Optimizing a Real Estate Website

Whenever I look at properties I search for the local listing service MLS. I woul optimize for this. People without an agent and are looking quickly get referrals for agents form everyone they know. I assume your site has a local listing feed. I would work on getting that feed to rank and then people without an agent hit your site first and this is where you put them into your marketing funnel

Hope this helps

Besides listing all the towns and cities close by....

Also list the local schools.

The local banks.

The local recruiters.

The local Welcome Wagons.

etc.etc.etc.

Create a mini-business directory on your site that addresses the above...and then write 3-5 articles per category to help draw in more local traffic.

Always view local marketing as addressing the 'whole' of the customer, and not solely your own niche. It can work beautifully.

Hope that helps!

Maybe I am being too obvious, but for my clients real estate websites when I think what KWs to rank for I use google keyword tool. I type in the most obvious word like 'New York property for sale' I set it as exact match searches and google will give me hundreds of related searches and how often they are seerched per month.

I agree with Cathy, you simply want to optimze for KW with city, so for example you can do houses for sale in atlanta, and this gets over 1,000 exact searches a month and over 40,000 local searches. You can also go after smaller cities, like metro cities, you do not have to go after the biggest, People are searching online everywhere to find houses. Keep it simple, and rank for kw and city

Nothing scientific here, just my gut. But if you are looking to optimize for sellers as opposed to buyers, you would want to show up for what they are interested in first and foremost and that's home values. I would think that if you optimized for folks searching keywords related to recently solds or home values in your area, you'd probably find some potential sellers.

Thanks Paulosully, that was exactly what I was looking for. I am trying to get into the mindset of someone who is thinking about selling their home and what types of think they are interested in.

What would I search for to find an agent?

"town name realtor" I can't image any other way besides asking for recommendations which is really how i would find my realtor.

hey guys, thanks for all the free advice here on the warrior forum, I know next to nothing about internet marketing but am finding it very interesting. I just finished developing my real estate website and am now beginning to research on how to drive traffic to it, targeted specifically for my local area.
What is the best way to incorporate keywords and optimize each page for the keyword I want. On my landing page it is just mostly listings and an MLS feed. Should I create a blog category and optimize that way? I am jsut still unsure on hwo to go about it. Thanks again for all the help.

If I were looking for someone to list my home, I'd type in something like "best realtor in CITY, best real estate agent in CITY, best real estate company in CITY" or "top real estate agent", etc.

I agree with Kevin optimize on capturing people looking for a home and then nurturing them. This will lead naturally to people that also want to sell. A lot of people are going to go with the person they bought the house off or a friends recommendation.

The 3 cores of using internet leads in real estate.

1. Religious follow up system, they don't convert straight away and 98% will never convert.

2. A website converting 10% of visitors to leads. IDX feed with effective lead capture.

3. More traffic, SEO, PPC, Blogs, Emails.

Note without 1. the other two are almost worthless. Without 1. and 2. you are fighting an uphill battle with any kind of marketing efforts, especially paid.

You might also want to look into expired FSBO leads, to get more seller listings.

With a real estate website you can really lose a lot power by having poor site architecture. You want a flat site architecture so the link jiuce flows throughout the site site better.

When houses are sold or taken off the market it is important to make sure that you 301 the page back to the category. Some people think that it is better to push back to the homepage but if the listing had any links it would be better having relevant link juice flowing back to the category where it is relevant. But each to their own.

Having semantic URL's is a must of course obviously. remember the benefit amazon got?

Also dup content can play a role also. Plus each listing should have a unique listing as it will help sell the specific piece of real state better anyways.

then there's the normal SEO You know how to do this otherwise you wouldnt be taking this on.

One more tip. Small fish are sweet. long tale keywords do well with real state with my experience. And they are easy to target from the start. When you get moving go after the stronger competition, more traffic keywords. Because at the end of the real estate is a numbers game.

Good luck with your endeavour.

There's some good advice here that I wouldn't have thought of myself. If I was personally looking for a listing agent, I would most likely search the basics like: city + realtor, city + real estate, etc. Nothing mind-blowing. Some of the info listed above are great suggestion to capture the indirect traffic...which I'm sure you are interested in.