Throwing out the "who's a real estate buyer or seller" question to a crowd of people could get you a prospect, or even a commission. Unfortunately, there aren't many of us who get an opportunity to do this, unless we're really brave and shout it out in the supermarket.
Then we move to marketing our real estate business, and we spend a lot of money on this crowd approach:
- Newspaper ads that go out to the entire newspaper readership.
- Magazine ads that also get pushed to many, but who knows...?
- Websites that sit there and hope somebody stumbles across them.
Of course, if we could yell it out in the supermarket, and we had the nerve to do that, we could target our audience a little better with something like "Who wants to buy or sell real estate in the Richmond Hill area?" Consider the odds that someone will drop their lettuce and race down the produce aisle to say "I'm so glad I found you!"
We don't do any better when we buy an ad in the print or broadcast media that is pushed out to tens or hundreds of thousands, but only a tiny percentage see or read it, and an even tinier percentage are currently a good prospect. It's a lot of money for sometimes tiny results.
With a website, we can create pages for neighborhoods, and we can try to move up in the search engines for free, or even pay a buck or two for a click to get a visitor to one of those pages. That's at least better targeting than other media. But:
what if we could get someone to approach us with interest in a home in a certain city...or
in a certain neighborhood in the city...or
on a certain street...or
in a certain block on that street...or
dare we hope-for a certain address, and it's for sale in our MLS...or
dare we dream-it's OUR Listing!
Would you like to get site visitors who are interested in a particular home for sale? No problem.
They won't race down the produce aisle, but they'll come directly to your site, to the page where they can get information about that listing on Smith Street. How? Well:
- You can build several thousand custom web pages, one for each listing, and keep them up to date, OR
- You can get an MLS IDX search function that isn't framed, and resides on your website so the search engines can index the text for each listing.
If you're leaning toward item #1, get counseling. If item #2 got your attention, here is some proof that such a solution is available and it definitely works.
NinasDreamHomes.com
NinasDreamHomes.com uses a RealtySoft IDX solution that isn't framed. Most IDX providers give you code to "frame" the search function in your site. This places a "window" of sorts so that you're looking at the content of the search on your site, but that content is actually hosted somewhere else. In other words, the search engines don't see it at your site, so there's no indexing of all of that great content.
However, NinasDreamHomes.com uses an integrated IDX solution from RealtySoft, and all of the text of the IDX and all of the listings are actually hosted on her site. This means that Google sees and indexes it as being on her site. Within days of the setup of this IDX search function, Nina's traffic increased dramatically. Google analytics shows the site visitors starting at near zero and jumping to around 500 per day!
But, it could have been for some other reason, right? Wrong.
In this image we see that the top searches bringing visitors to the site are almost all specific address searches.
Lest you wonder about how this is happening, take a look at result number 4 and this screen shot from a Google Search on that address:
It seems that 10 people stood up and raised their hands to say they are really interested in real estate in the area, and particularly this listed property. You'll never get it done in the produce aisle, but it's a slam-dunk on your website with integrated IDX.
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