Forget SEO - What About IVO?

A crusty old man walks into a real estate office and says to a young sales rep, “I want to sell my house you son of a b…..” A little astonished the agent replies, “I beg your pardon sir, I must have misunderstood you. What did you say?”

“Listen up, damn it. I said I want to sell my bloody house!” “I’m very sorry sir, but we don’t tolerate that kind of language in this office”, he says, calling the manager over.

The agency manager comes out: “What seems to be the problem here?” “There’s no damn problem,” the man says, “I want to sell my bloody riverfront mansion.” “I see,” says the manager, “and is this young jerk giving you a hard time?!”

Obviously there was a difference of opinion between the agent on the desk and the manager as to the value of this walk-in.  Which brings us to the topic of this post and your website:  is your website employing IVO, Ideal Visitor Optimization?  I wish I could take credit for this, but I found a great post about it by John Jantsch over at Duct Tape Marketing titled "Ideal Visitor Optimization is the New Website Design."

 

What doors does your site open to visitors that invite them to enter, engage with you, and give you their contact information so you can market to them?  Unfortunately, the vast majority of real estate websites are targeted to any breathing human who might want to buy or sell real estate someday.  Sure, we don't want to turn down business, but we should take a much more targeted approach with our site content to appeal to and engage our "ideal visitor."

Our websites are full of doors, and they lead to content, but is it content that's right for our ideal visitor?  Do we even know who our ideal visitor is?  Do you have a niche in your local real estate market like:

• condos
• rural property
• only buyers
• only sellers
• investors
• certain neighborhoods
• luxury properties
• first time buyers

If you have a niche, then you certainly know what to do right now.  Take a critical look at your website content, design and navigation.  Does it invite in your ideal site visitor based on your niche?  Does it take this visitor through the site with friendly navigation to get them to the content that they need and want?  Does it provide specific content focused on their information and real estate needs?  This should be your goal, as you're losing leads until you do create a site that's right for your ideal visitor, and that's IVO, Ideal Visitor Optimization.

OK, so you're saying "but I work with buyers and sellers, and first time buyers, and investors, and really mean people..."  I JUST NEED COMMISSIONS!  That's alright.  I understand, and you need for your website to speak to all of these prospects.  Then you just have to put a little more work into your site, as you need to create areas there that are designed and filled with content with IVO in mind.  

Make sure that your navigation, whether text links or buttons is designed to take each targeted ideal visitor by type to the part of the site that is optimized for them.  This isn't the huge task you may be running from screaming.  You already have content that speaks to sellers, and other content that speaks to buyers, and you may have content that explains the process to first time buyers.  The trick is to design your site so that when each of these visitors arrive, they are led through the site to the information they need and calls-to-action that will engage them.

Sure, it would be a lot easier if you cater to a niche, say crusty old men with riverfront mansions, but you must think about IVO when you're trying to figure out how to generate more leads from your website.  Then you just need to make sure that IVO is built into navigation and content is focused.

RealtySoft makes it easy with their site design features and WYSIWYG editor functions.

Set up your navigation the way you want, customize your content, arrange it to lead your visitor through the real estate site with IVO, Ideal Visitor Optimization, as your primary objective.  Then use RealtySoft's lead capture tools to create forms and get their contact information.

 

About Jim Kimmons: Jim Kimmons, with more than 16 years experience as a licensed real estate agent and broker in 3 states, is a consultant to Realtors in how to use technology to market and manage their businesses. He has also written books and eBooks on Internet marketing and real estate. Jim is RealtySoft's chief evangelist and is a compensated regular contributor to the RealtySoft.com blog.

 

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