As a real estate agent, one of your primary goals and constant challenge is driving consumers to your website. Your real estate website is like your online store, so it’s vital to your success to explore strategies that increase traffic to your website. Real estate is a numbers game. More traffic to your website, means more opportunities to convert a consumer into a lead. The more leads, the more opportunity for clients, and the more clients means more income and more referrals. When you brainstorm ways to drive more traffic to your website, think of ways your target audience consumes information and how you can intersect their attention.
In this article I will share 10 marketing tactics used to drive new website visitor traffic to your real estate website.
1. Link Post Traffic from Social Media
Social traffic comes from networks like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and the like. Your link post needs to have a compelling caption, catchy headline, and captivating content to get a consumer to click on it. Most importantly, it needs to provide value to the consumers in your target audience. To drive home buyer traffic to your website post links to your listings, home search, and local neighborhood reports. Alternatively, to drive seller traffic to your website, post links to your comparative marketing analysis and local market reports.
2. Paid Advertisement Traffic from Social Media
Paid social traffic comes from advertisements on social media, these ads are powerful tools that lets you hyper-target an audience outside of your followers, so you can reach and engage the consumers most likely to click your ad and visit your website. These ads are similar in structure to Link Posts but include a very handy call-to-action button. You can also post the same links to your website as Link Posts. These ads can come in a photo, album, video, carousel, or slideshow and are very usefully if you need to expedite finding a buyer for a list.
3. Organic Traffic from Search Engines
After a consumer types words or phrases into a search engine like Google, Yahoo, Bing, or DuckDuckGo they receive a list of relevant website links. This list is called the Search Engine Results List (SERL) and it ranks websites based on relevancy to the keywords inputted into the search engine. If your content is relevant, receives traffic and abides by the search engine’s rules, you can earn the top rank spot on the front page. A real estate blog and your listings are great at driving organic traffic to your website, so focus on optimizing these pages if you want to increase organic traffic from them.
4. Paid Traffic from Search Engines
Also known as Search Engine Marketing or SEM, this method of driving traffic to your website is similar to the organic traffic. The main difference is that these ads populate the top of the SERL based on a Pay-Per-Click auction method. In other words, you must pay to play for these ads.
5. Third-Party Listing Website
Zillow, Realtor.com, and Craigslists fall into this category and they’re websites that aren’t directly affiliated with your brand. You can load listings to them, but the primary branding belongs to them. These websites provide a ton of valuable information like listing, community, school, and point of interest reports. For these traffic sources, include a link to your listings page so that if this particular listing doesn’t work out, they can search for more options on your website.
6. Partners and Friends in Your Network
Influencers, friends, and business partners are valuable resources for driving traffic to your website. They have multiple ways to do this, they can write a blog article about you, share a link on social media, dedicate a page to you, refer you via word-of-mouth, and more. Since the traffic from these sources come from a “reliable” source, these consumers have built some trust with you and should be easier to convert into a lead.
7. Open Houses
When you host an open house, you present the opportunity to meet new consumers and charm them with your personality. Even if they don’t purchase the home you’re selling, they might like you enough to continue the relationship by reaching out or, more passively, visit your website. When you host an open house, use a sign in station to gather contact information and leave business cards with your website on them close by so visitors can grab one on the way out.
8. Word of Mouth/Business Cards
No matter what you do or where you go, you should have at least 5 business cards with you. On these business cards should be your contact information which includes your website. By including your website on your business card, you show the consumer the door to more listings, real estate tools, and information to help them on their home buying/selling journey – but don’t forget to remind them when you hand them your business card.
9. Direct Traffic from Flyers/Door Hangers
For the consumers that prefer other methods of obtaining formation than online, flyers and door hangers are still popular ways to promote active listings and recently sold listings. You can drive buyer traffic to your website by sharing active listings and seller traffic by sharing recently sold listings in that area. If you choose to use flyers and door hangers, remember to include your website so consumers know where to view more active/recently sold listings. If the that you want to share is longer than 10 characters, consider including it next to a QR code for easy accessibility.
10. Drive-by Traffic from Signage
Marketing material like lawn posts and open houses stands must have your website on them. If a consumer drives down the street and sees the sign but doesn’t like the home, their going to want to visit your website to see more listings – that’s why you must provide it.
Honorable Mentions:
- Online Workshops
- Community building
- Newspaper
- Flyers/door hangers
- Public Radio
- Car decals
Real estate is a numbers game. To grow your real estate business, you must drive as much traffic as possible to your website. More traffic to your website means more clients. Leveraging social media, search engines, third-party websites, partners in your network, open houses, business cars, flyers/door hangers, and signage to drive more new traffic to your website. As you increase the amount of quality traffic to your website, your rank will increase, and you can be on the front page for local searches!
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