Once you have driven the traffic to your website, it's hard to keep them. With bounce rates approaching 70% to 80%, it's easy to see that searchers expect to immediately get value form a website. Moreover, keeping visitors on your site for longer than a minute is equally daunting. So how do you improve these numbers?

Provide Rich, Local Content

One key in real estate is obvious—you need the listings people are interested in. But if everyone has the same listings via IDX, how do you stand out from the rest? Part of it is accomplished using the same techniques that got the visitor there in the first place—rich, local content. Allow people to explore the area and understand what the people, schools and activities in the various communities and neighborhoods you serve are like.

But it takes more than that. Really engaging people means allowing them to get taken in by the ways they can search for their "best place."

Engage Your Traffic in the Search Process

Well over half of home buyers stated that the "quality of the neighborhood" was a significant deciding factor in their purchase. The way people define "quality" varies based on who they are and what's important to them. Yet how many sites are there that let someone search for listings based on all the neighborhood factors that are important to them?

Nearly 50% of buyers (more in some areas) said that they had to be in a place that's convenient to work. How many sites can you search for listings that are within a 30 minute commute of the office?

Today, listings search involves basic variations on the same old theme. Beds, baths, price and maybe even a basic distance, city or ZIP code thrown in. In more and more cases, there's even a map. But the search hasn't fundamentally changed and people still find listings only to realize they're too far from transit; the neighborhood's not right for their lifestyle; the schools aren't what they're looking for. So the user repeats until frustrated and moves on. It doesn't have to be that way.

You can engage people in the search process. Allow them to tailor their search to their very specific wants and needs. Allow them to find their dream neighborhood and home in an engaging and interactive process just like the process they go through when speaking to an agent live. How important are schools to you? What do you like to do for fun? Do you have pets? Where do you work and what sort of commute would you like? And finally, what is your ideal house like?

Onboard pioneered "best places to live" over twelve years ago. Today, we can help to provide an engaging means of locating the best communities for each individual and much more. The key is to get people engaged, keep them engaged and dramatically improve the likelihood they convert to opportunities, not just passing visitors.

To view the original article, visit the Onboard Informatics blog.