For years I’ve used a simple metaphor when talking to agents about their real estate websites. Your website is a race car. It might be fast, sleek and capable of winning races. But a race car without a driver simply won’t cross the finish line – it just sits on the track.
To win races, someone needs to be sitting in the driver’s seat, throwing the car in gear and stepping on the gas.
Similarly, a good real estate website might have awesome lead capture tools, automatic MLS functionality and a mobile responsive design. But if nobody is promoting it – if nobody is sitting in the driver’s seat – then the website itself will not produce results… it won’t win races.
Unfortunately, real estate agents are not all website marketing experts. We’re often lost and wondering “Okay, I’ve got a website… now what?”
Today I’ll give you three surefire tips to send traffic to your real estate website – to drive your race car.
Blogging, content and resources:
According to HubSpot, 70 per cent of marketers are actively investing in content marketing, and 24 per cent of marketers said they planned on increasing their investment in content marketing in the future.
Producing blog posts or otherwise creating content and resources on your website is one of the most powerful ways to attract traffic. But it all starts with knowing your target audience and knowing what types of content they like.
Each type of client represents a unique approach to the content you create. So figure out who you’re talking to, then create content they will find useful. Next time they do a Google search for “best parks for kids in Vancouver”, maybe your real estate website is where they will find their information.
Social media publishing and engagement:
At its core, social media stands on two foundations: publishing and engagement.
A mistake I often see is agents that focus their attention on the publishing side of social media, and not enough on the engagement site. Engage with your community on social media and they will love you for it.
Rather than constantly publishing, split up your time on social media. Put half the effort into publishing and the other half into engaging. Go to Instagram, search for #Vancouver and then start engaging with the posts that come up.
Every time you engage with your potential clients on social media, you are giving them a notification from your real estate account. This will often result in them returning the favour, growing your own engagement.
You’re asking, this engagement is fantastic, but how does it result in website traffic? Because you’re still publishing links to your blog posts, listings, community guides and more… only now, more people are looking at them.
Earning backlinks for SEO:
Search engine optimization (SEO) overall is a powerful strategy to use to increase your website’s visibility, discoverability and traffic. There are so many tactics you can use that all fall into the category of SEO.
Keeping that in mind, I wanted to focus on one important SEO tactic: backlinks. A backlink is when any website on the internet links back to your real estate website. When someone links to your website, it tells search engines that your website has authority… you are popular, to put it plainly.
If 5,000 websites link to your website, you must be super popular. In this case, Google will be much more likely to show your website versus your competition. But getting 5,000 backlinks is not easy, nor is it something you can achieve quickly. Here are a few ways you can grow your backlinks with time:
- Become a media source: Sign up for a service such as HARO or SourceBottle, and become a source for the media. You will receive regular emails asking for quotes and if your quote gets chosen you will receive a mention and a backlink.
- Write guest blog posts: Reach out to big blogs in your community and offer to write guest articles about real estate for them. They won’t pay you money for it, but they will pay you in a backlink. The more popular the blog – the higher their “popularity” – the more valuable that backlink will be.
- Do a link trade with partners: You know a lot of people in the industry… mortgage brokers, home stagers, notaries, lawyers, investors, other agents. Reach out to them and offer to do a link trade. Create a “Partners” page on your real estate website where you link to their website and ask them to do the same. Backlinks for everyone!
- BONUS: Update your virtual tour link: Here’s a super powerful one that only works for real estate agents. When you upload a listing to MLS, there is a “Virtual Tour” link where you can link to the tour of a property. In that field, put a link to your own real estate website – preferably to the copy of that listing on your own website. When that listing gets published on the thousands of real estate websites in your board, you will get thousands of instant backlinks.
Backlinks are powerful for SEO, but they are also powerful in drumming up traffic. Each link has the potential to send visitors to your website – the more backlinks, the more potential traffic.
Stay consistent! Everything we’ve covered here today can earn you website traffic. But you need to keep at it.
None of these strategies will work if you do them one day or one week and then never again. Try to find a way to turn these tips into actionable marketing tasks that you use month after month. You will see results, but like anything good in life, the results take time.
Now go sit in the driver’s seat of your real estate website and buckle up. The race begins today!
Sepy Bazzazi is director of marketing at RealtyNinja.com, a Canadian company that makes creating beautiful real estate websites easy. Sepy has spent his entire career in marketing, working with real estate professionals to help them build their best business. Sepy recently wrote a book about real estate marketing that you can find here. Email info@realtyninja.com or call at 1-888-767-7421
