Many of the larger brand real estate companies offer their agents some sort of personalized agent website.  The agent websites have an admin area where you may add new content pages, change the names of their navigation buttons, incorporate a blog, Google Analytics and even SEO options.  The issue that I have run across is that most agents either do not have the time to enhance their website the way that they need to in order to get traffic or they do not have the computer skills and confidence to tackle the job.

It is important to understand that just because you have a website floating out there somewhere does not mean people will visit it.  At best, you can hope that you will get visits to your website because you have printed your website address in various places including your business cards, sign riders, property brochures and advertisements.  That is not enough to generate the type of traffic that you will need and that is also a very expensive exclusive way to send traffic to your website.

Here are some suggestions for updating your site so that you can generate some organic search engine traffic.

1. Localize your site

Your clients come to you because you are an expert in your area.  They did not come to you because they were looking for an agent who would show them homes all the way from Castle Pines to Fort Collins.  Listing general information about every city in the Denver Metro area as your coverage area will not help you generate traffic.  If you typed Denver Real Estate into Google today as a search term, a little over 16,000,000 results would come up.  By writing that you specialize in Denver Real Estate on your website will just make you one of those 16,000,000.  You have many pages and many years of writing to catch up and get to that first page of results of Denver Real Estate on Google.  It’s best to start with a smaller attainable target area, your farm area or the place where you have generated the most leads in the past few years.  Even better, would be to narrow that target market down to a niche in that target area, like kid friendly areas.  For the sake of this discussion, we will start with Piney Creek.  If I typed in Piney Creek Real Estate, I come up with around 64,000 results.  Most of those results are large real estate websites like realtor.com, homes.com and trulia.  We can write a few nice articles about living in Piney Creek and fun things for kids to do in Piney Creek and climb that list in a reasonable amount of time.

2. Track your website traffic - Google Analytics

One of the first things that I set up when I set up a new site is web statistics.  It is important to know if the content you are writing and the ads that you are running are working.  It is important to know how people came to find your site, how long they stayed, what they looked at and what page they were on when they decided to leave.  Google Analytics is FREE and once you have it set up on your site, you can have an email automatically sent to you each Monday with your report.  Google Analytics also helps reward you for all of your hard work because after you spent an hour writing an article about Fun Things for Kids to Do in Piney Creek for the Summer, you can see how many people visited your site to read it!

3. Make It Part of Your Routine

Setting up your site is the easy part.  Now you have to spend hours every month maintaining and updating it.  I know it’s difficult to do this on a regular basis, especially when you start to get busy, but content writing for your site is as important if not more than sending your Just Listed Postcards or newsletters to your clients.  This is an investment in your future and the sooner you start, the more savings you will have in future years.  Try to block out an hour of time each week before your sales meeting and make that your routine.  Start saving articles in a folder in your email to review at this time each week to give you ideas.  If you truly do not have time to sit down and write articles or research content for your site, I would suggest hiring a local college student to write for you.  You will still need to give them ideas and review their articles, but at least you are moving in a forward direction.

4. Make sure you have useful quality information

Give your clients a reason to add your site to their favorites! Give them a reason to make comments on your posts! Keep your information useful and entertaining.  Don’t just sit down and write an article with lots of keywords for the sake of catching the eye of a search engine.  Write something that you think your clients would want to read about.  Create a page of useful links in the area.  Write some reviews on your local restaurants or businesses.  Put together a calendar of current events in your community.  Display photos that you took of your neighborhood.

5. Sometimes you just need a little extra help

If all else fails, and you cannot figure out how to do this with your site or just need someone to work with you and motivate you once a month, I am here for you.  It is part of my weekly routine to sit down with agents and show them how to use their sites and give them pointers on things that they should do with their site.  I can help you until you feel confident to do it on your own.  Feel free to call or email me anytime! My hourly rate is $45/hour and I would be happy to meet with you in your office in the Denver Metro area.

Angela Miles

angela@milesofdesign.com

(303)667-9821

We have a lot of clients who come to us stuck in limbo over what to do with their website.  Their website is not getting the traffic that they would like, doesn’t look the way they would like it to or they just feel the need to change their look on a continual basis to keep it fresh. 

There are a couple of questions that you should ask yourself before scrapping your old website and starting over.

1. What is your budget? Every project starts with a budget and you should have a good idea of how much you are able to and want to spend on your redesign before looking for a designer. 
2. Is your current website getting acceptable traffic results with the top search engines?  If so, you probably shouldn’t be redesigning it or moving it to another host without thinking about loosing some of that traffic.
3. Is it possible to make some adjustments to your current site or does it really need to be redesigned?  Is it a template that has limitations in design?
4. What is your desired result for the functionality of your website? To provide your contact information to your clients? To display samples of your work? To talk about your services? To generate sales leads?

These are just a few topics to think about when thinking about giving your website an overhaul.  We can help you with any level of modifying your old website, giving your site an update or starting over with a brand new website.  Please email us with any questions at angela@milesofdesign.com or view samples of our work here.

If you are looking for a free software that will help protect your computer, I highly recommend this product Comodo.  You can never be too safe and this company offers free internet security, antivirus, firewall, malware protection, disk encryption and backup.

If managing all of your daily Tweeting and friends on Facebook has become overwhelming and too time consuming, you might want to download this free application, TweetDeck.  It gives you a quick snapshot of all of your daily updates and helps you organize them into columns so that you can see what you need to in a quick snapshot.   I know my Twitter home page has so many updates on it that I can’t even find messages from my friends anymore.  This program is a good way to fix that.

NetworkedBlogs.com is a Facebook application that helps you promote your blog.  Essentially, when you sign up, it will ask you to follow 5 other blogs.  There is a long list of categories and languages, so you will have no problem finding that meet your requirements.  You may enter in a profile about your own blog to add to their list.  The hope is that new members will see your blog in their directory and choose to follow you.  You will also see a list of blogs followed by all of your friends on Facebook.   It took about 5 minutes to set up so I would say it’s worth your while.

I think more and more people are understanding the benefits of blogging and social networks.  The problem is that most of us don’t have the time to write the blog posts or set up all of the social profiles.   Here are a few tips of what I am doing to make sure that I keep posting to my blog.

1) Subscribe to other blogs through RSS feeds.  When you do sit down to write your blog, you can get ideas of what others are doing by skimming theirs

2) Keep a folder in your email of industry related articles that your friends and colleagues send you.  Again, when it’s time to post, skim through that folder and look for ideas.

3) Write about something that interests you in your blog. 

4) Write about something unique in your blog.  I see a lot of real estate agents who write about Foreclosures or Denver Real Estate.  Those articles are too vague and have a lot of competition on the SEO charts.  Try writing about foreclosures rates in your specific subdivision or farm area instead.  There are not as many people searching for those terms on the search engines, but then again, you won’t have as many articles to compete with for #1 blog post on that topic either.

5) If you are one of those people that does not like to write, try a video blog.  Most laptops are equipped with a web cam.

6) Schedule a time for yourself every week to blog and stick to it!

7) If you decide that writing a blog is not something that will ever work out for you, but that you need more content for your website, please feel free to contact the Miles e-team!  We have writers and SEO experts that are able to help you with content on your blog or website.

Are you trying to find a way to add more incoming links to your website?  Here’s a list of free social networks that allow you to add your profile and links back to your site.  This is also a great way for real estate agents and small business owners to keep in touch with a growing sphere of friends, colleagues, and potential clients! 

If you dont’ have time to do all of these, I would recommend doing the first 5.  Ping.fm is also a good to set up after you set up the first five, because it allows you to make your status updates from one website, and then Ping.fm will automatically update your status on the other social networks for you.

Social Networks

1.      Google.com… Here’s My Profile
2.      Facebook.com Here’s Our Profile
3.      Twitter.com  Follow Us on Twitter!
4.      LinkedIn.com Here’s Our Profile
5.      Blogger.com or WordPress 
6.      Active Rain
7.      The Colorado Connector

8.      Del.icio.us
9.      Dig
10.    Dodgeball
11.    Facebook
12.    Flickr
13.    Friendster
14.    Gamer Card
15.    GoodReads
16.    Google
17.    Hi5
18.    Inman Community
19.    Jaiku
20.    Last.fm
21.    LinkedIn
22.    LiveJournel
23.    MOG
24.    MySpace
25.    Newsvine
26.    Orkut
27.    Pownce
28.    Pandora
29.    Ping.fm
30.    Plaxo
31.    Real Town
32.    Reddit
33.    SonicLiving
34.    Squidoo
35.    StumbleUpon
36.    Tabblo
37.    TagWorld
38.    Technorati
39.    Trulia Voices
40.    Twitter
41.    Upcomming
42.    Virb
43.    Vox
44.    WordPress
45.    Xing
46.    YouTube
47.    Zooomr