The 8 Elements of a High Converting Real Estate Landing Page
Why do real estate agents invest so much time and effort into online marketing?
Simple. To grab the attention of new prospects and direct them to their website. The only problem is, most traffic that comes from social media and advertising tends to bounce when it lands on a real estate website.
Why Do Most Real Estate Prospects Leave Your Website?
When you create an advertisement, let's say on Google Ads, your goal is to make the prospects curious enough to click on your content. This can be done with a clever line of text or an intriguing picture. At the end of the day, a potential client will click on your ad because they believe it will bring them value. They have a need and you are offering some sort of solution.
The Problem with Real Estate Home Pages
If someone takes the time to click on your advertisement, why wouldn't they investigate your website once landing there?
In most cases, the prospect likely experiences some level of disconnect. Let's say your advertisement was tailored towards confused first-time homebuyers. An ad like this might have a high conversion rate because the process of purchasing a home for the first time is daunting and confusing. First time home buyers are actively seeking out answers to their specific questions.
The disconnect occurs when they land on your homepage or services page which doesn't provide the exact answers they were searching for. Most real estate agents set up their web pages to be fairly generic, proving a broad overview of all their services.
While this might be a good place to start for your average client, when a prospect is looking for an exact solution, your homepage could have them looking elsewhere.
How Real Estate Agents Funnel Traffic
There are a few common ways that you can attract attention to your real estate website.
Social Media
Organic Search (SEO)
External Linking
Paid Advertising
Agents use social media to build an online following. If you are looking to bring traffic from your Twitter feed to your site, you might share a timely insight followed by a call to action (CTA). This CTA would outline how you could help the prospect and link back to your site.
Organic search brings users to your website after they have used a search engine to attempt to answer a question. If you have created content with SEO in mind, hopefully, Google directs the prospect your way.
External linking directs traffic back to your site by mentioning your brand or services on an external source such as someone else's blog.
And paid advertising is the process of creating marketing materials on platforms such as Facebook and Google that hopefully catches the attention of browsers and funnels them back to your site.
Real Estate Landing Pages: A Specific Solution
All four of these options have the ability to attract the attention of a potential prospect with a specific message. However, if you don't have a specific solution for the prospect to explore and interact with, you will likely lose their interest quickly.
The solution: a landing page.
What Is a Landing Page?
A landing page is a single web page that is designed for a specific topic or purpose. Using our previous example, you could create a first-time home buyers landing page where all the corresponding traffic could be funneled. This way, when the visitor lands on your landing page, they will be interacting with the content that can directly answer their questions.
All real estate landing pages should be created with one goal in mind: Conversion. All of the pictures and text found on your landing page are there to help lead the prospect to your call to action.
The Fundamental Elements of a Real Estate Landing Page
Ready to harness the power of landing pages? Here are the 8 qualities of a landing page that successfully converts online real estate leads…
#1) Embrace Minimalism
Have you ever landed on a webpage and instantly felt overwhelmed? Avoid giant walls of text above the fold on your web pages. A simple, clean, and minimalistic design will allow a prospect to easily see that the content pertains to their particular need.
This style of landing page also leaves the prospect hungry for more information which will prompt them to begin scrolling down the page (towards your CTA).
#2) Announce Your Offer/Value Proposition Right Away
When a prospect lands on your page, they should be able to decipher your proposed offering within seconds. It should be extremely clear and exciting. Long lead-ins typically don't perform well on real estate landing pages. Additionally, ensure your main title and headers contain the keywords that relate to your landing page topic.
#3) Utilize Endorsements and Trust Signals
Every great landing page includes some sort of endorsement where a previous client explains the value that you brought them. This gives the prospect a glimpse into your abilities and also begins to create trust between the prospect and your brand.
Real estate agents can also use "trust signals". These are images or logos that increase your credibility. Have you been nominated for the Top 40 Under 40 in your city? Perhaps you are accredited by the Better Business Bureau. Utilize the brand imaging from these recognitions to further build trust.
#4) Match the Advertising Style
When you are creating your landing page, use your advertisements as inspiration. The styles of your landing pages and your marketing materials should be very similar. Use the same type of language and phrases. You will also want to make sure that the color schemes are the same. Remember, a landing page is an extension of the ad that they first clicked on.
#5) A/B Testing
Your first landing page design may not be the most effective. The only way to find out is through some basic A/B testing. Create two or three landing pages and funnel similar traffic to all of them. After a set amount of time, perhaps a two week period, you can analyze the metrics and see which page converted at the highest rate.
#7) Create a Sense of Urgency
The best landing pages create a sense of urgency. Your ad copy should slowly build in momentum and push towards your end goal or CTA. Perhaps you are running a free course for first-time homebuyers in your city. Your landing page should touch upon the fact that there are limited spaces available and that the date is fast approaching.
TIP: Countdown clocks can instantly convey a sense of urgency on any style of landing page.
#8) Provide Alternative CTAs
Always provide prospects with multiple opportunities to interact with you. Maybe the user isn't ready to contact you for home buying services today but they found your information very useful. This is where a secondary CTA can capture any of the leads that were not convinced by your main CTA.
One of the most common and successful secondary CTAs is an email capture. If you have a monthly email or you have authored an ebook, provide an email sign-up at the very bottom of the page. Remember, if someone took the time to read through all of your copy and scroll to the bottom, they are very close to converting, you just have to give them the right outlet.
Conclusion
These 8 elements have the ability to increase your conversion rates 10x if implemented properly. Constructing the perfect landing page is not a simple task but it will be well worth your time.
To view the original article, visit the Parkbench blog.
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The Key to Real Estate Lead Generation: Custom Landing Pages
Are you searching for ways to boost both your website lead generation and the effectiveness of your online advertising? Custom landing pages, which users "land" on after clicking one of your ads, are one of the biggest keys to lead generation.
Landing pages are designed with one goal in mind: to earn the contact information of people who click your advertisements. Of course, to get that contact info you'll often have to offer something in return. Learn how to put landing pages to work for your business with our guide to custom landing pages for your website.
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Consider a Lifestyle Section for Your Real Estate Website
A huge chunk of our business is locating homes and facilitating their sale, and our real estate websites are a big part of our marketing. People have a great many requirements for what they want in a home, from size and bedrooms to neighborhood and amenities. People want to enjoy their time in their homes, but they also spend a great deal of time away from home engaged in activities other than their jobs. Concentrating just on the four walls and the home's features leaves a lot of buyers doing their own research into what they like to do or enjoy near prospective homes.
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Effective Real Estate Website Calls-to-Action for Lead Generation
For real estate lead generation, you run ads in the newspaper, in the homes magazine, and highlight your website in all of your other marketing. You've done a good job with this marketing in calling people to take action and come to your website. Now what are you doing for calls-to-action on your website to get your visitors to tell you who they are?
If you're asking for them to "sign up for my newsletter," or "register for my guestbook," you're probably not very happy with leads from those calls. It's not that a newsletter isn't valuable, and we'll talk about that, but just asking them to sign up for it isn't going to grab their interest. So what can you do for calls-to-action around your site for real estate lead generation? And where should you place them?
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Using Internal Linking and Navigation to Keep Visitors on Your Site
Does real estate website internal linking really help with SEO? YES! But internal linking is also quite valuable for lead generation, as you can guide visitors to other content they wouldn't normally see. They can then be guided by linking to content with specific calls-to-action that will get you those leads. As for SEO, internal text linking, if done right, adds emphasis to the key phrases that people use in their online searches to find real estate websites.
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Real Estate Branding by Niche Market Will Grow Your Business
Real estate branding means pretty much the same thing to many real estate professionals. To prove it, do web searches in your market area, and you'll find that the vast majority of the results are some version of "real estate" and your market area. Or, almost as many will be some version of "homes for sale" and your market area.
What other real estate branding can you do that will mean something to consumers? Find a niche and not only work it but brand it as well. So, what are some niches you can work for real estate commissions?
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How to Create Community Webpages that Sell
When you're looking to highlight the uniqueness of a neighborhood, community-focused content can be your best friend. Community content is used to showcase the most attractive features and benefits of a local community, while also displaying your personal knowledge of the area's history and amenities.
But how can you build community pages that truly sell? What is it that prospective buyers are really looking for?
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3 Keys to Creating Effective Real Estate Landing Pages
You need to rethink your relationship with your real estate landing pages.
As more and more consumers get their real estate information online, your first connection with potential clients is increasingly your landing pages.
This goes for referrals as well. Today, people are used to gathering information on businesses, reading reviews and researching individuals online. So there's a strong chance your referrals are looking you up online before ever speaking with you.
Your landing pages are not just this first point of contact for potential clients; they're also your first impression. Elements like layout, color choice, text copy and perceived value can all play into a potential client's perception of you, and ultimately their decision to work with you.
Since generating high quality leads is core to your real estate business, it has never been more critical to understand the keys to effective real estate landing pages.
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8 Components of a Lead Generating Website
One of the most underutilized resources in real estate is the agent and/or broker website. Many agents see their website as a place to send buyers to search for listings after the lead has been captured. However, websites can be used to generate leads as well. Top agents generate hundreds of buyer and seller leads from their websites. To start making money with your real estate website, take time to add the following tips, tools, and techniques to your website strategy.
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Choosing a Not-Com Domain Name to Set Your Business Apart
In the early days of the internet, IP addresses—long strings of numbers separated by periods—were used to identify websites. As more and more people took to the internet, a simpler, easier method of finding a website was designed: domain names. When the first domain names were released around 1985, website owners could choose from .com, .net, and .org.
Since that time, those top-level domain extensions have remained popular, making it hard for new businesses to find great, unclaimed domain names. Luckily, recognizing the continually growing demand for domain names, new possibilities were (and continue to be) introduced. Businesses can now choose one of the original .com, .net, or .org domain extensions or one of the newer ones, which include but aren't limited to, .site, .biz, .blog, .services, .ltd, .online, .town, and (perfect for the real estate industry) .homes.
Creating a Domain Strategy
With so many domain extensions available, business owners aren't limited to a single domain name. While your primary domain name may be BuyNC.homes, you may decide to purchase a secondary domain name for your investor clients under lucrative.holdings or one for your rental clients under RentAtlantaGA.homes.
Creating a domain name for each of your primary niches can boost your appeal to those buyers and sellers. After all, why should someone looking to sell their beach home go to a website whose domain is more buyer-oriented when they could use a site like sellbeach.homes? Each of these names can then be used in various marketing materials and forwarded back to niche-specific pages on your primary website.
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Page Features Your Website NEEDS If You Want to Generate Leads
If you want to generate leads from your website, landing pages are a must have.
Essentially, a landing page is any page a visitor can arrive at or "land" on. It's a page you can send clients to gain specific information, such as to learn more about your local market, view a listing, request information from you, and so on.
And if you design your landing pages with purpose and intent, landing pages are also tools for lead capture.
In this blog article, we're going to look at a specific type of landing page for Market Updates that we use at our brokerage, GoodLife Realty, and how we use it to engage our network, boost traffic to our website, and ultimately generate leads.
Market Update Landing Pages
Market Update Landing Page are just a page you can send people to if they want to receive updates on what's going on in your local market.
Remember: A landing page will most likely be someone's first impression of you. You have seconds to catch the viewer's eye and engage them.
So, when creating your page, be sure to make it attention-grabbing. Use stellar photography and copy that speaks to what your viewer hopes to get on that page.
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Your 'About' Page is About More than Your Real Estate Career
In the wild, animals use bright feathers, beautiful songs, or even dances to attract. Unfortunately, launching into a lead generation ballad or capitalizing on rusty tap dance skills isn't a viable lead generating strategy for most agents. Instead, agents must rely on the power of their website's "About" page to demonstrate their compatibility and desirability to buyers and sellers. Discover how you can optimize your about page's effectiveness with these tips!
First Impressions Matter
If you clicked on a webpage and were immediately confronted with a Picasso-esque arrangement of colors, photo alignments, and font sizes, would you buckle down and start reading or dismiss the page as a lost cause and move on? Start maximizing your page's potential by evaluating whether your website looks inviting. For maximum effect, your webpage should have the following:
Section headers where necessary
Short, digestible paragraphs
Easy to understand flow
No more than two fonts or colors
Consistent photo size
Clutter-free appearance
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Agent Websites Are Dead
If you are planning to invest in a new website, or to update your current website, be sure to think deeply about it, and maybe even think backwards. Let me explain. Most agents do not need websites because they cannot afford to drive traffic to them.
When do you need a website?
If you have more than 10 buyers set up in the MLS to get listing alerts
If you have at least one listing (and yard sign) at all times
If you plan to spend at least $500 in online marketing
Too many agents spend time and money on a website that they may not need. Most brokerages provide a webpage for their agents. That is probably enough for most agents. The fact of the matter is that if you are not setting up buyers on your website, investing in new customer acquisition advertising for your website, or if you do not have a listing with a yard sign that is driving traffic to your website, you may be wasting your time.
Managing a website when you do not have any consumer traffic to the website makes no sense. Too many agents are investing $500 to $5000 to set up a website. On top of that, you spend between $50 and $100 or more for basic maintenance. If you want your website to be successful, you need to add content to it by blogging and composing neighborhood pages. Even after spending all of that money and investing all of that time, your website may only get between 10 and 100 visits a month (most of them by you and your mom).
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Have You Bought into this Dangerous Myth about First-Time Homebuyers?
First-time home buyers have historically been a large niche for real estate agents. As each generation enters the workforce, their desire to own a home logically follows after quite soon.
This trend has been hotly debated as the rise of the millennial homebuyer has spurred some interesting opinions.
Conversations in recent years have resulted in many Realtors believing the millennial generation is the first group to break the status quo of home ownership. Are you one of the real estate professionals who don't feel that first-time homebuyers are a worthwhile source of leads anymore? If so, this new research will surprise you.
Let's explore the recent myth of the first-time homebuyer, and how you can profit big time from this important group.
The Myth About First Time Homebuyers
It seems like you can't pick up a newspaper lately without reading about unpaid interns or unemployed college graduates living in their parents' basement. We hear a lot about the millennial generation's struggle to enter the workforce.
As a result, the assumption has been that millennials will put off purchasing a home later than previous generations have.
Because of the media coverage on millennials, many real estate professionals believe that there will be a delay for this generation to begin purchasing property. We've been told that the market is simply too expensive for first-time homebuyers.
But recent research conducted by Zillow shows us that this assumption is incorrect. I would argue that continuing to believe this myth can be harming your success as a Realtor by missing out on sales and referrals.
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What Does Your Real Estate Website Say About You?
Websites are the public faces of real estate professionals. No other single marketing tool comes close to equalling the importance of a website. They deliver the first images and words about an agent or a brokerage that prospective clients and customers see.
If a site doesn't connect with consumers in a matter of seconds, that first impression could be a real estate professional's last chance to win a new client. Sites that consistently fail to be compelling can do serious damage to a perfectly competent real estate practice.
Yet hundreds of thousands of agents and brokers publish sites that miss the mark by miles. After spending thousands to build and host a site, they spend even more for canned content that can do more harm than good.
News you can't use
Some use services that carry national or regional economic news feeds that provide "national" or "regional" information on market trends. Other sites use "how to" content written for the broadest possible audience in terms of geography, price tier, age group. The chances are good that much, if not most, canned content misses the mark for three reasons:
It's so generic that it doesn't convey that the site's owner has any particular expertise or focus;
Competing agents and brokers in the same market may carry the same canned content, which creates confusion and defeats the purpose of the site; and
It occupies space on your site that could be put to much better use.
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Accelerate Your Income with Simple Conversion Strategies (7/14)
Thursday, July 14, 2016 at 10:00 AM PDT
Conversion is the biggest battleground in real estate, and agents are spending big money for coaches who promise to take them to the next level. In this webinar, Virtual Results president Jim Marks will give you those tips for FREE.
The key to better conversion? Don't overthink it. Systemize your follow-up so you don't second guess yourself or waste time on unproven tactics.
In just one hour, you'll:
Get tips on small changes you can (and should) make to your website
Learn how to convert from traffic to lead, and lead to client
See how to identify the value of a lead now and over the long-term, and follow up accordingly
Learn about automated tools you can use to nurture leads naturally
Register now!
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Best Practices for Your Real Estate Website
92 percent of home buyers start their search for a new home online. Are you giving consumers what they want with your business website? Not only is your website a great platform to display your brand and value, but it can also be a great lead capture tool. Making sure your website is up to today's online standards will ensure you stand out when a consumer lands on your page. There are three best practices we think are most important for an effective real estate website:
Show Your Value
Consumers come to your website to search for listings and learn about the local market, so show them what you got! Your site should be designed with your potential clients in mind. Think about what information they're looking for and how you can provide it in a user-friendly manner. Testimonials from previous customers are a great way to demonstrate your value and explain (in a more unbiased manner) how you can satisfy a consumer's needs. Local market statistics, neighborhood reports, and community updates help to position you as a local expert.
Use a mix of text, photos, and videos to engage consumers visually – content they can easily share is a great way to get your name out to the masses and establish your place as a trusted source of local real estate information.
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Anatomy of a Real Estate Landing Page
So you're using digital advertising for real estate. Your ad is helping you stay top of mind with people you are prospecting or the people you already know. But where are you sending those people that click on your ad?
You should be sending them to a landing page.
"But I have a website," you're saying. Let's take a quick step back and correct a common mistake: a landing page isn't quite the same thing as your web site.
What is a landing page for real estate?
Once someone clicks on your ad, they need to go to page that delivers on the promise you made in your ad. That delivery is on a landing page, which is a web page that speaks to a specific purpose.
It's not a home page. It's not an About page. So what makes a web page a landing page?
Landing pages have ONE purpose (home values report or a specific listing)
They are easy to read and scan
The message is clear — don't tell your entire story
Deliver on the promise of a digital ad
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How Are You Helping Agents to Monetize Their Contacts?
Whether you are a builder/developer trying to move more product or a broker or marketing company looking to do the same on behalf of a client, bottom line is you are trying to get more consumers to buy new homes. There are many familiar ways to do this:
Build a website, pay to drive traffic, and hope that someone sees it;
Build an expensive sales center and hope a consumer comes in the front door;
Hold open houses for agents and hope that they do something with all those brochures you printed up for them;
Create a direct marketing print or digital marketing campaign and hope consumers/agents don't unsubscribe; and, depending on your market,
Translate all your materials (print and online) into multiple languages in the hopes of catching the eye of one of those many foreign buyers.
Do any or all of these resonate with you?
One additional area you might consider is beefing up your effort to incent external agents to market your projects. Why? Because, unlike the other methods described above, real estate agents have a reason to respond to your efforts—they get paid a commission if something happens.
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Landing Page Tips to Help You Generate More Leads
Real estate is a tough job, but there are a lot of things to love about it. You're your own boss, you get to meet new people, set your own schedule, and have the satisfaction of helping people through their largest transactions. However, these great perks don't really kick in until you've got some leads. At NAR San Diego, Chris Smith gave a talk about online lead generation and credits landing pages as a major contributor to a successful lead generation strategy.
What is a Landing Page?
A landing page is a simple, standalone page where you can send people for a singular purpose: capturing leads. The landing pages are connected to ads or promotions that drive users with a specific intent. For example, you may have one landing page to capture sellers who want a CMA and another for people requesting a guide for first time buyers.
Why Do I Need Landing Pages?
When someone comes to your site from an ad or promotion, they have a specific goal in mind based on the material that led them to click your link. However, when they come to the home page of your website, they receive a very generalized experience. You can use landing pages to address the needs of the specific lead.
You can also use landing pages as a way to find out which of your older leads may still be interested in buying or selling. Smith recommends setting up a landing page for old clients with a free offer and see which clients register. Those that do are probably worth reaching out to again.
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New .Homes Website Domains Now Available to Real Estate Pros
Is the .com domain name you really want already taken? Never fear, there's a new domain extension in town, and it's full of SEO potential for real estate practitioners.
The sunrise registration period opened just last Monday for the new .Homes top-level domain. "Sunrise" registration is a limited window of time that allows trademark holders to purchase .Homes domains that match their marks before registration is opened to the general public. That means if you've trademarked the name of your real estate team or practice--Central Coast Realty™, for example--you can now reserve CentralCoastRealty.Homes so that your company's name isn't taken by somebody else. The Sunrise period runs through May 6. You can learn more here.
However, the domain names with the highest SEO potential are up for grabs on May 12, when open registration starts. Because registration will then no longer be restricted to trademark holders, agents and brokers can buy names that reflect their area, like Boston.Homes. The reason a domain like this has so much SEO potential is because it matches the phrases that consumers are likely to search for, e.g. Boston homes or Boston homes for sale.
.Homes domain names are only available to professionals who serve the residential real estate industry. This includes agents, brokers, mortgage professionals, appraisers, property managers, builders, home insurers, MLSs, and associations. Dominion Enterprises, the operator of Homes.com, is the exclusive registrar of .Homes domain names. To learn more, visit domains.homes.
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5 Helpful Tips for Creating an Effective Website
A website is a valuable key to success as a real estate professional – this is the center of your marketing world and how you make your money. Viewers can visit your website at any time of the day; it is a 24-hour shop that is always generating business. The best way to ensure your website is successful is to hire a website professional who will take the time in creating a current and up to date platform for your business. Below are 5 quick and easy tips for a successful website.
1. Think Simple and Clean
First impressions are everything. As viewers come to your website they do not want to be overwhelmed with content, images, and bright splashy colors. This will most definitely turn potential business away as viewers will back out of your site and go to another. Having a simple template with limited coloring and imaging will give off a professional feel; key content and wording is important to display on the homepage as well.
By having the main components appear bold and centered on the homepage—like a Home Search, Featured Listings, or Map Search—you'll draw in viewers, as this is why they are coming to your website. Keep your navigation simple and user-friendly – use key words like Buyers, Sellers, and Contact Me for quick and to-the-point access. Think as your client – what is it that you want to see within the first minute of opening your website?
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Best Tips for Driving Traffic to Your Real Estate Website
Creating your real estate website is an exciting process. You carefully choose the look and craft the content, and then you send your beautiful new website out into the world wide web. But then what? If you’re not driving traffic to your real estate website, what good is its elegant design and terrific listings?
Setting up your website is the first step to building a valuable online presence that creates more leads for you as a REALTOR®. But driving traffic to your website is just as important! Here are the best ways to drive traffic to your real estate website.
Make Sure Your Real Estate Website is Mobile Friendly
Technology has evolved rapidly in the last few years and the way we use the internet has changed a lot! Instead of browsing the web from a desktop computer, more people than ever are using mobile devices to access the web. If you force your visitors to pinch and scroll their way around your site, they may give up and go elsewhere. Ensure that your website is comfortable to use on laptops, mobile phones and tablets.
Regularly Post to Your Real Estate Blog
One of the best ways to show the search engines that your website is active and legitimate is by regularly adding content, and a blog is a powerful way to do that! Update your blog with relevant real estate articles and include keywords that apply to your business. Search engines like Google and Bing will smile upon fresh content. Your keywords will help increase your chances of appearing in the search engine results. To make this process even easier, choose a Realtor website solution that provides you with professionally written blog content on a regular basis.
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7 Signs that Your Real Estate Website Needs a Redesign
The beginning of a new year is a great time to audit your online presence. Take a moment to check your marketing materials, social media and search portal profiles to make sure your contact info is correct and all links work.
It's also an opportune time to take a critical eye to your website, your most important piece of "online real estate," to be sure it's not stale or outdated--and that it's not driving customers away! Not sure how to tell if your site needs an overhaul? These seven signs are a dead giveaway that your site needs a redesign:
1. Lackluster IDX search options. Does your website's IDX search only offer limited search criteria like price, beds, baths, and square footage? It may be time to upgrade to a more modern solution. Basic search parameters won't cut it for today's consumer. They want a search with detailed local information that's lifestyle oriented--like what schools are nearby, or what restaurants and other amenities are in the neighborhood? There are plenty of IDX options available today that offer consumers the granular search options they're looking for. You can research IDX solutions in our Product Directory.
2. Your layout isn't mobile friendly. Have you heard the term responsive web design? It's a method of designing a website layout so that it detects the device that it's being viewed on and automatically scales to fit that's device's screen. This approach eliminated the old way of having to build two separate versions of a site--one for desktop and one for mobile. With responsive design, one version is all any website needs. Responsive design isn't just to appease mobile users, however. Google is now punishing websites that aren't mobile friendly. If your site is difficult to view on phone and tablets, it's time for an overhaul--before your site totally disappears into the abyss of Google search results.
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Real Estate Website Design Isn’t Just Colors and Page Layout
A Google search for "website designer" yields 591 million results. Add the words "real estate" to the front of it ("real estate website design") and the results shrink down to 77 million. That's still a few million too many for meaningful research. You're still likely to get thousands of different company results if you add in your city. There must be some money in this business, as there are a lot of people doing it.
Let's assume that you're not happily heading in the wrong direction, thinking that your major design considerations should be:
How big can my personal photo be?
How well do the site colors go together?
Can my top producer badge be on every page?
Can I have a lot of Flash or other moving stuff going on?
How many popups can I have to make visitors sign in?
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An App Isn't Enough to Make Your Business Mobile Friendly
Is your business optimized to serve today's mobile consumer? If you offer buyers and sellers a property search app, but your website is difficult to use on mobile devices, you're missing out on a lot of potential leads.
There are several reasons for this. First, consumers are not using property apps exclusively. Many, especially those early in the search process, are still Googling "Mytown homes for sale." If their search brings them to your IDX site, how long will you think they'll stay before moving on to another site that's easier to use on their device? A few seconds, at best.
That's if they're able to find your site at all. In April, Google updated their search algorithm to favor sites that are mobile friendly. Termed "Mobilegeddon" by some, the update relegates sites that don't display correctly on mobile devices to the bottom of search results.
What Makes a Website Mobile Friendly?
So what is it that makes a site work well on mobile. In days past, some websites would actually offer two different versions of their content--one designed for specifically for mobile and a "full" site that works on desktop or laptop computers.
Today, "responsive" design has solved the need to build two sites. A website designed responsively can identify the size of the screen it's being viewed on and scale accordingly. This means that all devices and screen sizes--computer, tablet, and phone--can view the same version of a website.
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9 Elements of a Great Website Homepage
Your real estate website homepage: it's usually the first thing site visitors see and probably also the first page you created. But when was the last time you took a critical look at it?
It's important to review the content on your site from time to time, to make sure it's still doing what you need it to do – capturing leads, of course!
Today we're taking a closer look at the humble homepage. Here are nine elements that your homepage should have:
1. Headline
Quick: what is this website for? Keep it simple. Your name or real estate agency name will do.
2. Image
Don't forget to include a picture of your smiling face somewhere! Include your team or agent headshot so customers know who they will be meeting when they take that next step. Adding a high-resolution image of your selling area or one of your listings is a good idea, too.
3. Value Statement
Be sure you tell your visitors about the value your services will bring to them. Use the copy to say how they will benefit from your specialized skills. Say what you do, why it matters and how you will save them time, money or stress (or all of the above).
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A "Lead-to-Lifetime" Solution: Popular CRM Now Includes Agent Websites
IXACT Contact launched a new agent website solution last month at a price that will please the budgets of agents everywhere. The websites are included in the subscription fee of the existing CRM solution, adding substantially more value both for current users and for prospects looking for an integrated end-to-end CRM and marketing solution.
According to Rich Gaasenbeek, IXACT Contact's VP of Sales and Marketing, the company isn't increasing subscription costs with the introduction of the new websites. Instead, they're positioning themselves as a "world-class CRM, email marketing, and agent website platform" that's available at a wallet-friendly price.
Gaasenbeek calls the rebranded IXACT Contact a "new lead-to-lifetime client solution," underlining the tight integration between all of its components. Leads that come in off the website, for example, are automatically imported into the CRM and assigned to a drip marketing campaign that nurtures leads until they're ready to buy or sell a home. "The system ensures leads don't fall through the cracks," says Gaasenbeek.
Aside from its robust lead capture and management capabilities, IXACT Contact's agent websites also feature:
Responsive, mobile-friendly layouts
Two levels of optional IDX integration
16 pages of professionally written website content
A wide range of attractive designs and layouts
An integrated blog with optional, pre-written content
Social media integration
Let's take a closer look to learn more.
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How to Drive More Traffic to Your Real Estate Website
Converting leads in the online environment is not an easy thing to achieve. It is not just a matter of bringing people to your website and letting things run their course, although that is the place where you must start.
Ok, let's assume that you have a decent real estate website as far as functionality and the visual side are concerned. If you are experiencing low traffic to your website, it means that you haven't taken enough time and made a good enough effort to reach people and get them interested in what you have to offer. Today we are going to discuss what are some of the right steps (and some of the wrong ones as well) to pulling in a satisfactory number of people to your real estate website.
Identifying the Ideal Traffic
When it comes to website traffic, you have to think ahead. Getting the numbers up is no big deal. You can pay for traffic and bring your stats to a satisfactory level. However, if you want to achieve something more than just having numbers for show, you will need to focus on finding the right traffic. Identifying parameters like age group, vocations, geographical area and other relevant factors will help you focus on getting traffic that will have a better chance of converting to paying customers later on.
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Six Items Every Real Estate Website Should Have
Creating a real estate website that offers a good customer experience can do a lot of things for your business. It can instill trust in your clients and potential clients by offering a professional look and feel. It can also help convert leads by offering quality and useful information.
Whether you're a new agent in the beginning stages of development, or a seasoned agent that has had a website for years, there are several things you should keep in mind when developing your site. In the graphic below, we list six elements that every real estate site should have to offer a great customer experience.
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15 Places to Advertise Your Website
Your real estate agent website is one of your most powerful marketing tools. Are you using it to your full advantage?
Your website markets you, your services and your listings to prospects around the clock, even when you are busy working, sleeping or on vacation. It is a place clients can go to learn more about the home selling and buying process, and where repeat clients come to find you again after what might be years in their current home.
To make sure you are optimally promoting your site, here are 15 free (or inexpensive) and easy places you should be advertising it:
1. Your business cards
As an agent, you could meet a potential client anywhere! Be ready with a stack of business cards that include your web address, email and phone number. Find more business card tips here.
2. Your digital business cards
Not carrying business cards? No problem. We have your tech savvy business card solution right here.
3. Giveaway pens
Make a bunch of pens with your website address on them. Take them (and leave them) everywhere. Give them to everyone you know.
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Top 10 Real Estate Landing Page Tips
These tips cover both landing pages you create for all-online exposure, as well as print and other marketing that you want to lead a person to your website. You may be writing a guest blog post or social site post and you want to generate a click to a landing page to generate a lead. Or, you could be mailing a postcard to a neighborhood, and you want to take a listing prospect to a landing page to generate a call-in for an appointment.
Tip # 10: Start with a plan, a focused topic, campaign or ad piece with a goal.
Determine what you want to accomplish and a tightly focused goal and call-to-action. As an example, you want to post to Facebook, Twitter, or Google+ about the importance of a thorough CMA and how they're done. Or, you're doing a mailer into a neighborhood with that goal.
You now have your goal, and you want to stay true to that topic, focus on it, and don't dilute your message with other stuff. In other words, don't also try to talk about how you work with buyers just because you can free up some space or add some words.
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How to Generate More Real Estate Leads
Consumers now have many options for exploring real estate listings online. To compete in this market and acquire new leads, it's critical to have an effective lead acquisition and nurturing strategy. In this article, we'll review methods for acquiring new real estate leads to help you grow your business.
Some of these methods are simple while others will require more planning and follow-through, but they can all help you acquire more leads.
We'll talk about best practices for nurturing your leads in a future article.
Website Optimization
Does your website need an overhaul? An optimized website will engage buyers and sellers and convert more of your visitors to leads. Website optimizations will generally fall into two categories: aesthetics and content.
Website Aesthetics
Consumers form an opinion about your website in a fraction of a second. The following key points can make a dramatic improvement in how well your site engages consumers:
Professional, uncluttered look and feel
Quick loading time
Friendly user experience with simple navigation
Ask your family, friends and colleagues for their honest assessment and make adjustments if needed. Your business depends on it!
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What Online Prospects Want from Real Estate Agents
More and more people are looking for both real estate listings and real estate agents online these days.
When prospects come to your website—whether they found you via an Internet search, a well-placed classified ad or a boosted Facebook post—you have less than 3 seconds to make a good first impression.
3 seconds?!?
Yep, that's right, and that already-short amount of time decreases every day as attention spans shorten and the digital marketplace speeds up! If you're going to have an impact, you better have what online prospects want, and they better be able to find it... fast!
What Online Prospects Want
Mobile-Friendliness
With more than half of real estate search traffic coming from mobile devices, it just makes sense that your website should work on computers, tablets and smartphones. If someone is searching for agents in your area using their phone, you risk losing their business before you even have a chance to win it if your website won't load or isn't user friendly.
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You Can Get Listing Leads from Your Website
There are two major focus points used by real estate professionals in creating their websites. If they're listing properties, they want to feature their listings and use the listing presentation on the site in their personal listing appointment presentations. They show their potential listing client how they can market their home better online than the competition.
The other and far more content-focused approach is to provide local real estate information and attract buyers, or just prospects that the real estate agent can place in their CRM system. They market to them in the future, no matter what their current interests or real estate goals. They could be a buyer, seller, investor now or at any time in the future, and we just want them in our system.
Both of these approaches work if the site has content that is focused on those goals. What if we want to take a more "seller-prospect" approach? It is a mistake to assume that you'll just get lucky in getting a listing client now and then from your website. You get most of these sellers from other ads, farming mailings into neighborhoods, and referrals. The mistake is in assuming that homeowners who are thinking of selling are not really using the Internet much, as they're not shopping listings like buyers are.
Interviewing his listing clients who contacted him from website forms and email, a successful Web marketer found that they had some common things to say about their use of the Internet before they set any listing appointments:
They wanted to see listing prices for nearby homes similar to theirs.
They wanted to learn about current market conditions and if the time is right to sell.
Most important, they wanted to see what local agents were doing to market homes online.
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Google’s Mobile Algorithm Set to Change April 21. Is Your Website Ready?
There are some big changes, quite possibly the biggest of all time, coming to Google's mobile search algorithm. It's being called "Mobilegeddon" and is expected to be the dawn of a new era of internet that has never been seen before. If you haven't optimized your website for mobile by the cutoff date of April 21st, you're going to be left in the dust of your competitors that already have.
It would be a major understatement to say that consumers rely on mobile devices during their search for a home. In fact, 40% of Homes.com's total traffic now comes from mobile and there has been a 192% increase in mobile property leads since 2014. This means that there's a huge opportunity to grow your business if you are able to provide a mobile platform that your audience can rely on.
There are more benefits that come with having a mobile-friendly website than simply creating a better experience for users on their smartphones and tablets. One of the most important advantages is the role that it plays in search engine optimization (SEO), which is the area that this new algorithm is expected to affect the most. The bottom line is this—your website will have a better chance of being discovered in mobile search results if it meets Google's mobile standards.
A study conducted by Advanced Web Ranking found that the first five results featured in a Google search accounted for 67% of all clicks and the results ranked from six to 10 accounts for only 3.73%. What this shows is simple. Higher search ranking equals more traffic to your website, thus more opportunities to connect with buyers and sellers.
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How to Drive More Organic Traffic to Your Real Estate Website
Fact: No matter how great you think your real estate website is, if you simply sit back and expect it to get tons of organic search traffic and therefore tons of leads, you are going to be greatly, greatly disappointed.
If you are in this boat, don't feel bad. Week in and week, out we hear agents tell us how they paid tons of money for a custom website and it just isn't working. While it is theoretically possible that there could be some SEO problems with the site in question, more often than not, that is not the case. The reason these sites "Aren't Working" is because the real estate agent has spent no time planning or deploying a content marketing strategy to build organic search traffic.
A solid inbound marketing plan, and a content marketing strategy to go along with it, is critical if you want to succeed in the organic search game. Besides just driving traffic, your inbound marketing plan should be targeted so that you don't get just "any traffic" but the specific traffic you want that is comprised of your ideal clients.
Because this is such a frequent misconception about websites, and because content marketing seems to be such a tough thing to get ramped up for many agents, today I thought I would share three tips to consider when planning your content marketing strategy.
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Top Home Buyer FAQs
Are you looking for ways to be more helpful to online consumers? These are some of the most frequently asked questions by homebuyers – questions that people in your area are searching right now!
Add these FAQs to the buyer resource page on your real estate website to help prospects and leads who are looking to learn more about the home buying process. And don't forget to add your own thoughts when you do. Remember: fresh website content is always good for SEO!
What are the advantages of buying a home?
Owning a home is a great way to build equity, take control of your living situation, and invest in your family and community. One study found that homeowners also report a higher quality of life. Check out the other findings about the social benefits of homeownership in this infographic.
How much home can I afford?
A good place to start is to estimate your monthly payments will be around 25% of your gross monthly income. That is a safe number that most lenders feel comfortable with, although your credit rating and other monthly debts will be factored in, too. Try using a mortgage calculator to figure out approximately how much house you can afford in different loan and rate scenarios.
Why do I need a buyer's agent?
A buyer's agent is committed to working only in the best interests of the buyer – that's you! Your buyer's agent knows the local market and will help you determine whether the homes you are looking at are priced fairly. Your agent will also help you cross all of your t's and dot all of your i's when navigating contracts and paperwork.
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Best of 2014: 4 Lead Generation Sources - Which Should You Budget for?
We're continuing an annual tradition of counting down our top 10 articles of the year. The following article was originally published back in January and is #3 in our countdown. See #4 here.
In December, we explored how Virtual Office Websites (VOWs) can be used to generate leads. There are many more sources for online leads, though, so we're kicking off the New Year by taking a broader look at our options. After all, now's the time when many agents and brokers turn budget- and process-minded, and examine what is working for their business and their budget.
Some sources, like social media and Craigslist, only require an investment of time and motivation. But at the start of a new year, many real estate pros are more concerned about paid sources of lead generation and where--or if--they fit into their annual budget.
With that in mind, today we're going to take a look at four different sources of online lead generation. Each will be evaluated according to cost, time and effort, and quantity of leads.
Custom or DIY Websites
Do-it-yourself websites come in all shapes and sizes. They can be anything from simple Wordpress sites to full-blown custom designed web destinations. Some who take the DIY route plug-in a third-party IDX search like Diverse Solutions to their site, or use only an MLS or association provided search widget.
Others provided limited or no search capability. This is not necessarily a bad thing, however. I'm particularly fond of this website for local brokerage the Davies Company. Why? Because it's clean, uncluttered, and makes it easy to find exactly what I need. There's no sense of being overwhelmed by property search options or other features--a feeling many generic template sites often convey.
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Everything an Agent Needs to Know About Gaining a Client’s Trust Online
Gaining a client's trust is one of the most important tasks for a real estate agent. You are building a relationship that will ultimately lead them to make one of the biggest decisions of their life! Some of the more conventional methods involve having a meeting, getting to know your client and their family in-person, and talking on the phone. These are great ways to build trust, but what if a client's first impression is online and not face-to-face? According to NAR for 43 percent of homebuyers, the first step in the home-buying process is looking for online properties, and what if your website isn't a great representation of your personality?
"Ninety-two percent of buyers use the internet in some way in their home search process." – NAR
So here's the hard part, translating your individuality to your website, and becoming approachable online, in addition to in-person. As challenging as this may seem, we have some great ideas to help you get started.
1. Put Your Personality on Your Website
When attracting clients online, their first impression of you is the homepage of your website. Let your personality shine through and make it a welcoming experience. Have eye-catching pictures, client reviews, and a layout that's easy to navigate. People also love to interact with a site, so incorporate a 'search for homes' right from the homepage or toolbar on top.
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10 Tips for More Effective Calls to Action on Your Real Estate Website
This can be anything from signing up for a newsletter, to registering for the Home Hunter tool, to requesting a showing of a property.
Calls to action are important because they help us make it clear to users what the next steps are we want them to take.
So how can you make sure you have effective calls to action?
1. Be clear and concise. Assume that your users don't know what you want them do to next on your website. Tell them in as clearly as possible what they should be doing (for example, "Sign Up For Our Newsletter" or "Search For Properties").
2. Use action words. These are words that prompt the user to do something, such as "Sign Up," "Search," or "Contact Us."
3. Create a sense of urgency. Using words like "now" and "limited time" will provide users with a sense that they may miss out on an opportunity if they don't follow through immediately.
4. Don't overwhelm a user with too many choices. Avoid using more than two calls to action on any given inner page on your website – too many choices will overwhelm your users. Oftentimes, when users are presented with too many calls to action, they'll decide not to choose any of them. If you do have two calls to action, make sure that the more important one is emphasized more (you can do this by choosing a more contrasting colour, or making the call to action larger).
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Five Real Estate Website Best Practices
Nearly 90% of home buyers search online during the home buying process. Not only are they using the internet for their next home, but to find a REALTOR® who has experience buying or selling their particular type of home. Many real estate agents understand that having a strong web presence is important, but don't often know where to start.
Here are the top 5 elements to consider when building out your real estate website:
1. Consider your brand. A website often serves as a visual representation of your brand, so be mindful of the voice, tone and images you elect. For example, if you specialize in selling modestly priced homes in a modestly priced area, your homepage image should reflect this. In other words, don't show pictures of flashy, urban condos if you're primarily focused on buying and selling in a suburban setting.
2. Make sure it's user-friendly. It's not enough to just have a website—you need to have a website that is informative, easy to navigate and friendly to both buyers and sellers. Consider what function you want your website to serve. What information do you want visitors to absorb when they come to your website and what's the fastest way to get them there?
3. Create clear CTAs and contact opportunities. For many real estate agents, their website serves as a form of lead generation. In this case, it's vital to have clear Calls to Action (CTAs), as well as contact information right on the homepage.
Adding a contact form to your site can also help you capture new leads. When that lead form is connected to a real estate CRM such as IXACT Contact, they can automatically be added to a drip marketing campaign that ensures you're connecting with them as swiftly as possible.
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Getting Started With Google Analytics – Part Two
In part one of Getting Started with Google Analytics, we talked about what's involved in getting it up and running on your website. Today we will discuss some of the important reports and metrics that it will provide you with. These reports and metrics give you the insight needed to refine or adjust your practices so that your website is meeting your goals and serving its purpose.
While Google offers customization options for your dashboard, most will include the following metrics: Sessions, Users, Pageviews, Pages/Session, Avg. Session Duration, Bounce Rate and % New Sessions. When looking at these metrics, you can segment and analyze a certain date range to see if any practices you put in place are correlated to a change in the amount of traffic that has reached your website or a change in how users interact with your website.
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Real Estate Websites 101
Your website is your online "real estate" showroom, so it needs to be appealing and functional. Most experts would agree that your website should also have IDX so that you can provide MLS property search for website visitors. Without IDX, you can display only your own listings, which doesn't provide a compelling search experience. The ultimate goal of your website is to gain new business or sell properties, so it will need the ability to capture leads.
Your website options span a wide range – from 100% custom design, to template-based do-it-yourself. The key to success is balancing your budget constraints with your goals, and finding a vendor who will fit that niche.
To help you learn more about real estate websites, we recommend reading the following articles. They're a good place to get started:
Real Estate Website Checklist: Buyer Resources
Real Estate Website Checklist: Seller Resources
5 Things That Should Not Be on Your Real Estate Website
Visual Hierarchy and Your Website
Real Estate Website Sales Conversion Funnel
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11 Key Things to Include on a Real Estate Agent Website
Are you having trouble creating content for your site? Sometimes it's not as hard as you think. Simply take a look around your community and put yourself in the shoes of buyers and sellers: What would they want to know?
Listings
Every real estate agent must have his or her listings on a website! A great way to stand apart from other agents in your community is to include short snippets about the property, high-resolution photos and videos that showcase the home on an in-depth level.
Upcoming Community Events
Creating content about local community events shows you are active and care about the town you represent, and home buyers will appreciate the knowledge you are giving them. The culture of a neighborhood can make all the difference!
School Districts
Schools often play a very important role in the home buying decision. Staying up-to-date with school events, awards, accolades and more gives potential home buyers an inside look into the community.
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Online Marketing 101
The phrase "online marketing" is as broad as it gets. It's a term that encompasses a cornucopia of tactics, products, services, and strategies. But don't make the mistake of assuming that this makes it a throw-away category. In fact, the very depth and breadth of online marketing is what makes it so very challenging for agents and for the vendors providing solutions to assist them.
In the world of real estate, what does online marketing entail? Common services include:
Social media
Email marketing
Banner advertising
Single property and agent websites
In truth, if a marketing activity involves the Internet, it can fall under the umbrella of "online marketing." Sound confusing or overwhelming? Here are a few quick reads to help you learn more:
Social Networking vs. Marketing
6 Marketing Tools to Build Your Business
4 Lead Generation Sources: Which Should You Budget For?
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Four Hard Truths About Real Estate Websites
Whether you're new to running a real estate website, or have had one for many years, you should know the hard truths of owning one. This will help you improve it, and help make it the best it can be. Below are a few truths about your website:
1. What You Put In, You Get Out
Everyone knows that the more effort you put into something, the greater the reward. The same goes for your website. If you're not putting in any effort and creating pages, forms, search definitions, enhancing your SEO, etc., you cannot expect to gain any leads from it. If you do not have someone that works on your website for you, make it a priority to spend a few hours each week improving your site's content.
2. Website Changes Are Not Instant
There are many factors that take place when determining a website's ranking. Search Engines such as Google needs to be able to find it, read it and then repeat the process with your website being more enhanced each time to start ranking more fairly on search results. SEO enhancements are never something that take effect right away, and can take months if not years to get your site ranking well.
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5 Things You Want to Check on Your Website Right Now
Don’t have time for a major update to your website, but haven’t updated anything on it in a while? Here are five things that you should check right now so your users have the most relevant information.
1. Is all of your contact information up to date?
Are all phone numbers and office addresses listed on your site correct? Are your social media accounts tied into your website? Do all of your web forms distribute to the proper channels? You don’t want to run into the position where you may be losing a potential lead because they couldn’t get in touch with you!
2. Do all of your custom web pages and custom search definitions use SEO URL Translations?
SEO URL translations are extremely beneficial when it comes to search engine rankings. They help the search engine know what each page is about.
3. Do all of the links on your home page and on any custom web pages that you’ve created work?
Have you removed or renamed any pages that were linked previously? Have any of the external sites that you may link to moved or gone down? Make sure that your content is still available and suitable for your users.
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Visual Hierarchy and Your Website
Your website is a tool to communicate with your users. Sometimes, however, we have so much that we want to communicate that the message gets lost along the way. The best way to make sure we are able to communicate our message clearly is by using visual hierarchy in our website.
Visual hierarchy – how you organize and visually prioritize elements on each web page – helps with comprehension and guides users through the story that you want to tell. It shows users what they should look at first, as well as helping them determine if your page has the information they are looking for, and where that information is located. Because of this, when creating or updating your website, visual hierarchy is one of the most important things that you should consider for each page.
For myself, I find that an easy way to determine the visual hierarchy of a web page is by going through the following steps:
Collect all the content that is going to be on a page (I'm talking everything – all of the text, the images, the calls to action)
Decide what is most important and relevant for the site's users, then what is next most important, and next, etc. (i.e., a heading is important because the user needs to know what this page is about)
Decide if the users should do something and what that something is (ie – a call to action is important if you want the user to contact you about information on the page)
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WordPress Basics for Agents
Industry superstars like Nicole Nicolay have made WordPress a familiar term for most real estate agents. As you probably already know, this is a blogging platform that can also be used to build agent websites. The price tag – a big, fat ZERO – has undeniable appeal for many agents. If you're considering a WordPress site, there are many factors you'll need to investigate. Today, I'm going to look at only two of the most important.
Property Search
It's easy to argue that an agent website is worth very little without property search. Without the option of property search, what value are you providing to your visitors? Thus, property search should be included on every agent's website.
As a result, a variety of technology vendors have created WordPress "plugins" for property search. If you're unfamiliar with the term, "plugins" are tools created by developers to integrate with WordPress and add functionality to WordPress sites.
A good example of a WordPress property search plugin comes from WolfNet. Their plugin synchronizes their powerful IDX search with any WordPress website or blog. It's important, when considering a property search plugin, to ensure that it offers the full functionality you've come to expect from IDX search. For instance, WolfNet's plugin still includes the SEO features (such as individual property detail pages and dynamic listing content) and customizable search options that have made their IDX such a popular choice.
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8 Things to Think About When Writing For Your Real Estate Website
For all real estate agents, the most important part of their websites is generating leads. With that being said, writing content for your website is also very important for keeping visitors on your website and providing great SEO for your website's ranking. It can be a major determining factor for a visitor choosing to sign with you as their real estate agent. Many websites fail to deliver in this area. Below are some helpful tips when writing website content:
1. Have Up to Date Content
With the real estate industry always changing, the last thing you want is a visitor to be reading a page on your website, only to finish reading it and notice that it is five years old. This can frustrate potential clients, as they may feel what they've read may no longer be applicable.
2. Have Relevant and Interesting Content
If you are including content about saving energy in the home, make sure you stay true to that topic and don't get sidetracked with irrelevant information. Consistency is key. The more exciting your content is to read, the greater your chance of generating a lead. Remember that you are also trying to market yourself with your content, so the more memorable the content, the bigger your gain.
3. Include Images
Make sure that you have images that are relevant, as with your written content, having up to date images will work to your benefit. You also need to be sure they are royalty free, in the public domain, or are pictures you have taken, or that you have permission to use (never assume you have permission to use an image unless you have asked).
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