Any consumer who sits down at a search engine and types in “homes for sale in X” has an immediate need for information and help. If you serve community “X,” you want these consumers on your website.

Whether your strategy is to focus on organic search engine ranking, search engine advertising, or both, a solid strategy for meeting your visiting consumers’ expectations is critical for converting these visitors to prospective clients, and from prospective clients to closed transactions.

• Your first step to converting search engine visitors to active clients is to recognize that these consumers have an expectation. They sat down at that search engine with an objective in mind.
• The second step is to understand what this expectation is likely to be. What did he or she ask for that brought him or her to you?
• And finally, the third step is to land these consumers on a page on your website that is highly likely to meet their expectations.

Search engines reward websites that attract and retain visitors – conferring higher organic rankings upon these websites because consumers find them “relevant.”

To be effective, these landing pages almost always need to be listings-rich. And listings aren’t all you need. To make these landing pages extra attractive to the search engines, they also need keyword rich static content.

IDXnetwork is known throughout the industry for custom IDX filters which allow Realtors to automatically feature properties in their farm area or certain property types to give website visitors one-click access to exactly the properties agents want their visitors to see.

You specify the parameters in easy-to-use interface and the system will auto-populate and auto-update these pages with exactly the listings you need to brand yourself as the local expert.

Using Interactive IDX Filters you can create pages by city, subdivision/developers tract, condo buildings, zip codes, price range, bank owned, foreclosure, short sale or excluding short sale, waterfront properties, equestrian, adult communities or even hand picked selection by MLS numbers.

Visit our DemoIDX to see live samples:

By Condo Buildings

Bank Owned & Foreclosure

By City + Price Range

Each filter has an area for a custom description and a photo. The combination of your custom description with automatically updated listings makes filter pages attractive for your website visitors.

Search engines love these pages because they update daily with new, highly relevant content for your website.

For more information about improving your website experience for users,
call us at 1·800·966·4431 or click here to request a free consultation.

Caution: Don’t try these hot tips without adequate lead capturing tools on your website, such as Interactive IDX.
Sizzling Tip #1
Emphasize your web address on all print materials, including your “For Sale” signage, your print advertisements, your email signature and your stationery. Every place you use a phone number, you should include your web address. Where you can only include one or the other, consider the context, but often a web address is preferable to your intended audience, especially if you have a website address that is easy to remember. If your signage was printed before you created your website, add a rider with your web address. Is your web address already on your signs? Add a rider that says “Search 1000’s of listings like this one on my website.”
Sizzling Tip #2
Reference your web address in your voicemail message(s). Consider also mentioning that property listings can be searched on your website. Many people call for information and if they cannot reach you immediately, they are just as happy to learn that they can access the information they want in another easy manner. There is certainly no harm including your web address in your message, as long as it is short, easy to remember and does not require extra explanation.
Sizzling Tip #3
Make sure that your website is listed on your company’s website as well as any other real estate- or consumer-oriented website. Any website where the site owner spends any amount of money to drive real estate consumers is a worthwhile place for you to have a live link to your personal website. This includes your company’s website, Realtor.com and other real estate and/or community portals. The key is to attract attention to yourself (to the extent permitted) and entice visitors to click through to your personal website. Once there, these visitors are likely not to turn back because of the robust set of real estate tools offered on your website and the easy to navigate way in which they are offered.
Sizzling Tip #4
Use email accounts branded to your domain name. Between messages you send out and your messages that get forwarded by your recipients on to other recipients, email messages travel far and wide over the worldwide web. A branded email address presents a cheap and invaluable branding opportunity and invitation to visit your website. Imagine seeing an email address like sold@best-LA-realestate.com or info@best-LA-realestate.com or even just sally@best-LA-realestate.com on somebody’s email. If you are a consumer interested in real estate in the Los Angeles area, how could you resist the opportunity to visit www.best-LA-realestate.com and see what information is available. And then to visit this site and find out that you can register to get email notifications each day about brand new Los Angeles listings that match your criteria? You would be one happy consumer!

Sizzling Tip #5
Broadcast an electronic newsletter (or even just a series of simple real estate tips and tricks) to all of your contacts with useful information and a live link to your website. As long as your message is short and relevant to your audience, it will get scanned, at a minimum. Consider only relaying only the first couple of paragraphs of your article(s) with a link to your website to get the rest of the article. Be sure and encourage your readers to refer their friends and family with questions. Consider adding a referral button to your newsletter and/or website to make referrals easier.
Bonus Sizzling Tip: Marketing to the Search Engines
Nearly 75% of consumers start their transaction research in the search engines. Google, one of the most influential of the large search engines, launched half a billion real estate-related search results in 2004. Registering your site in Google, as well as the other search engines, greatly enhances your chances of attracting traffic to your website, but search engine optimization and placement is a time-consuming and tricky business. We recommend that you outsource this task to an expert. This type of marketing is more expensive than the tips provided above, but the leads that come from this form of marketing are extremely qualified and easier to convert to live business if handled correctly. For information on our search engine marketing services, please click here or register to have one of our online marketing specialists contact you about creating your own personal search engine marketing strategy.