real estate in usa

Real estate is a tough business to be in right now but has always been a relatively tough business before the economic troubles. Most real estate agents have embraced the internet as another marketplace, and as over 70% of potential purchases search for their new home on the internet, it’s a good job!

Attracting visitors to a real estate website is a tough undertaking. Competition is fierce for the keywords, content and visitors. The visitors themselves are looking for information, news and advise as well as property, so a limited maintenance program of merely adding new properties has gone by the wayside. To be competitive the website has to have good, up to date content offering the information the audience wants.

The most important thing for any website is to be user friendly. It needs to be clean, attractive, fast and simple. The links needs to be descriptive and easily accessible and the search function needs to be on the very first page.

Content is king. A dangerously overused cliché, but so true. A website has to have good, unique and informative content. As mentioned, it isn’t enough just to update with new listings any more. A blog or news section is the ideal way to keep the content updated and fresh, while offering a service to your visitors. Articles on the area, region, property market, or anything relevant to your cause is also very useful.

If you have spare articles, offer them to other relevant sites in exchange for a link to your site. This is a good way of getting good inbound links without having to go on bended knee to webmasters.

Write about the place you live and/or do business. Offer information for those coming into your area, like schools, commercial districts, main employers and the like. More good quality content for you and your visitors.

Use traditional SEO techniques with regard to keywords, alt text and tags. If you don’t know what you are doing, then employ an expert like the boys at RT Design. If you want to be seen, you need the search engines to see you, and think you are worthwhile listing.

If you have the time, add a forum to your website. This is a great way of engaging with your audience and place yourself as a subject matter expert or authority figure. Answering forum questions can build loyalty and that is worth money.

Offering a weekly newsletter is also an excellent way of promoting your site. Including things like new listings or deal of the week is a way of including content unique to each edition and will keep your audience reading it regularly.

In essence a real estate website should be alive and constantly evolving. It should be easy to use and offers something for every visitor especially value-add things like the news, and area information. Having constant, relevant updates to the site will also help your search results and therefore your bottom line.