Increasing the time that a visitor stays on your website, increases the likely hood that they will contact you! This metric has been focused on a great deal by companies that run e-commerce websites, but we should be focusing on it as well. Here are 5 tips on how you can increase the time a user spends on your website.
- Pay Per Click Campaigns - Ensure that when you a user visits the landing page, it is what was advertised in the advertisement. For example, if you are advertising "Get a Free Foreclosure List" in your ad, and then the ad takes them to your "Home Page", it is unlikely you will get that user sticking around on your website!
- Links on Every Page - The navigation menus that you have on your website should not be the only way to navigate through your website. Within every page of content you should be linking to other areas WITHIN your website that can provide additional value. This way a user can stay on your website to learn more and see that you are the expert!
- Quality Content - Getting content from your title officer or the library of sources from your template provider is nice, but it is not unique! Concentrate on writing up content about your area from the perspective that only you can provide. Help people learn about neighborhoods, condos, homes, and more through your eyes!
- Calls to Action - Providing great content is essential, but you must also give them a reason to contact you. Make appropriate calls to action like "If you like this neighborhood, get the FREE list of Homes available" or "With lovely tree lined streets here in Bixby Knolls, use our FREE Long Beach MLS to see what is available".
- Multi Media - Sounds obvious, but enrich your pages with pictures, videos, or sound. Great products, like Instant Audio, allow you to put sound on your website for Testimonials or just explaining about your area.
Concentrating on these aspects of your web presence will increase a visitors time on your website and get you more contacts out of the same number of visitors! Our websites have increased by over 1 minute per visitor in just the past month, just by updating some of our Pay Per Click campaigns! :)
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As all of us want to get more leads out of our websites we are continually being pitched different products, asked to be in different directories, and being told by others how they can help us improve our results. I think all of us want more leads so that we have more to go through and we can choose the clients that we want to work with. After all we all want to work with people that actually want to buy or sell not just kicking the tires.
A great FREE website that I came across is http://www.linkvendor.com/. Now this website is completely free and gives you some great things to monitor your website with. You can check the following with their tools:
- Value of a link - Wonder if you should pay a directory for a link from their site? This free tool calculates the value of a link from a website. While I would recommend using it as your only guide it is a nice guideline to keep in mind.
- Page Rank Check - This tool allows you to see if what Google is reporting by them is truly the value of your website. Not bad to get a second opinion and sometimes when the Google Page Rank system has issues you will have a nice place to go.
- Outbound Links - Tells you how many outbound links that you have. There are other tools for this but this one does a decent job.
- Keyword Density - Tells you what percentage a word appears throughout your site and allows you to check the search engines as well. This is nice if you are working on integrating new words into your SEO work.
There are other tools on this site. It is FREE and the guy does a tremendous amount of work on it. Check it out and I hope that it helps you improve the performance on your website. Once again the address is http://www.linkvendor.com/.
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I know that many out there run ads on the Google Network and also with Yahoo and MSN. We run ads on all three networks. The great thing that I always like about the Internet is the ability to test an ad's effectiveness. In fact the greatest part is that you can test the effectiveness immediately.
Hopefully everyone is always running two ads at a time. With Google Adwords you can run different ad variations for the same set of keywords. I always recommend to friends and co-workers to run two ads as Google will run the ad that it deems is the most relevant. They determine this by judging based on the CTR (Click Through Rate). This is simply (number of times the ad is shows)\(number of times the ad has been clicked). As the ads run the one with the higher click through rate will be shown more often. It is hard to judge just by this number which is the better ad. Now since we always want the best chance at success we want to always be testing new messages. If you can get a CTR rate above 1% you are on your way. It is not uncommon for us to have some of our ads have CTR rates above 15% or 17% it just depends on the words and the ad that is running.
A great site http://www.splittester.com/ helps you judge the effectiveness of your ads. This site was created by Perry Marshall and if you have not had a chance to read any of his books on Google I would highly recommend them.
I hope this site helps everyone judge the effectiveness of their ads!
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You know we have great websites provided by Point 2 Homes. We are also all encouraged to continue to add custom content to our websites to make sure they perform at the highest level possible. It is important that buyers not only find listings but also information about the communities they are looking into.
A great FREE tool is http://www.gritechnologies.com/tools/spider.go. This will show you how many pages the internet search engine spiders will find on your website. It is a nice view to see what is showing up and what is not. Obviously all of us want our sites to be found on the terms that we are going for but this is a nice site that shows you how things are showing up.
Take a look at it and hopefully it helps you decide how to add some content to your site.
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We all want to improve how our websites are doing in the search engines so we can get more leads to our websites which of course leads to hopefully more commissions for all of us. My brother, James, who performs the work on all of our websites gave me this list of 3 items that he says work the best and are the easist to implement.
- Increase your inbound links - This is the number of websites that point to you or reference you. Now this isn't always the easiest thing to do but you can do it yourself by searching online for directories. Also we found this great site at http://www.directorymaximizer.com// that can help you for pennies per link. We did this and it is helping.
- Make sure you have your own custom content - This is one of the biggest things that has helped us. We found that many people don't even write about the area that they work in. So write it up.
- Use the words people are searching on - This can be difficult to do without extra tools like www.WordTracker.com but they do offer short 7 day memberships that can work out for you.
These have helped our websites perform and we get over 250 requests a month. Some from our point to homes website and some from our custom ones. I did get some of this information from www.OnlineRealEstateSuccess.com.
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You know many times we try and write and write many different sections of our websites and then we don't see an increase in any traffic. Sometimes we just can't understand what we did so wrong. It really does matter how we write our sections and what words we chose. I found that if we get some help ahead of time from someone who knows what to look for then it sure helps.
My brother, James Bridges, who handles our SEO optimization as well as that for other realtors in the area has written a nice article at, http://activerain.com/blogs/globaltrustteam. He highly recommends using Wordtracker for selecting your words. He is a former instructor at the ITP program at the University of Southern California, a former MCSD, and in charge of multiple wevsites.
If you don't want to sign up for word tracker or learn to use it check with James at jbridges@globaltrustinc.com to see if he can direct you to some more resources.
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I hope that everyone say the real estate portion of Yahoo today. It lists the 5 most wanted places to live in America. Now Los Angeles was ranked #1 which is our near by neighbor and at #5 is our city of Long Beach, CA.
Now if you have clients who are relocating or thinking of a place to move this is a great article to point them to it. Check out: http://realestate.yahoo.com/California/Long_Beach.
It would have been great if they listed the benefits of each city and why someone should be there. I think the top 3 reasons to live in Long Beach are as follows:
1. It is the most affordable beach city in Los Angeles or Orange County.
2. You can still get a condo in Long Beach under $250,000
3. You just can't beat the weather here!
Would love to hear what people think about Long Beach or their city!
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When my brother and I started with our websites we learned a few things that we have been telling others about and wanted to make sure to pass on to everyone.
Make it easy
Often times we forget that customers don't view our websites the same way that we had hoped or that they only want to do certain things. Often customers want information but don't want to e-mail. Now of course people who e-mail probably are farther along than the form requests but they all tend to work out. Let's talk about forms.
We are still working on our NLS website but take a look at the form below:
http://www.lovelylongbeachhomes.com/buyer_inquiry_form.asp?area=Bixby
That is from one of the websites we operate. We learned that the less we require and the shorter the form is the more accurate and more requests we get.
The form below is from our NLS website
http://www.teamglobaltrust.com/Buying/page_163205.html
The form is also short which is why I believe they build them that way. Just make sure to have as many links pointing back to your forms as possible.
Also make sure to have your phone number as easily available on every page as possible. These two things will help.
We currently receive over 200 requests from our forms every month and we received a 20% increase when we shortened our forms down.
Let us know what you think.
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My brother and I have been using the Internet to generate the majority of our business since we began in real estate 4 years ago. It still makes up over 65% of our business. There are lots of different services out there that agents can choose from but we find it best when agents do what they know best. What agents know best is the areas they work on. There are so many agents out there who are not telling the Internet buying public what they know. What do you think the customer cares more about? 1. How may sales you did last year?
2. What the area is like, what the school are like, what can I expect when I move into the neighborhood you work in? The answer is overwhelmingly answer number 2. When my brother and I started we had no statistics to mention so we started writing on the area, which we were just learning as well. Our customers contacted us because of our area knowledge and the fact that we gave everything away for FREE! So how do you get more out of the web than your competitors are? The answer is easier than you think. We have stuck with it over time that's one thing for sure. The other thing is we write our own content. What buyers are looking for is information. If you give them the information that's what they want. Buyers are looking desparately for information. You just have to give it to them. Make sure you give them what would tell your best friend about the area. Make it personal. Make sure you have as much of your expertise in the content as possible. It is important to write original content and to make sure that you put it on your website or blog as often as you can. Even if you are just adding a post or web page a month I guarantee that will be more than most of your competitors. If you want to see what we have done check out http://www.lovelylongbeachcondos.com/. It has been 4 years in the making but started small. Let me know what you think.
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