A website can be a powerful marketing tool for realtors. Not only are they a great resource for potential clients to learn more about you and your team, but they can also be a great source of generating leads from people searching for property listings in your area.
However, realtors have a unique challenge when it comes to their website – there are several property listing websites such as Zillow, Realtor.com, Trulia, and others that have become the go-to resource for homebuyers and will always rank high in search engines for property related searches. Therefore, it is not enough to simply add local listings to your real estate website and expect them to appear in search results.
So how then can a realtor, without the marketing budget of Zillow, possibly compete with these giants?
The following are a list of strategies that can be used for any realtor’s website to help it appear in searches so that it can go to work for you to generate leads.
Local SEO
According to recent studies, 44% of home buyers search Google as the first step to their home-buying process. A search may look something like: “condos for sales in Columbus, Ohio”. If you have crafted your local SEO strategy correctly, your website can be one of the first results shown for this search.
Local Focused Content Marketing
You may be familiar with the concept of content marketing and how it can be a powerful and cost effective source of leads from your website. For those unfamiliar with the concept, content marketing is the creation of valuable content in the form of blogs, videos, podcasts, or PDF downloads, that provides information related to searches conducted by your potential clients. Zillow also does this, but since you represent a smaller range of communities, you can focus your content on your local audience. For example, a blog post titled: “10 reasons why Brecksville, Ohio is a great place for families”. Once your content is created, use all your channels to promote it including social media and email.
Community Pages
Another type of content you can include can be local community information and data pages. People searching for homes in a specific area are likely to be interested in various statistics related to the area. These pages have the added benefit of not only providing valuable data for buyers or sellers, but also improving local search results and positioning the realtor as community expert.
Paid Advertising and Landing Pages
For a relatively low investment, you can instantly appear at the top of Google searches or boost your promotions on various social media channels such as Facebook. Pair this with a well-crafted landing page and you are bound to generate leads. A few ideas for paid ad/landing page combinations are:
- A seller agent marketing a listing before it hits the market
- A buyer agent offering a beginner’s guide for first-time homebuyers
To ensure the maximum return on your investment, make sure to closely track conversions in order to see if your advertising budget is being spent well or not. If people are clicking on your ads and not calling, there may be some tweaks that can be made to either your ad or your landing pages that will increase your rate of conversions. If you’re not sure what changes will make the greatest impact, try A/B testing so that you can compare a variety of landing page designs, or marketing copy at the same time to see which one is most effective.
Learn more about how Pribble Design can help support your real estate website design and marketing or contact us for a consultation.