A New Year Real Estate Website Makeover

The real estate business slows down a lot during the holidays, and this provides an opportunity to think about your business and the coming year. In between trees, lights, lots of food and relatives, there is time to think about your real estate website and how you can improve your online marketing.

Business will probably be slow for at least a month or more, so why not take an in-depth look at your real estate website, lead generation activities, website traffic, and how much business you can directly attribute to your website. If everything is just as you like it, and improvement isn't necessary, congratulations. For most of us, we would like more closings from our website, so why not use the slow time to work on it?

Content

If you are getting decent SEO results from your current content, don't make drastic changes that may cut your traffic. However, there are probably new developments in your market that you could add to the site. If you aren't happy with your SEO, then new content or content rewrite is advisable.

Action: Content Review

Get into the shoes of each type of prospect/client you want to attract for business. Go through your content as a buyer, seller, investor, whomever. Are you seeing the type of content that they want and need? Is it useful, especially in answering questions about real estate and the local market? Make notes about what you may want to add or edit. This is the review phase.

Lead Generation

Go through the site again and check out your lead generation calls-to-action, forms, and look at your real estate website stats to see how effective each has been. Could your action calls be worded for better results? What are you offering in exchange for your visitors' valuable contact information?

Action: Update Offers

If you're asking people to sign a guestbook or in other ways asking for contact info without a valuable exchange of information, you need to correct the situation. Build MLS reports in PDF format and offer sold property and Days On Market reports via email for lead generation. Offer sample (private information redacted) closing and HUD forms, especially alongside content for first-time buyers. For listing prospects, offer free home valuations from submitted form data.

Awesome IDX

More than 90 percent of real estate website visitors say that one of their top reasons for visiting a real estate website is to search property listings. If you aren't offering a top-notch IDX search function on multiple areas of the site, you're losing prospects. Check what you have versus your competitors, and if you're falling short or want to be better than theirs, look for a replacement IDX search.

The holidays should be about family and fun, but there is time in there for a real estate website makeover to increase next year's income.

To view the original article, visit the WebsiteBox blog.