Real Estate Marketing Blog

Real Estate SEO

When Mike Kehoe of Birdview Technologies reported to the Inman Conference that one of his clients received over an 11% conversion rate, I smiled with pride. For the site mentioned was designed and optimized for traffic and conversion by Spider Juice Technologies. Years of testing and bucking the "common" knowledge had paid off.

You see, we have discovered that the most optimal way for an online Real Estate agent to succeed is thru rapid lead generation and follow up. And in order to escalate your leads, you must start off with an acceptance of your current traffic and lead conversion ratio.

Ask yourself "How many visitors does it take to get to a lead?"

In fact, when we initially interview a potential client often times the conversion is close to 200:1. Depending on design features, you should really get at the most 50:1. And probably 30:1 is more like it.

Conversion comes from on page conversion optimization & Keyword representation.

On Page Factors

Most people have heard of Search Engine Optimization. Few talk about on page conversion optimization.

First of all, this whole concept pre-supposes that you are starting off with a most wanted action (MWA). Sometimes your MWA is Branding, sometimes it is Leads. And many times it is both lead capture and branding that you are asking your website to do.

If Leads are your goal then your call to action is critical. Other features on your page can distract the viewer from your objectives.

On Page factors that may increase or decrease conversion are:

• Asking them to sign up (making your call to action clear)
• A Johnson Box (these are those tabled boxes that break up your body copy)
• Color can attract or distract
• Too many buttons
• Animation
• Offer Placement. Where are you placing your call to action?
• Variety of Call to Action
• Frequency of your call to action

These are just a few of the attributes that may help your lead count to go way up.

HappyVille Real Estate

There is a reason that studies have found that Pay per Click search engine results often render poor conversion rates. Specificity.

The reason is that you can only use high volume keywords with pay per click (PPC). These high volume keywords are by their nature generalized. They are also the most profitable for the engine. But what may profit the engine does not always profit you.  (Thats not to say that PPC doesn't have its place in a search marketing campaign)

9 times out 10, I am asked to "make my site #1 for "My City real estate". While this is a worthy objective, it is at best very short sighted. Words like "City real estate", "city homes", city condos", are all high volume in just about any city you research.

However, a successful marketing campaign must employ search engine click thrus that are made up of general & specific "streams of traffic". This is because traffic is a comprehensive endeavor. You wouldn't just rent out 1 or 2 of your penthouse units and leave the rest your 150 unit apartment complex empty? You couldn't expect profitability would you?

However, this is exactly what most agents do when they go after a few high volume words.

Traffic is made up of the combined visits that come from various inquiries into a search engine.
Each inquiry represents a finite amount of possible traffic determined by the placement in the engine, for a particular keyword phrase.

So long story short, a few keywords aren't going to make your business. You need a Universe of words in order to get monster traffic and lead conversion.

Additionally, not all keywords or traffic are created equal. Step out of real estate monetarily and imagine yourself as Jeff Bezos at Amazon.com. What would delite you more?

500 visitors that typed in "Books"? Or 500 visitors that typed in "Harry Potter"? Or better yet, "Harry Potter, Sorcerors Stone"? The more specific you get, conversion goes up and the closer you can get to that elusive 1:1 conversion.

The challenge however, is that the more specific you get with our keywords, the less traffic you get. So you need to represent a large amount of these specific keywords that produce low traffic by themselves. But combined, create a large stream of very convertable traffic.

By optimizing your on page factors and your keywords that drive people to your site, you will take your visitor to conversion ratio down to a respectable number.

--------------------------

Tim O'Keefe is President of Spider Juice Technologies. His firm specializes in Search Engine Traffic and Lead Optimization strategies. An ex-Realtor himself, TIm has always started a project with the fastest path to profitability as his objective for his clients. You can consult with Tim personally, at 310-533-9145.

Internet Real Estate Sales

The California Association of Realtors released its "2005 Use of Technology Survey" Tuesday during the "Tech Tuesday" opening session of their Centennial Realtor Expo in San Diego. The survey found that 33 percent of realtors' business is coming from the Internet.

While just 33 percent of their business comes from the Internet, 67 percent of realtors reported that the Internet extremely or very important in the marketing and promotion of their business and 61 percent of realtors post listings to their own Web site. Other results of the "2005 Use of Technology Survey" found that 90 percent of realtors have a high-speed Internet connection at home, an increase from 82 percent a year ago and 71 percent in 2003; and 46 percent of realtors use e-mail as their primary form of communication with their client.

The Real Estate Blog on Google

Google and Yahoo, and MSN are all indexing blogs with a new sophistication and intensity than ever before.

Yahoo and MSN have both made their RSS Readers available thru their personalized services of my.yahoo.com and my.msn.com. Indicating that they are paying attention to rss/blog feeds.

Just like it has been known by many SEO Companies in the know, that the registration forms at the various engines are all but worthless. That in fact the engines follow other links to your site index your site.

Now, it appears they are at least on a small level using these personalized RSS Readers to find good content. It is theorized that these readers are behaving like little voting machines for the various websites. Much like the theory behind Google's Page Rank.

Well now Google is offering their own personalized RSS service. Well, not really. It is a bookmark service on their personalized Google.

However, Google has a new service in beta , that is available both at google.com/blogsearch and search.blogger.com. Google blog search scans content posted to blogs and feeds in virtually real-time, according to Jason Goldman, Google product manager for blog search.

It is time to Blog folks.

If you would like to know how to get your blogs into these services go to this link for a free tutorial.

Social Influence

As a side distraction I like to Coach Youth Football. It started out as a way to see more of my son. It then became a passion.

It was just last night that I was preaching the power of leadership to one of the kids.

I told him that there are many new players on our team, that are desperately looking to others to show them what to do. To show them how far is too far. They need leadership. And our team needs leaders to emerge.

I told him that people, by nature, are generally like sheep. Do you remember when you were a kid and someone would look into the sky at nothing, and everyone eventually start looking up in the sky at nothing? I told him when people are unsure of what to do, they look to others for guidance.

This principle and others were brilliantly taught by Robert Cialdini a Social Psychologist in his amazing book, INFLUENCE.

My good friend once explained it to me as we were on the freeway in heavy traffic. He pointed to the off ramp. He said "Watch the People will often follow other cars down a two lane off ramp, leaving one lane completely empty." The Sheeple affect.

I was delighted to see another blogger has written about Sheeple. It prompted me to write this short piece.

What does that have to do with anything? Well I assume if you are reading this blog that you are interested in influencing your prospects.

It is really easy when you have a blog to become an authority about your subject matter. This will help you lead your own Sheeple to the promised land!

Birdview and Inman

Mike Kehoe of Birdview Technologies sent over his notes from his talk at the Inman Conference.

I went ahead and and put down the highlights. You can get his slides at the bottom of this post.

• Birdview Technologies serves consumers MLS data from 130 MLSes with 1 Million listings.
• Birdview also serves their clients thru webdesign services.
• On any given month Birdview clients get over 100,000 leads.
• Over 1,000 real estate offices uses their software.

Mike demonstrated the Birdview "4 Steps" system.

1. Generate Traffic- He found that a site can be successful if you are willing to pay .30 a visitor.
2. Capture Consumer Information- You must capture traffic and in his survey he found that these sites got a 5% capture rate.
   
   >>My next article will be talking about how Lead Conversion comes down to optimized traffic and optimized on page factors. >>
3. Identify Hot Leads- Hot leads must be filtered from the cold leads and his survey found that 1% will convert to a contract in 30-60 days.
4. Warm up Cold Leads- He found that 2-3% of Cold Leads will close in 180 days.

This is shorter than the National Real Estate Online Averages I talked about in recent posts.

I believe the shorter time frames to be because of Birdview's exclusive Real Estate CRM (Customer Relationship Management) features that automatically contacts your prospects for you.

Budget

Mike indicated that to be successful online you must be willing to spend a minimum of $500 a month for your online marketing. He says that you must keep it simple and work all four steps. All the while maintaining patience, as this online marketing can be frustrating.

One of the parts that really resonated with me was to measure your closes. As Mike Ferry taught me long ago, measure and know your numbers.

Traffic

Traffic, a couple points I think worth mentioning are:

• Traffic is not cheap. If it seems to good to be true it probably is.
• All Traffic is not Equal.
• And “Organic Traffic” delivers the best long term ROI.
  (Gratuitous AD:This is what my company does very well. Call us or write! 310-533-9145 Info@spiderworkz.com)
• In order to get your best  lead conversion he says to keep the properties within 3 clicks (or less). Keep the sign up button easy to find.

Real Estate Website Survey Results:

He reveals some of his spot survey real estate sites and two were my clients!

www.leaphome.com 4,368 Unique Visitors and it gets a 4.59% registration rate. Nice what my on page conversion optimization can do!

redondobeachmls.com (this site is no longer one of our clients) 2,218 Unique Visitors and it gets 11.59% capture rate (of visitors that go to property search)!! YOWZA!
oops. A client of mine, alerted me that this is no longer the site that we built, nor does he use Birdview anymore. I doubt it will get better than this conversion rate.

He finishes by reminding us of the importance of knowing your numbers.

  If you would like the full PDF. Please request it www.spiderjuicetechnologies.com/mk

TIm O'Keefe is President of Spider Juice Technologies and offers , as well as other traffic programs. Spider Juice Technologies also emphasizes on page lead conversion programs to assure lead capture.
Tim@SpiderJuiceTechnologies.com
310-533-9145
Search Engine Marketing