Tips and Tools to Boost Your Firm's Website Traffic

By Dane O'Leary

In 2018, just about everyone has a website. While this means there's incredible amount of real estate information available online, it inevitably means a lot of competition. Is there anything you can do to draw more attention — and traffic — to your real estate website?

Fortunately, there is.

Whether you're running a website with local listings for a brokerage or you're spearheading a real estate blog, there are a number of things you can do to help your website stand-out from the crowd. In fact, we've compiled four tips and tools that you can use right now to boost traffic to your site.

Make Sure You Have an Abundance of Quality Content

Google has gotten very smart over the years. In addition to the many other factors the search giant considers when populating search results, Google is a bit of a stickler for quality when it comes to your content.

When determining how your firm's site will rank in search results, Google and other search engines perform a quick assessment of the quality of your content. In particular, the search engines want to make sure that you're not publishing duplicate content taken from elsewhere on the Internet, and they want to make sure that it's legitimate content (i.e., not simply a bunch of keywords strung together to manipulate search algorithms).

Focusing on the quality of the content you publish is one of the first things — and arguably the most important thing — you can do to improve the traffic to your real estate website.

What this means for you:

These days, customers are looking to connect with brands rather than simply be presented information. For real estate, this means going beyond listings-focused content.
You could start a blog that helps buyers know what to look for and sellers know what to focus on. You could offer a weekly newsletter with helpful tips and local insights. You could publish a landing page highlighting all of the services that you offer. Whatever the case, make sure you have a good amount of relevant and helpful content on your site.

Invest in Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization — or SEO for short — refers to certain things you do to your content or your website to increase search engine visibility. In particular, SEO often equates to keyword management, link-building, and on-page optimization.

Once there's quality content on your firm's website, the next step to increasing traffic is to focus on SEO. This means incorporating the right keywords in your content and making sure you incorporate those keywords into the page's title and meta data.

What this means for you:

For real estate websites, the key is local SEO. To be listed in the 'local pack', you want to be sure your site is included in local directories - from Zillow and Google My Business to any local real estate listings in your area.

You can also invest in traditional SEO strategies. Creating content around longtail keywords and building links to your site from other authority websites are two proven SEO approaches, for example. You can also boost local SEO by including your city and state name in your target keywords.

SEO tools can make SEO extremely easy for you. For example, Yoast is a great resource for maximizing SEO potential. The plugin automatically scores each page's SEO value, allowing you to make the necessary changes before you ever publish the content.

Treat Social Media as a Funneling Opportunity

As analytics often show, a well-optimized website can gain a lot of traffic organically from search engines. However, that doesn't mean there aren't other ways to more purposefully "funnel" traffic to your website. One of the greatest benefits to using social media to funnel traffic to your firm's website is that it utilizes a (free!) resource you likely already have at your disposal.

Basically, a social media funnel refers to the use of social media posts as a means of directing audiences on those platforms to your website.

What this means for you:

First things first: start by building a social media following. Whether you provide local real estate listings or resources for buyers and sellers, you can better connect with your audience through social media.

As you build this following, you should consider creating some captivating content specifically for social media. When you share that content on your social media accounts, make sure you include links to your agency's websites. Social media tools can help you get started on both these fronts.

The strategy in social media funneling is to simply engage with people. Ask questions, respond to comments, and share content from others. This achieves a couple of important things: it will result in increased followers as well as showing people that your agency acknowledges and engages with audiences, which promotes interest in your agency and will likely result in more traffic to your agency's website.