and emails, and have had over 800 registrations on my site.  OK, but what about conversion? 

We all know that most Internet leads don’t convert quickly.  But, at this point, I have one listing, four homes under contract and one closing as a result of internet leads since February 1.  I am also working with four buyers who should be under contract by the end of August, and I have two $1 million+ referrals out that should close this summer.  Not bad!

For over a year, my site’s ranking on the search engines has fluctuated from #3 to #8 and everywhere in between for the term Austin real estate, #3 or #4 for Austin real estate blog, between #3 and #5 for Austin homes, #1 or #2 for Lake Travis real estate, and up there for a whole bunch of long tail results.  My short tail makes up around 15% of results. 

So part of getting the leads is a result of getting my site ranked well in the search engines, but before I made the call to action change, I wasn’t getting even 10% of what I am getting now.

• This is a great example of the power of Search Engine Optimization (SEO).  You’ll notice that while Sam has evidently done a lot of work to rank for his main keywords, his long tail results (ranking for terms that are related to your main keywords) are also impressive.  If the traffic from his short tail (main keywords) is only 15%, that means that 85% of his traffic comes from related keywords.  This is a situation unique to doing SEO on a site - using pay per click, for example, will produce traffic as long as you’re paying for specific keyword placement, but you’ll never get traffic from related keywords!
• Another factor to keep in mind is the fact that Sam provides a map-based MLS search provided by WolfNet.  While he had the Wolfnet search on his site long before his leads increased so dramatically, I believe that using a more sophisticated search may be contributing to his results. 
• Sam is requiring registration after the visitor views three listings.  The fact that 1) he has a map search tool, and 2) he can give his visitors some information before registration is required may have something to do with his visitors’ willingness to create an account.  When I asked him about that, he described how he gets his search to work so well:

Read the rest of this entry »

A Message from Kathleen:  This is the first guest post on the BRER Blog.  I’m lucky that Sam Chapman agreed to contribute this post, and I look forward to his future contributions, too.  The issue of requiring registration before a visitor can search the MLS on a real estate website is a hotly contested one.  It may not work in every market as it has for Sam, but it’s certainly worth considering!

A Couple Changes Have Made a Big Difference

I made a couple of fundamental changes to my highly ranked Austin real estate website at the very end of November.  As a result, the number of leads I have generated from the website has absolutely skyrocketed.  What did I do?

First, I put a large Search Austin Homes link at the top right of every page on my website.  Right below that, I put my contact information.  My thinking was that people would be drawn to the link as they see it on every page.  My statistics also show that around 95% of visitor time is looking at listings.  Having the contact information has resulted in an average of just under one email or phone call to me per day by potential buyers.  Prior to the change, I was getting around 6 per month.  That is an enormous change!

The other significant change I made was forcing visitors to register to view listings.  On my search by map page, people get detailed views of listings that they click on.  I give one free detailed view and then ask them to register.  Of the top sites that show up on Google when searching the term Austin real estate, half force registration. 

Of those, mine is the only one that offers at least one free detailed view, the rest force registration right away.

How Things Changed

Before forcing registrations, my stats show that people were seeing around 10,000 detailed views of listings per month.  Since the changes, people are seeing almost 40,000 detailed views.  This has resulted in around 150 registrations per month.  Before the changes, I was getting around 20 per month.  Again, a huge increase in leads!

When people register, they have to enter a name, a phone number and an email.  So far I am finding that around 70% of the information is real and will actually get me in touch with someone.  Of the people my team and I are able to reach by phone or email, we’re finding that around 11% are resulting in a relationship.  By this I mean ongoing phone calls, emails, appointments or custom searches being set up.

Tracking the Bottom Line

How many of these will actually close is something that I really want to see.  As most internet leads are around 6-9 months or more before they actually start seeing properties in Austin, that is a number I won’t have for a while.  However, I am extremely encouraged with what has happened since the beginning of December and feel that I am going to see very strong sales this year and in years to come.

This post was contributed by guest author and Austin REALTOR® Sam Chapman.  Sam has lived and worked in the Austin area for almost 20 years.  Sam primarily works in the south Lake Travis area and western parts of Austin, but can refer buyers to agents who specialize in parts of the greater Austin area.