When most real estate think about improving their website the thoughts of spending large amounts of money come to mind.  In fact, it’s often not necessary to spend money on a website in order to turn it from a digital business card to a lean, mean, lead generating machine.
Here are items that you can focus on to ensure your website climbs to the top of the search engines and is generating leads for you every day.

1. Website Domain Name – Your domain name or web address will impact it’s results in the search engines as well as how it performs in your marketing efforts (especially pay per click).  Instead of having a website that is “yourname.com” consider having a domain name that represents the areas that you serve.  There are plenty of domain names still out there so be creative and pick one that you can market for years to come.

2. Website Content – If you haven’t written fresh content for your website in awhile consider adding some new pages.  This fresh content will be welcomed by the search engines and the visitors to your website.  Concentrate on writing pages focused on the neighborhoods that you like to operate in and you will be able to create great new pages that will compel visitors to come back and want some more.

3. Page Titles – Having effective page titles is one of the best ways to improve your results in the search engines.  Page titles should be unique on each and every page of your website and should be focused on the content for that particular page.  It isn’t easy but it will experience huge results when you take the time to go through your pages and update the page titles.

4. Calls To Action – Calls to action empower a visitor to provide you with their contact information.  As you are going through each page to change the page titles, ensure that every page calls the visitor to taking the action of providing their information.  Glancing at a page you should be able to easily see how someone could request more information.  This can range from getting listings for a neighborhood, finding out a home value, or picking up the phone to discover more about a new buyer loan program.  Look through your pages and make sure your calls to action are obvious.

5. Adding Buyer Tools – Buyers need tools in order to do research for the neighborhoods and properties that they would like to live in.  Consider adding easy to use buyer tools like mortgage calculators and an MLS search tool so buyers can easily get the help they need from you.

6. Adding Seller Tools – Before a seller can decide if it is the right time to list it is important that they get a good understanding of what home values are going for in their neighborhood.  Give your seller prospects the opportunity to see what their home is worth by providing home valuation tools.  There are many different free tools available and when you provide these tools you can empower them to contact you for a more detailed analysis.

7. Submit to Search Engines – Despite all of your efforts the search engines may not know you actually exist.  Take the time to submit your website to the major search engines.  You only need to do this once and after that they will be aware of your website and send out their spiders and bots to track the updates to oyur site.

8. Contact Information – On many real estate websites it’s too difficult to determine how to contact the agent.  It can range from the extreme of having only a single page with contact information (e-mail and phone) to listing too many phone numbers on a page.  It is more likely that a visitor will call you when you display just one phone number.  Try to have your phone number displayed prominently on each and every page to empower the visitor to call you at any time.

9. Limit Navigation Choices – Providing 15 or 20 choices on your menu may make it seem like you are being helpful, but you are just confusing your visitors.  With so many choices they don’t know what to click so they will just leave your website.  Look at your menu choices and limit it to just 6-8 options and you will get visitors digging deeper within your website.  The longer they stay the better chance you have of them contact you.

10. Links – Getting other websites to link to your website will help you to rise to the top of the search engines.  It takes some effort but the rewards will be huge.  Look for websites that are local and related to real estate (like construction firms, architects, landscaping, etc) and reach out to them to see if they will consider adding you as a resource.  The more in-depth your content the better the chances are that they will take the time to link to you.

Taking the time to take action on just the items in this top 10 list will help you generate more leads and improve your results in the search engines.  Allow yourself time to complete each one and you will quickly notice that you have hit each and every item on this list.

By James Bridges of Online Real Estate Success

Online Real Estate Success offers real estate training and coaching programs for real estate professionals who want to succeed with online marketing.  Programs are balanced to cover everything from lead generation to converting those leads into appointments that lead to sales.