I was at “The Real Estate Marketing Summit” this past week and there was a lot of talk about what makes an effective marketing strategy for Real Estate in 2012. Web marketing was the main topic and included what your website should look and feel like,social media and mobile.
Real Estate Website 2012
Do not put your head shot in the header as it really hurts conversion.
Quote ” You face on the page is just old bullshit you have been using way to long”. This has been used for Realtor’s for many years and it has been recommended for year that you put your face on your business card. The cold hard truth is that the client/customer does not care.
My thoughts: I think there are still cases where your face can help when you are trying to build a brand around you or you are trying to build trust, I leave it up to the reader to decide what is best for you.
Content
The content on your site needs to be educational and engaging. Google reward you for having great content on your site, in the past your where told to write 250 or 500 work articles with a keyword density of 3-5% etc etc. Now after the Google Panda Update you have to write for humans not the search engine. The Panda introduced some called “Machine Learning” into the Google Algorithm, it tries to determine the quality of your article and it test it ideas by comparing it results with human test cases. So now you need to write much better articles with lower keyword density, test from many in the industry indicate that 1000 word plus with a keyword density of 0.5% or less seem to rank better than anything else. Link to your articles are important(very important) but the quality of your content is more important than it once was to get a high ranking. Good writing is important for engagement and conversion, you may need to study copy writing or maybe its time to hire a professional writer.
3 Types of Content
There are 3 main types of content.
- Classical Original content
- Curated Content – This is where you gather articles/video etc from around the web and filter out the wheat from the chaff and maybe provide some commentary on these articles or videos.
- Content as Conversation – This is content put out through the social media channel such as Facebook or Twitter
Don’t label your Blog “Blog”
Call you blog something else “Useful Real Estate Articles” or something, this can help increase readership of your blog, this info can from Jay Thomson – The Phoenix Real Estate Guy who does huge amounts of conversion testing.
Increase the size of your font.
Make it easier for your readers to read your site, try going to font size 16 instead of 12. Make it easier to read on mobile devices.
Make your Website Design Clean and Simple
Get rid of the clutter on your website, less ( a lot less) is more. A good design philosophy is to design your site for mobile first and work backward to your full site. Mobile website is starting to pick up, I am seeing 8 -15 % mobile traffic across multiple sitesa nd has steadily increased in 2011.
Social Media Icons
Don’t have the social media icons right at the top of your site, you want social media to bring traffic to your website not away from your website.Use a social share button rather than take the visitor to your Facebook,twitter or you tube channel and put it at the bottom of the page.
Video
Video is becoming more and more important for real estate marketing but people have ADD. The good life team team did a lot of testing in 2011 with video length they discovered that less than 60 seconds works best for them. Conventional wisdom say your video should be 1 1/2 to 2 minutes long but the good life team was having much better luck with 59 seconds or less.
Calls to Action
Make sure every page has a clear call to action. Make the tel big and obvious, don’t use the work “submit” on your forms use something more useful “Get Useful Info” or something.
People Only Read 20% of your page
In tests is has been found that people only read about 20% of the text on a page, so bold and bullet point the main ideas you want to get across.
Aspect Ration 16:9 rather than 4:3
We live in a HD world 16:9, make your videos,photo’s and forms a 16:9 aspect ratio.
Do you want people to stay on your site longer?
Use a video library to educate and engage the client. Talk about the neighborhood, the schools, the restaurants and the local amenities, interview locals and get them to talk about the neighborhood. In a recent study people where asked what is more important the neighborhood or the property: 28% said the neighborhood, 18% said the property and 54% said both.
Using Facebook to drive traffic to your site
If you are going to drive traffic to your website via facebook, updating your facebook posts 1-2 times per day seems to get into 99% of your fans news feeds (this is where you want to be, if you did no know).
Using auto posting software (hoot suite etc) is frowned upon by Facebook and is said to hurt your EDGE rank. EDGE rank is a factor that determines if you post will show up in a fans news feed.
That’s it for now folks, what out for my post on mobile website for 2012.
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