Getting more home buyers to visit your real estate website requires search engine optimization (SEO) as well as unique and valuable content for them to land on.
There are many ways to build an MLS-integrated site that attracts qualified leads with real estate listings, resources and digital content. However, the key is continually making your offerings more attractive to potential customers.
To increase traffic to your website and turn visitors into genuine real estate leads, you can use the effective optimization process that we outline in our free “How to Amplify Your Real Estate Website Traffic” webinar.
Step 1: Revisit your website’s on-page SEO strategy
You may have already learned how to optimize your real estate website for search engines like Google. However, SEO best practices change often due to Google’s various algorithm updates. This means you need to regularly check on what they consider to be a “well-optimized site.”
Head to your Google Analytics or other analytics software account in order to measure your site’s performance — from keyword effectiveness to traffic totals, and everything in between — and run real estate SEO reports for your site to reveal areas you can improve upon.
For example, if you notice your area pages for all neighborhoods in your market don’t generate much traffic, try out different keywords and adjust the length of the copy for each page. After a couple of months, you’ll be able to see whether these types of adjustments helped increase your number of visitors. If that’s not the case, simply head back to the SEO drawing board to rework those pages until you get the right search formula in place.
Step 2: Add lead capture forms or adjust existing ones
Another area of your real estate agent website to focus on is adding lead capture forms site-wide. These forms have helped brands in every industry with on-site lead generation.
By offering something of value (such as a private showing opportunity or an hour-long listing presentation) behind one of these forms, you can collect contact information from leads and turn them into customers by following up via email or a phone call.
Even if you already have these forms incorporated across your site, it’s essential to analyze their performance. If you discover that your forms aren’t collecting high quality real estate leads, you can experiment with what you offer behind the forms, and where the forms are placed on your site.
Including a lead capture form on listing and area pages can help you boost real estate lead generation on your site. However, attaching these forms to educational blog articles may not yield a large number of leads, since most blog posts provide content that speaks to top-of-funnel leads who have only recently discovered your website.
Step 3: Make video marketing a priority site-wide
Video in and of itself won’t be the lead gen savior for your MLS-integrated website. What it can do, though, is enhance your published content. Adding video to blog posts and around lead forms can help you tell your real estate brand story and share helpful resources with your audience.
With video, you can impact audiences far more quickly than with just text-only pages.
Brainstorm videos that you want to include throughout your website. Whether you share entertaining listing tours, enlightening neighborhood highlight reels, or live streams from local events, be sure you add this content to appropriate pages. As a side note, one video can be repurposed for multiple pages, so don’t assume you have to craft an entirely new clip for each of your site pages.
There are dozens of real estate videos you can produce for your online marketing and several top-producing industry pros you can get video inspiration from. Do a bit of research before getting behind the camera so you have a clear idea of the types and total number of videos that you’d like to produce. That way you can plan your shoots and and editing sessions for the weeks ahead.
Step 4: Elevate site awareness via email marketing campaigns
Email is an essential real estate marketing strategy. One in four emails from agents to their lists are opened, with many recipients clicking at least one link in these messages. Compared to other marketing tactics and channels, email is one of the easiest means for industry pros to generate more site traffic (and business).
Don’t ask something of your leads immediately in your emails. Research shows that most leads aren’t ready to make a purchasing decision right away. They need to become “sales-ready” leads through various nurturing activities, such as newsletters, digests, and other emails.
Develop a concrete nurture plan that fuses a handful of emails with some patience and awareness. Examine data associated with your sends (like open and click-through rates) and you’ll be able to monitor their activity and know when your leads are ready to make their move.
Step 5: Increase your blogging frequency
Frequently sharing in-depth, high-quality content on your real estate IDX website will improve your ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs) and increase the amount of leads you generate.
By increasing the amount of content you produce, you’ll improve your organic SEO and consistently bring in a higher volume of website visitors.
Publish blog posts and send email newsletters at the same time each week to establish a consistency with your audience. The data proves the more you blog and build a library of site content, the better your long-term traffic and lead gen numbers will be.
If you don’t have an editorial calendar that can help guide your online marketing efforts, Placester’s Seth Price can teach you how to create your own.
Step 6: Work to earn more referral traffic
Guest posting for popular blogs and publications in your area and developing a network of high-profile influencers are two of the leading ways to get more referral traffic to your real estate website.
Reach out to local newspaper and magazine editors and well-known personalities with popular social media accounts or email newsletters. All you need to do to get “in” with these people and leverage their brands is to explain who you are and how you can bring value to their businesses or ventures.
Step 7: Consider a site redesign or replacement
To be competitive in the digital age, you need a responsive IDX website that comes with pre-made site themes, mobile-friendly design, easy editing, and the ability to search local listings. Being able to offer visitors the right tools they need to find homes for sale in their area or learn about their home’s value is crucial to your success as an agent.
Investigate the real estate website marketplace to find an option that best suits your business needs and makes it simple to integrate your IDX feed.
Watch our real estate marketing webinar for agents and brokers to get even more tips and tricks on how to increase IDX website traffic.
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