I Have an IDX Solution – Why Haven’t I Gotten Any Leads?

By this time I hope all REALTORS® have heard how important it is to integrate or embed an IDX solution into their website. IDX, or internet data exchange, products allow your client’s and prospect’s to search the entire MLS (or multiple MLSs) for listings from your personal website — BUT what add-ons or tools can you benefit from? Does your IDX solution generate and capture internet leads?

Predefined Searches

One great add-on is to create predefined search parameters with unique content (language that targets that audience) and use that throughout your website to create dynamic content that is seen by search engines AND human eyes.

An example would be: Bergen County, New Jersey is known for its secluded, luxury homes tucked on acres of Northern New Jersey wooded landscape. Towns such as Alpine and Upper Saddle River are home to beautifully designed custom houses with indoor pools,  tennis courts and the privacy needed for the most discreet home buyer. These luxury homes are more fairly priced now more than ever – view luxury homes in Bergen County. (let’s pretend I linked that to a listing search for all Bergen County communities for homes only $1.5 mill+…notice I did not say ‘click here’ but I hyper-linked an actual description of the page I am taking you to. That means big SEO points!)

Inbound Links

Another great way to bring home buyers to your website is to make sure you have inbound links to your listing page. This means your website link is on other websites – so for example if I am reading your blog post I can click on ‘Rentals in Orange County’ and up pops your IDX results page for rentals in Orange County. This is just the next step once you’ve mastered the predefined searches above. Again these links should appear on your:

• blog
• other websites
• social networking pages
• mortgage broker’s website
• newsletters
• email marketing
• press releases

User Portfolios

IDX user portfolios are used to capture leads as well as offer buyers listing information at no cost of time or energy to you! This tool allows a user to input and save search information and listings which can be compared to an MLS database — new listings will then be emailed to that user that match their home criteria automatically. This also makes your website ‘sticky’ meaning those users will continually come back to your website to search for homes.

Listing Teasers

This goes hand in hand with the IDX portfolio mentioned above. A teaser allows a home buying prospect to search 1, 2…5 (whatever limit you desire) properties before they are prompted to sign up for a portfolio account. There contact information and homes they’ve viewed can be seen.

What other IDX tools do you use to generate and capture leads? RE/Advantage has a great, multi-MLS supported IDX solution for agents and brokers that includes everything described above!

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Bing’s Take on Quality Content

Recently Bing’s Duane Forrester’s blog gave us some interesting information on how Bing views quality content.

Here are some of the things Bing suggest you consider when writing quality content:

• Duplicate content – don’t use articles or content that appears in other places. Produce your own unique content.
• Thin content – don’t produce pages with little relevant content on them – reach deep when producing content. Think “authority” when building your pages.
• All text/All images – work to find a balance here, including images to help explain the content or using text to fill in details about images on the page. Remember that text held inside an image isn’t readable by the crawlers.
• Being lonely – enable ways for visitors to share your content through social media.
• Translation tools – rarely does a machine translation tool leave you with content that reads properly and that actually captures the original sentiment. Avoid simply using a tool to translate content from one language to the next and posting that content online.
• Skipping proofreading – when you are finished producing content take the time to check for spelling errors, grammatical mistakes and check the overall flow when reading. Does it sound like you’re repeating words too frequently? Remove them. Don’t be afraid to rewrite the content either.
• Long videos – if you produce video content, keep it easily consumable. Even a short 3 – 4 minute video can be packed with useful content; so running a video out to 20 minutes is poor form in most instances. It increases download times and leads to visitor dissatisfaction at having to wait for the video to load.
• Excessively long pages – if your content runs long move it to a second page. Readers need a break, so be careful to balance the length of your pages. Make sure your pagination solution doesn’t cause other issues for your search optimization efforts.
• Content for content’s sake – if you are producing content be sure its valuable. Do not just add text to every page to create a deeper page. Be sure the text, images or videos are all relevant to the content of the page.

Besides Bing’s suggestions, here are a few of mine:

• Scannable Content – People do not like to work at reading your web pages, in fact most people like to scan the pages, at least at first. The term “scannable content” describes the a way of making your page easier to read by your visitors through the use of white space, bolding, lists, and paragraph headings.
• Think SEO
• Keywords – Take a little time to do some keyword research. Keywords are the fundamental backbone of your SEO strategy. Choosing the correct keywords become vital to your overall SEO success. Long tail keywords drive hyper-local content; and hyper local information is a REALTORS® best friend.  Leveraging this can be a key to your successful SEO campaign. Knowing your market is also important to your success – which is perhaps the most overlooked and under used concept is keyword research.  Keyword research is vital to your success but I see very few of my Real Estate clients using it.  Read more here an my previous post “Keyword Strategy“.
• Think Long Term – SEO does not happen over night. You need to have patience.  You also should have a game plan. If you are blogging be consistent and post on a schedule. Remember not only are you building SEO pages but you are also trying to build a reputation as being an authority in your market area.
• Link Building – Building quality links is another important aspect of any SEO design. You should try to add inbound, outbound and internal links when appropriate. Read some more on Link Building at my post titled “Thoughts on Link Building for the Real Estate Agent“.

When you are writing good content always start off with a plan and make sure you research your material. If you have any other tips you find useful I would love to hear from you.

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Google Tweeks its Search

Google recently made a change to its search algorithm that takes into account results that would benefit from the most up-to-date information available. This change should effect about 35% of searches as it tries to determine when you need more up-to-date relevant results.

“If I search for ‘Olympics,’ I probably want information about next summer’s upcoming Olympics, not the 1900 Summer Olympics (the only time my favorite sport, cricket, was played),” wrote Google Fellow Amit Singhal in a blog post on November 3rd.

“Google Search uses a freshness algorithm, designed to give you the most up-to-date results, so even when I just type ‘Olympics’ without specifying 2012, I still find what I’m looking for,” he added.

He did note that not all searches need to provide up-to-date results.  Searching for a favorite Bolognese sauce recipe does not mean that an older result is not less relevant.

Cases where Google does see up-to-date results as relative are;

Recent events or hot topics: Events that trend on the web immediately like the NFL strike, you will probably want to see the most recent news.

Regularly recurring events: Events that take place on a regular basis like NAR could benefit from up-to-date results.  When searching for the “NAR Conference”, it is implied you are probably looking for the most recent event.

Frequent updates: Things that change frequently will also benefit from the most up-to-date results.  For example if you are looking for the best digital cameras you are probably looking for the most up-to-date information.

Different searches have different freshness needs. This algorithmic improvement is designed to better understand how to differentiate between these kinds of searches and the level of freshness you need, and make sure you get the most up to the minute answers.

So how does this affect the Real Estate Agent?  It is possible that community information on your website could benefit from new and fresh information.  Certainly community events and news probably will be effected.  So make sure you keep pages that might be affected by this change, update on a regular basis!

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Agents Have You Tried Marketing with Facebook Ads? Why Not!

Real estate agents and brokers work hard to communicate with as many potential target buyers and sellers as possible.  Many REALTORS® have beefed up their Web sites through SEO (search engine optimization), social networking, press releases, article marketing and perhaps even a pay-per-click campaigns like Google AdWords.  Even with all the promising ways to enhance your online presence there is another source you might want to consider.  Facebook Ads are a cost effective way to reach a large target base.

One of the main advantages of using Facebook ads is that  Facebook has the ability to target potential home buyers and sellers by their interests, age, education, connections and even their location.  This is very important because it not only lets you target by geo location but also certain demographics such as interests and age.  If you only target empty nestors why have ads targeting people in their twenties. That being said Facebook allows you to effectively target market your real estate services to a select group of people all at a reasonable cost.

According to comScore, Facebook ads accounted for more than one third of all impression ads. With over 800 million users Facebook presents a huge reason for you to consider them as another source for your marketing.

If you are thinking about setting up a Facebook Business Page or Ad we can help. As with any advertising, you must understand the goals and objectives for your campaign and know how to measure the results using Facebook Insights. Insights can show you who is clicking on which ads, who is liking your Business Page and also stats like churn and post interaction.

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Mobile Website for Real Estate Professionals

Today most of your home buyers are using Smart Phones in their daily life and relying on them heavily for instant information. Given this fact having a mobile website can greatly benefit today’s real estate professional.

With this rapidly growing user base it is important that you have a proper mobile presence. One thing you want to avoid is having your buyers go to your regular website. Most regular websites are not mobile friendly in terms of their user interface and how fast pages load.  Plus a Real Estate Mobile Website will take advantage of your cell phone’s GPS to provide current listing information of homes around you. Real Estate Mobile websites also have a sleek design to fit your phone, are designed to load fast on any device (since bandwidth is always an issue) and are highly customizable with other features and content.

What is Agent Central Mobile?

Agent Central Mobile is a complete set of mobile real estate solutions designed exclusively for Real Estate Agents and Offices. Agent Central Mobile is currently available in 3 different versions:

1. IDX Search
2. Agent Plus
3. Office Plus

Agent Central Mobile provides a full IDX property search of all listings, GPS location search, custom pages, SEO friendly content, lead capture forms and one-touch phone calls on participating mobile browsers.

All leads from Agent Central Mobile are captured through our Agent Central Max Lead Management System, making it easy to follow up with customers, view the listings they have viewed, and more.

Why Not an App?

Today most agents spend a considerable amount of time on SEO (search engine optimization) and other online marketing. With Agent Central Mobile you can continue to take advantage of this trend.

Also, an app usually only performs searching – while a mobile website can be customized, changed and edited with little effort.

While apps seem cool and trendy, consumers will still find you through search engines like Google and be directed to your mobile website. Mobile sites require no downloading to use – your clients and prospects simple click on your shortcut button on their mobile phones home screen. With Internet marketing (including mobile marketing and search engine optimization) expected to surpass $55 billion by 2014, mobile websites will play a vastly growing role in your business.

To find out how you can take advantage of the mobile market – contact us today.

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