April 09 2014
How effective is your broker or MLS website? Are you losing traffic to third party sites like Zillow and Trulia?
During our webinar on Monday, we demonstrated how to build traffic to your site, improve your visitors' experience, and convert those visitors into leads.
Read on for highlights from each of our three speakers, and to view the recorded presentation.
Since 2011, traffic to broker websites has gone flat, while activity on third party sites has flourished. To understand why this is, we need to turn our attention to broker websites, which have traditionally been developed around the business needs of the broker.
However, it's consumers that drive success--not brokers, MLSs, or even agents. If you don't understand what the consumer looks for in a real estate website, you have no foundation on which to build a successful online presence.
So what do consumers want? According to WAV Group, they want:
You can create an effective website through clean, organized design and by understanding the intent of your visitors.
Competing effectively requires a constant evaluation of usability, according to David Camp of Real Estate Digital. This is not just a singular event, it's an ongoing process.
Usability starts with understanding the mindset of today's online consumer, including:
Once you know what your visitors want, you need to understand how they use your website. Use analytics tools to follow their search experience, see how they navigate through your site, and evaluate their search keywords. Be sure to also measure key performance indicators, like time on site and bounce rates, as these demonstrate your visitor's level of engagement.
To increase engagement levels, it's critical to evaluate your website. Of particular importance is the "make or break page." This is your listing detail page and lots of time and traffic are spent here. Evaluate your URL structures, as well as your calls to action (are they measurable? positioned correctly?).
To learn more, contact [email protected] for their Website Platform Usability and Conversion Guide.
Gone are the days of keyword stuffing and buying links. Now, search is all about meeting the user's intent. Search engines like Google try to determine intent by weighing where the user is searching from, the content of their query, and their previous search history.
So it follows that effective search engine optimization is all about connecting your site's content with the user's intent. The Search Agency's holistic SEO approach--dubbed h(SEO)--encourages site owners to do this by "thinking beyond the link" to content strategy, analytics, and social media.
Key components of this approach include:
For more information, download The Search Agency's whitepaper, h(SEO)-A Holistic Approach to Search Engine Optimization.
You can view the complete webinar below: