Making Your Website Work for You When it comes to obtaining information, the majority of us will begin our research online. Considering the multitudes of websites that contain thousands of words on any given topic, finding information has not only become easier and more efficient, but more economically feasible. Gone are the days when we feel compelled to purchase books relating to places, events, or people. Instead, a simple search can yield more details and facts than ever imagined. Research has shown that over eighty percent of Buyers will begin their real estate searches online due to this increasingly easy access to information, prices, and photos. Being online means that your listings, and you, are going to be in front of the majority of the market, reaching new people in new areas. The difficulty lies in the fact that, as previously mentioned, there are multitudes of websites online that house similar information. How are you going to stand out from those other sites and gather the prospects, leads, and sales that you ultimately need to increase revenue? Here’s how: focus on website content, design, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), continual updates, and marketing. It’s going to take a bit of time, it’s going to require some planning and thought, it’s going to make a difference to your business.
Website Content
There are websites out there that are extremely well-designed. They have gorgeous photos, interesting shapes, and a well-chosen color palette. The eye smiles just looking at them. Design is definitely a key part of a website’s success, but even more so is the content that is contained on the site. Online visitors are looking for one thing and one thing only: information. They want to answer a question they have or gain knowledge about a particular topic. This is the reason they went online in the first place. No matter how beautiful a website is, if it does not contain the information for which they were searching, those online visitors will go elsewhere. It’s similar to a physical store. It can have a well-designed exterior, but if you walk in lookin g to purchase milk and are unable to find a single dairy item, you’ll walk out and likely never return. Content is king. The information you have on your site will be the deciding factor of whether or not those online visitors remain on your site. So, how do you know what information they want? Well, sometimes that can be hard to determine, as people are always looking for what is relevant to them. In the case of online Buyers, the number one piece of information they want is listings. Listing locations, photos, descriptions, specific details, virtual tours, and pricing. The more information, the better. Research has shown that many Buyers choose the neighborhood or area of the city in which they would prefer to live before they even choose a home to purchase. Many agents receive quality leads by providing insights into local amenities, schools, parks, transportation, shopping, and proximity to local attractions. It may seem like detail overload, but providing the most details will definitely differentiate your site and help increase leads. Another way to increase leads is to ensure that all of this great content is easy to find. A good guideline is this: if you look at your website and cannot find access to listings within the first ten seconds of being there, you will want to adjust your content. Otherwise, you run the risk of people going to competitor sites to find the information they are seeking. To add to this ease of use, you can also utilize content modules like Online Reports for online visitors to receive additional real estate market or listing information from you after providing their name and email information. They receive in-depth content and you are able to increase your prospect base. With other modules like the Listing Notifiers, your Point2 Agent account can work in the background for you, emailing relevant listing changes to interested parties without you having to spend the time doing so. Remember: content is king. The more information you can provide on your site for online visitors to see right away, especially in the case of listings, the better the chances of them staying on your site and providing their contact information in order to receive further in-depth information from you. Website Design As previously mentioned, website design is important, but is not the sole aspect of a website that needs to be considered. A good design costing thousands of dollars will look great, but won’t necessarily do anything to increase leads, sales, and revenue. The website designs that work the best for an agent are ones that integrate with the overall feel and content on the site. Think about the customer base you have, the listings you advertise, the markets you service, and what personally makes you passionate about real estate. Often, you will find that there is a particular segment of the market or area of the city that is the most interesting to you. This is called a niche market. It is a particular cross-section of the market that can be marketed to, worked with, and communicated to in a unique way. For instance, if you prefer to work with new homebuyers, that would be a niche market. Other examples would be selling homes in one particular city, selling a distinctive architectural type of home, or focusing on relocating families. Your website content will be structured to provide the information necessary to educate and work with these particular niche markets, and you’ll find that your design will too. New homebuyers will need more assistance in terms of what the process is for mortgages, moving, acquiring a home, and the real estate transaction. Keeping things simple and straight-forward will be beneficial for both them and you. A website design that is simple, clean, and avoids overwhelming colors and graphics would work for this niche market. Focusing on military families? Using the military greens would make sense and blend in well with the type of people they are. Designs should be created with the customer in mind. Navigation page to page should be made simple. As well, including key resources and contact information in the same place on every page will help them find you when they have questions, need additional information, or are ready to physically review the homes that interest them. Remember: people go online for information. The easier your website’s design makes it to find that information, the more traffic your website will see, and the more leads you will receive. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) There are millions of websites online. All of them have information. Why, then, do certain ones appear at the top of search results, while others get lost in the abyss? There are a number of reasons, but SEO is high on that list. SEO is the act of optimizing your website so that the search engine crawlers (sometimes called spiders) can find your site and identify it as one worth sharing with online visitors.  SEO can sometimes prove to be difficult, as each search engine’s crawlers behave differently, and often their individual behavior can change. It is similar to having children. One day she is happy and willing to do play nicely with her brother; the next she is throwing blocks at his head. Luckily, the crawlers don’t throw blocks, but their erratic behavior can sometimes cause a website to show up on page two this week and page fifteen the next. They key to dealing with them, much like dealing with children, is patience. SEO results do not happen overnight, and they require some thought and diligence. SEO results are seen through a variety of practices: updating your page titles to closely and very specifically indicate the content of that particular page, updating your meta information and keywords to match the keywords in your page content, ensuring that the content on the page is relevant to your niche market (content is king!), and submitting sitemaps to the key search engines that online visitors use. Sitemaps are as they suggest: maps for those crawlers to see where certain pages are located and imply the content they will find there. Hence the reason specific page titles are so important. The closer you align your SEO to your website content, the more efficient those crawlers will become in finding relevant information that relates to the search terms being entered by the online visitors. Your website works for you in the sense that it creates ways for traffic to find you when you’re not looking. Continual Updates A website is like life: the more you put into it, the more you can expect to get back. Creating fresh content not only satisfies online visitors who happen upon your website, but also impresses those search engine crawlers who see your site. A continually updated site also implies that you have a lot of knowledge and information to share, which incents visitors to keep returning to see what else you have to share. ‘Updates’ include modifying the default page content that you received when you first received your Point2 Agent website, adding further information about listings and neighborhoods, including content modules like Online Reports, and utilizing one of the best ways to share tidbits of information on a regular basis: a blog. Blogs are online journals where you can share anything from open houses to featured listings, upcoming local events to market trends, personal hobbies to updates regarding your business. Since blog posts are meant to be short, easily-digestible nuggets of information, creating them is often a lot faster and easier for you. The advantage is that the search engine crawlers see these updates and make note of the activity on your website, and those online visitors eat up short nuggets of knowledge! You can provide a plethora of information on your site for anyone to see, which can often alleviate the chances of receiving the same questions several times, but most of all, thousands of online visitors can virtually communicate with you through your website without you spending more time than it takes to create the information update. Marketing Your website can do a lot of work for you in terms of sharing information, generating leads, keeping prospects updated, and sharing listing information. It can only do this, though, if you let people know that it exists. Your website is a marketing asset and should be used as such, but needs traffic being driven to it to be as effective as possible.  Including your website address (domain) on business cards, email signatures, listing brochures, listing presentations, give-aways, mugs, pens, signs, bus benches, magnets, keychains, etc. will tell people that they should go online to gain access to your listings, your knowledge, and everything you have to offer them. Put your website address anywhere you put your name. People go online for everything nowadays, so they will expect you to have a website. Giving it to them directly takes away the guess work and avoids them having to search for you, only to be distracted by another website. Given some planning, patience, and dedication, your website will be on the path to becoming a key part of your overall marketing. Creating relevant content for your niche market, determining a design that works with that content, adjusting keywords and page titles for SEO, providing updates, and marketing your website address are all key things that you can do to help make your website stand out from the myriad of sites currently on the Internet, as well as make it standalone in virtually ‘working’ with online visitors until they are ready to contact you directly. Those online relationships are becoming increasingly beneficial and strong, and can become a key part of your business and revenue models. Work with your website now so that it can work for you in the future. ~ Tanya Spilchak, Education Coordinator |