Real live referrals that come your way from your family members, friends, and colleagues are your very best leads to people ready and eager to buy a house sooner rather than later. Remember that any and all people who speak glowingly of you truly are like gold to you…be nice to those people and make sure you thank them for any and all referrals.
Your second best source of real estate leads is through your website. According to the National Association of REALTORS, more than 80% of prospective homebuyers search online to find their prospective agents as well as their prospective dream houses. Very shortly, nearly 100% of your leads will come directly from your website and then at that point, real live referrals from family and friends will merely confirm impressions and information prospective buyers glean from your website.
How do you maximize both the quantity and quality of leads coming to you from your website? Maximize your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategy.
Kelly Shelton, SEO expert and vice president of Marketing for Boostability offers some insights:
1. Make sure your business name and website are compatible to mobile devices.
2. Add your company name to online maps such as Bing Profiles, Google My Business and other social media sites.
3. Make sure the description of your business is unique.
3. Make sure you select the right category for your business.
4. Make sure you have lots of high quality photos.
5. Make sure your profile is complete.
6. Make sure your contact information is consistent across all sites, channels and pages.
7. Optimize your site for Google and other sites using SEO.
8. Optimize titles and mental description tags on each page – if you don’t know how to do this, go to YouTube and learn how.
9. Optimize the page content – the longer the better when it comes to content – make sure the content relates to the title and heading.
10. Optimize images – each image should have a keyword related to the title of the image.
11. Create interest in your brand/your business by using links that come back to your site such as LinkedIn, Homes.com, Bing Profiles, Google My Business, guest posts and press releases.
Remember that the more information, content, news, updates, etc. on your website, the better…assuming the writing, design, usability, ease and security of your site are all excellent, welcoming and accurate.
