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.