I ‘d love to hear your opinion on targeting a large metro area (you stated your “greedy”) and the ability to service the leads (maybe you have a large team?) and effect on SEO…

We are in Miami so we are facing that very question, target greater Miami as a whole, or closer to home…. (I see it as a quality over quantity issue) but would love to hear your strategy on this.

Hi Janie – targeting a large area is a matter of choice. Like Miami, when referring to San Diego, its more of a region than just a city. I break it down into a handful of geographic areas , then further into the cities and communities within those areas. I do it this way because while its a big area, you can get to almost anywhere in the County in 30-45 minutes, except fot the back country.

So given that commute times are less on average than say LA or the Bay Area, its not uncommon for people to search in dozens of areas before they narrow down their search.to a handful of communities. By that time they have likely met a few agents, so the strategy is partially based on catching them first and being the ones who help them narrow down the search.

From an SEO perspective, if I can rank for the larger trafficked terms, its usually fairly easy to then do well on the community level. With hungry buyer agents everywhere, there is always a demand for leads.

The lead management is a big part of the decision to go big versus small though. If you cant manage the leads, it doesn’t matter.

Another factor is the size of the area. I wouldn’t do this in LA, or Chicago. That is just way to big a geographic area unless you have a substantial agent infrastructure in place.

That said, I’m a big fan of scalability. Loosely targeting the broader area while focusing on a few core areas you can handle is an ideal way to start. You can always add areas as you grow.

This isnt a debate. It is what it is. The point was that not everyone wanted to search. The other 17k are not exactly mysteries though, as we have analytics that shows what many were looking for and where they went. We also have about a 20% bounce rate – which is low, almost 5k still left immediately.

Also, I ‘d love to hear your opinion on targeting a large metro area (you stated your “greedy”) and the ability to service the leads (maybe you have a large team?) and effect on SEO…

We are in Miami so we are facing that very question, target greater Miami as a whole, or closer to home…. (I see it as a quality over quantity issue) but would love to hear your strategy on this.

thx for the post

“If 24k showed up and 7k went into the IDX, this does not mean that 17k were *SELLERS*, or info shoppers, or anything. They could been a mix of those two, plus people in the wrong place, plus people that followed a link from a post just to see what’s up with this guy, anything

Anyway – never mind. This debate has no outcome since there’s no way to prove what the deal was with the 17k mystery visitors.

We can state that 7k of them were most likely interested in searching.

That attitude is shared by many, and why most RE sites dont produce. I would argue that it is EXACTLY like Amazon – a business site whose job is to produce income.

“If 24k showed up and 7k went into the IDX, this does not mean that 17k were buyers, or info shoppers, or anything. They could been a mix of those two, plus people in the wrong place, plus people that followed a link from a post just to see what’s up with this guy, anything

You don’t know what they were doing there. They may of been buyers that didn’t like the site, or couldn’t find the IDX, or whatever.”

You either just made my point, or Im confused. .

I’m always over simplistic and I apologize. To me, visitors are either there for searching (buyers), information (sellers), or information (could be a buyer or seller or someone researching an area or neighborhood).

So there’s three things, not 300, and two of them are just about the same.

Bob – I love real numbers. To me, it’s a lot better than the bla bla bla “ideas” that normally dominate the blogs.

However, what you derived from your data is not so cut n dried.

If 24k showed up and 7k went into the IDX, this does not mean that 17k were buyers, or info shoppers, or anything. They could been a mix of those two, plus people in the wrong place, plus people that followed a link from a post just to see what’s up with this guy, anything.

You don’t know what they were doing there. They may of been buyers that didn’t like the site, or couldn’t find the IDX, or whatever.

I would STILL say that the largest number visitors to a web site (that we can identify their goal), are there to search for homes.

How about that one?

LOL.

BTW, love the conversation! And, believe me, I don’t even fake to know everything…

(i’ll call you after lunch here)

Site 1
24,000 unique visitors
7,000 initiated a search
2,500 users registered

Site 2
12,500 unique visitors
3,800 initiated a search
1,259 users registered

Not everyone searches for real estate, regardless of the ease of use.

On the design issue, I took one site that was getting 500-600 unique visitors and 12-15 new registered search users a day and re-did it. A week before it was relaunched, it dropped a few spaces in the serps and the trafficwent to @300 uniques a day. The first week it was launched, the percentage of visitors searching went up and the registyered users went to 45-50 a day. The design led to 3x the number of registered users on 50-60% of the traffic.

I know of sites that are on page two that get more leads than sites one page (same serps).
Like Bruce said, It isn’t as simply as you say, or else everyone would be killing it.

Question – I’ve thought about having a home page with a static page followed by a list of sequential posts. So this would be a bit of a hybrid — best of both worlds. Any opinions on that approach?

Rob – I really like the clean, well-organized look of your site. I disagree that delivering an informative, sticky site is easy. If so, someone would have figured out the ultimate template site that 80% of agents would use. If your site comes up in a search, I think that you have 3 seconds (or less) to grab your reader. If it’s too busy – they’re gone. Too ugly – gone. Can’t find what they want in two clicks – gone. Easy to do? I don’t think so.

I’m happy to install WordPress but I want to keep my site as is. I.e., I don’t want to flip it to a WordPress theme et al.

Is this possible? I’m so ignorant to this wordpress stuff, it’s embarassing.

Thanks!

go release it

thanks

You tell sellers that when your house is listed with me, I attract the buyers with all these kikkass buyer tools. Here’s my traffic numbers, etc., (this is in fact the truth)

A seller could not care less if you are attracting other sellers. Plus they are not out on the real estate web sites in the numbers buyers are.

But don’t take my word for any of this, I’ve had like 5 listings in the last two years. In this market, well quaified buyers are a more reliable source of income for me.

Finally, I don’t think real estate web site design is quite as complex as you are suggesting.

-Something north of 80% of buyers are starting on the internet.
-One of the first few agents that interfaces with a new buyer will end up as the official Agent
-90% of these 80% are looking to search for homes

So:

-get as many visitors to your site as possible
-get them to your IDX as soon as possible
-capture their info
-make first contact

That’s all you can do. Assumiing your goal is to land clients with your site. I suppose there could be other goals at play here.

Not sure where all the IA fits into this super simplistic equation.

But again, whatTheCrapDoIknow.com?

What if you are a big listing agent? You may want to attract potential sellers as well. Frequently that business is earned deeper into the site. Changing market conditions will also affect user behavior. In 2007 & 2008, with one site that primarily targeted buyers, the underlying IA structure allowed me to target the short sale seller without changing anything that would hurt other rankings. 30% of the traffic was short sale related. Today that online pull business has decreased as the distressed seller is being hit with a tsunami of push marketing that gets to them first. .

Think of it as a sailboat. With a well designed one, using different sails on the appropriate rigging gets you to your destination regardless of the wind direction and without having to make any structural changes. If you sail competitively, the key is reading the wind and utilizing the right sail at the right time. Same with being competitive in the online race.

When Google says build it for the user, keep in mind that those are experts in information architecture talking. Build it right for the user, and you’ll build it right for the search engine.

As for DW, I will never go back. I’ll get back to you about the home page.

Atlanta, RSS feeds really aren’t the way, just suck it up and be a dynamic sissy and install wordpress or some other modeled cms It will save you time and frustration, otherwise, I suppose RSS is your answer, albeit will impact your load times and possibly fail in timeouts leaving you no further ahead than before you had the feed.

This continues to be very interesting but I bet you could just put a big fat IDX search engine on the front page of your site and have your entire site structure below it and do better than anything else one might come up with.

The site structure below it will drive traffic and the IDX on the front page is what every new visitor is looking for and handles the lead generation, which I assume is still the purpose of all this. (?)

You WordPress weenies are making me jealous! Every time I want a new page, or a modification, I have to go to DreamWeaver and start coding! Like a man!

LOL!

Seriously though, do me a favor – take a look at my home page and give me your thoughts on how I could integrate a blog into this page. I know most everyone around here only knows blog sites and dealing with WP themes, but I only have experience with hand coded sites.

I’m thinking I create another div box and maybe RSS in the blog headlines that are coming from a sub domain where said blog is living??