This morning I was listening to a real estate website sales rep give a presentation on their website technology. It got me thinking that after all this time online real estate marketing still sucks. The reason it sucks is because everybody has essentially the same web site with the same set of features.
This is the problem. When a realtor signs up for one of these websites they’re getting in the back of the line of the long tail of real estate websites. Then spend money and time trying to become a hit where all the action is. This is how online real estate marketing operates. Great if you’re a hit. Terrible if you are in the tail.
Becoming a hit is hard. It takes doing small simple things over and over. This amounts to a significant amount of work. This work is rarely ever done and is the reason why most realtor sites are in the tail.
Here are the basics for becoming and staying a hit:
- Start by picking a real estate niche, like a neighborhood, and dominate the search results for that niche. The curve still exists but you can get to the head quicker and the tail isn’t as long.
- Generate good, informative content in your niche. This is where all those small things add up. Share your knowledge and experience. Creating good informative content people want to link to results in good search engine placement.
- Make your site is search engine friendly. SEO is more about making your content easy for search engines to see instead of using a whole bunch of keywords in meaningless content.
- When you’ve dominated your niche choose another one and do the same thing.
- Relying on pre-canned content that everybody else has. For buyer information, for seller information, what a house is, blah blah.
- Real estate listings on your website.
- A pretty website with lots of flash.
- Neglecting your site.
- Buying online adverting.
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Ben,
Fantastic Post! Picking a niche and updating regularly can make a HUGE difference for an agent. Focusing on a niche helps get the right kind of people visiting your site. 20 people a day looking for Yaletown Condo’s is better than 100 people a day looking for BC real estate.
Lastly, a niche means different things in large and small cities. Don’t pick too big in a big city or too small in a small town.
Sandy