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Better Site Design For Agent & Broker Impact!
Site design is subjective and every agent has their own opinion, likes & dislikes. What’s important to consider is… most home buyers & sellers have a very limited attention span on the web. If you think about your own behavior when looking for information, do you move around quickly until you see something you want?
To help think design through, here are some steps we’d advocate to support better impact and lead conversion with your site’s home page design!
Successful Site Design
1. Define Your Purpose Succinctly: find the discipline to define who you are and what you do up top and in as simple a manner as is possible.
The Mortgage Centre Toronto is not only the logo, but incredibly succinct and easy to understand. Adding the region of emphasis – ‘Servicing The Greater Toronto Area’ – certainly supports.
2. Emphasize ‘Call To Action’: give visitors an obvious and immediate means to get what they want.
The Mortgage Centre Toronto and Corvallis Oregon Agent Annette Sievert want visitors to get what they came for 
including options to search homes; to access to great deals; to ask questions and to communicate now!
3. Offer Clear Menu Navigation: give the visitor a means to drill down into your content without having it clutter the home page design.
We’re suggesting items for emphasis in this post, but your site will likely offer a lot more … so develop a top-level menu of tabs that are simple to understand & navigate. Allow visitors to drill down easily, yet the home page doesn’t have to be an overwhelming experience.
4. Demonstrate You Are Current: it is good practice to demonstrate you are both current & knowledgeable in your profession and you can do it with your site’s blog.
However, there’s no reason your entire home page has to be blog copy; certainly not when you’re trying to achieve all of the above [and below]. Consider designing a summary of what exists on your site’s blog, with a few recent post titles all linking into the greater depth of information you have there.
It’s also worth mentioning, you do want some recognition of new copy on your home page. It supports more visitor page views and also deeper search engine crawling!
5. Offer Reasons To Register & Subscribe: most visitors want to be in control of their experience on your site, so allow it; however, there’s no reason you can’t offer some improved value in exchange for a registration.
A number of real estate agents offer unlimited free home search because, frankly, visitors expect it AND the competition is doing it too. Beyond free search, the opportunity to register for email when similar listings arrive on the market is a pretty standard lead capture solution with most IDX Search accounts. Other options that might enhance an individuals search experience include a personal account profile, saved search criteria and also specific saved listings? How about FREE UPDATES via email where there’s some good local blogging going on? In either case, find conspicuous but not obnoxious ways to promote these added value registration options.
6. Try And Keep It Above The Fold: and we repeat, “most home buyers & sellers have a very limited attention span on the web!”
People have different screen sizes, screen resolutions, browsers, versions of browser, security configurations and ‘who knows what else’ influencing their view, so do your best to keep what’s important above the fold! Don’t worry about all that depth of content you have, if you designed well visitors should be able to navigate their way to it all easily enough.
Related Posts:
WHAT IS YOUR GOAL WITH SITE DEVELOPMENT AND DESIGN?
BUILDING GREAT BUSINESS SITES THAT FOCUS ON CLIENT GOALS!
Contributed bychris@kineticknowledge.com
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San Diego MLS Attempts To Direct Consumer Attention Away From Zillow & Trulia
Interesting Development: San Diego’s four Association of REALTORS® = Sandicor Is Attempting To Direct ‘Consumer Home Buyer Search Traffic’ Away From 3rd Party Aggregated Sites Like Zillow & Trulia Back To Its’ Member Brokers & Agents through an aggregated listings search site of it’s own.
Keep a close eye on this trend nationally because Sandicor appears to feel the traction 3rd party sites Like Zillow & Trulia have with consumers searching for homes is at the expense AND/ OR popularity of local broker / agent websites and brands.
Here’s an informative video on the Sandicor Consumer Listings Search Effort produced by Wav Group’s Victor Lund , a leading business consultant to various national Real Estate Organizations.
Here’s an email sent out yesterday to it’s members on this new site:
San Diego’s four Association of REALTORS® and Sandicor are excited to announce the release of a new consumer website! This website is designed to turn the consumer’s focus back to Brokers and Agents and away from third party sites such as Zillow and Trulia that rank among the top 20 websites in the category of San Diego real estate. In addition to the Sandicor MLS site, there will be four additional websites branded to each of the four Shareholder REALTOR® Associations that own Sandicor. The goal is simply to reverse the trend of consumers going out to and staying on third party sites and to drive consumer traffic back to our member’s websites. Recent analysis (click here to view relevant video from Victor Lund) using HitWise (an Experian company) has shown that website traffic from third party sites to broker and agent sites has significantly declined and that consumers are staying on the third party sites for their San Diego real estate information. We want to change this! The four Realtor Associations and Sandicor consumer websites are intended to “unseat” these third party sites as the de facto resources for property searches and property information in San Diego County.
Developed around a powerful and flexible search engine, the websites provide the following benefits for brokers and agents:
–Deliver leads to brokers and agents
–Drive traffic back to brokers and agents and away from third party sites like Trulia and Zillow
–Facilitate a consumer’s search for San Diego County real estate information and properties.
–Provide consumers with unbiased, timely (updated every 10 minutes) and comprehensive data – all of which are valued and preferred by the consumer
–Allow the consumer to find an agent using a name, affiliated office or location
–Permit county-wide Open House searches
–Provide valuable Community Data
–Provide links to helpful information such as Population Statistics, School Systems, and Government Resources
–Offers a variety of reports for both Brokers and Agents on their listings such as the number of views of their listings in a search, the number of times the listing was displayed and emailed and more.
–Lead to a reduction in the fees paid by Brokers for participation in national third party sites.
There is no additional fee to provide this tremendous benefit. Sandicor can leverage the consumer view that the MLS is the trusted source for real estate information provided by and for the real estate professionals in San Diego County. The consumer knows MLS data is unbiased, timely and comprehensive.
Contributed bychris@kineticknowledge.com
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Leveraging Video For SEO… Better Yet, For Visitor Loyalty!
Video Can Support SEO, Better Yet It Will Support You With People
Rumor has it video drives competitive SEO. And, if approached correctly, it can [ See below tips AND See Video Improves Likelihood of 1st Page in Google by 50X? ] be true, but let’s not ever forget the effects good content – especially video! - can have on people. It’s one thing to have visitors, but it’s entirely another thing to have loyal & trusting visitors. After all, who’s more likely to buy?
Great Use Of Video For People
We think John Poltrock, Top Murphy NC Agent, sets a great example for real estate marketers with his video tutorial efforts here:
Video: Learn how to search the Murphy NC MLS System for homes.
Optimization Tips for Video
1. Add targeted keywords to your video file names… change abc.jpeg to Murphy_NC_MLS_Search_Tutorial.jpeg
2. Add targeted keywords in video titles & tags
3. Add targeted keywords in video captions & descriptions… *blog posts and pages using an embed code from the video host* can go a long way here!
4. Create a video library on your site
5. And because the Google algorithm counts & compares total video viewings,
a. Create a video library in YouTube… this is where video search and consumption is happening folks!
b. Embed those same YouTube Videos into relevant pages… this will increase Google’s understanding of the content [assuming you describe it] and potential viewings!
Related Posts:
- Murphy NC Real Estate Video Tutorials
- YouTube: Is It Important For Business?
- How Do I Search Engine Optimize My Images?
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chris@kineticknowledge.com
What You Get With a Kinetic Sites
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Lead Conversion: How About ‘Free Property Tax Appeal Service’?
Seeing as how there are so many homeowners concerned about their taxes, a ‘Free Property Tax Appeal Service’ should be a great lead conversion tool.
Is there an opportunity to assist clients & prospects with their current property values and a tax appeal process? In a down economy and depending on ‘farm area’, assessed values may be down anywhere from 15- 50%. It’s likely property owners are receiving their 2011 ‘Real Property Notice of Valuations’ now. Depending on a number of different factors, can you support your future clients & prospects with a more favorable county valuation … and cement their loyalty?
If so, design a ‘Free Property Tax Appeal Service’ offer into your home page, link it to a form they easily fill out and you’re prepared!
chris@kineticknowledge.com
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WordPress And Real Estate IDX Plugins
It’s become fashionable for Real Estate IDX Companies to create WordPress- ready plugins. Mostly, this is, to automate property listing driven pages. It makes sense as WordPress is not only acknowledged by Google to have some of the best markup for search engine spidering, but it’s also highly extensible software [i.e. easily modified, including by the addition of useful features.]
While we never recommend one IDX provider over another, and many aren’t available in all markets anyway, we came across this great bit of advice from Diverse Solutions the other day and felt it important to repeat,
“Every dsIDXpress page on your site is index-able content, but it’s content that Google will find on thousands of other real estate websites that use an index-able IDX solution.It’s the original content you add to your site that supports all the dsIDXpress content that will help get your site placement. Simply linking to dozens of dsIDXpress pages can lead to a heavy reliance on dsIDXpress without any supporting original content; which ultimately can lead to huge drops in Google.” - Robert Larson, Official Rep, Diverse Solutions Community Forum, 04/11/11
The quote is fashioned around their own dsIDXPress plugin, and we stand by it! Folks, in the long run and other than good original content there is no silver bullet! IDX driven content activity will help get your site more indexing placement and this has been proven by many of our own clients, but no matter how many index-able pages you can generate always REMEMBER that each page competes individually [think: it's '*page* rank', not 'site rank'] for placement. If everyone else in your marketplace has the same [IDX- driven] indexed content, your competitive rank, visibility and human like- ability is always going to fall back to what ‘on page content’ [and measurable off page reaction = like links, bookmarks, likes, subscribes, etc., etc.] you have.
Ultimately, what differentiates you from a competitor with that same content?
If the dsIDXPress plugin is available in your market, we’re experienced with WordPress integration and would love to answer any questions you may have – please do not hesitate to get in touch! AND AGAIN PLEASE REMEMBER that while these plugins can be a great resource, it’s the original content that wins the long term sustainable war!
PS: 3rd party applications can influence the health of your site! Do your due diligence before adding any 3rd party plugins!
Related Information:
- What Do Agents And Brokers Need From Their Site?
- Kinetic Sites Now Incorporating ds IDXPress for MLS Listings!
- IDX Broker Now Offering a WordPress Real Estate Plugin!
chris@kineticknowledge.com
What You Get With a Kinetic Sites
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