Your website is an online storefront that needs traffic to drive leads and sales. Websites are marketing tools, just about every source on the World Wide Web agrees that the purpose of a website is to generate business through getting more “eyeballs” to see your product. The web is the least expensive marketing channel available to real estate agents. If your realty site isn’t searchable by Google, Yahoo!, MSN… or driving quality traffic and leads, you’re site isn’t working as a marketing or lead generation tool for you. Fact is, you can’t build a personal relationship on the web with people that don’t visit your site or blog. So the first step in online marketing and internet visibility is generating and measuring traffic to your site. Let’s dive right in see what you can reasonably expect from your real estate site, what other realtors are achieving with their sites and how to measure the success of your site.
What should a real estate agent reasonably expect from their website:
- A minimum of 10,000 hits per day or 150 unique visitors per day
(hits and visitors are very different animals- hits refer to the number of files pulled from the server per day while unique visitors refers to the number of actual people that visit the site daily) NOTE: For smaller farm areas, you might need to reduce those numbers, but not substantially.
- A minimum of 2 new leads per week (According to Jim Cronin over at the Tomato, 4% of all traffic should convert to leads- so a reasonable expected pull-through of 150 unique visitors should be 6 leads)
(this is highly dependent upon the content of the website and the inclusion of a solid lead generation tool, but this is n attainable goal- our agent sites average much higher than 2 leads per week but I feel 2 is an attainable goal for everyone)
- Searchability in Google, MSN and Yahoo! meaning first or second page placement in search results for their primary keywords
- Page Rank of 3 within the first six months of your websites' life and a page rank of 5-6 by the end of its first year of life.
How to measure your traffic
Your website’s back-end traffic metrics
Most all websites and blogs have traffic statistics modules running on their backend that will tell you what your daily hits and visitors amounted to. Some will even show which posts or pages received the most visitors so you can understand which topics are of most interest to your visitors. Many also will log what keywords a visitor used to search for you on popular search engines that drove them to your site. These are all very important metrics by which you can measure your success and use to modify your strategy to drive more traffic.
FYI: Monday is generally considered the most surfed day in the Internet world with Wednesday being the softest. So it is natural for your traffic statistics to rise and fall throughout the week. If your website’s analytics tool doesn’t show weekly, monthly or quarterly results, you should track your traffic in an excel spreadsheet so you can quickly modify your strategy if your traffic isn’t increasing.
Alexa’s traffic report
While your server and your back-end tool will give you the best and most accurate traffic statistics, Alexa is a good tool to check in with. It gives you an idea of how the rest of the web thinks you are doing. For example, while RSS Pieces just launched in August, we have already catapulted our traffic into the top 100K websites on the web according to Alexa. Think that is impossible for a regular local real estate website? Look at Jay and Francy’s, Phoenix Real Estate Guy, one of my favorite Realtor blogs. Jay and Francy are tech savvy Realtors that have harnessed the power of the Internet to drive traffic, leads and, I would imagine, market listings in the Phoenix real estate market. This Realtor’s blog is clearly within the top 100K websites on the entire web! Jay and Francy prove that driving high volume traffic is not only possible but achievable for a local real estate website or blog.
Page Rank
Page Rank is not the end all be all of your web existence but it is an indicator of how Google feels about you. Since Google only updates their page rankings every 6 or so months, sites don’t climb the PR ladder very fast. However, this is what you should expect a solid PR 3 within your first six months and between a 5 or a 6 by the end of the first year. You can check your website’s page rank in Google’s own search results, in the Google Toolbar or by going to 123SEOtools. For example, according to Google itself claims RSS Pieces’ homepage, while only 3 months old, has a Page Rank of 3.
How to measure your searchability
There are a million ways to find out where you stand in various engines on your primary keywords, but I am just going to mention to easiest and the most useful.
A properly developed website or blog should drive traffic through organic searches on popular search engines like Google. Not sure if yours is? Try this. When you search for your website on Googl, Yahoo! or MSN with the keywords or phrases you would expect your customers to enter, does your site show up on the first or second page of the results list? (If your website is less than 6 months old- this doesn’t really apply to you- you’re probably still in a Google sandbox)
IBP: With all the tools out there and all the high-dollar ones I have at my disposal, I recommend IBP as an affordable option for analyzing your real estate website/blog’s SEO, backlinks and searchability. I seriously, do not get paid to say this! I like this product so much I have been known to buy copies of it for clients and give them as a Christmas gifts. It will help you to understand what the primary competition is for the keywords you are selecting, what they do to get there and what you have to do to get your site into those results. The free trial version will give you all the searchability results you need, but I recommend the $250 product for all the other funky SEO stuff.
How to get volume traffic and generate leads on your site
- Make sure your website is SEOed. And, no, you don’t have to call me to do it! Get that IBP program and have your existing designer implement all the recommendations it makes
- Develop a backlink strategy
- Update your site or blog with very well written, useful and somewhat sensational information daily. You might want to re-read some of my blog writing articles:
- Make sure your website and blog have validated HTML so a search engine can read it and index it well.
- Make sure you include a lead generation tool on your site on every page not just a “contact us” page. Some ideas are a CMA tool, newsletter signup, rss to email subscription tool, open house register, etc.
- Always look at what the successful real estate agents are doing, you just might learn something… I do!
- Keep a close eye on your traffic statistics! Following the ups and downs of your traffic will tell you if you are doing something right or heading in the wrong direction.
- Be sure to use syndication tools like RSS on your site so you can notify subscribers when you update your site. Also submit stories from time to time to RealEstateVoices and Carnival of RealEstate.
- Use ping services like pingoat and googleping to notify social networks and search engines that you have updated your sites and suggest they come back and re-index you.
Top 5 attributes of highly successful real estate websites and blogs:
- frequently updated with fresh relevant content that is valuable to potential customers
- HTML is optimized for search engines with properly formed tags and relevant meta data (keywords, descriptions and heading tags) Ken Smith and Toby Barnett have extensive posts on this topic. I recommend reading through them.
- HTML is fully validated so search engines can read it and browsers can display it consistently
- drives substantial traffic through syndicating its content across the web
- consistently builds incoming links from other trusted, relevant and highly ranked websites.
FYI: for all of you that wanted to know how to use SimplePie to pull RSS feeds on your own site- go to the RSS Pieces website. We posted the first part in a how-to series with code examples and explanations. I had this sneaking suspicion that AR might not like posting code into their edit window... I know I wouldn't like someone doing that in mine!
Mary McKnight
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Mary - You are so great! Thanks alot for the mention again. I love reading your articles and I always learn from YOU! You really have me ... thinking, searching and reading..