Every business craves leads, right?

They are the lifeblood of revenue growth and profitability.

Most of the time anyway …

 

The most optimal way for an online Real Estate Agent to succeed is thru Lead Generation and follow up. And in order to escalate leads, you must start off with your current traffic and lead conversion ratio.

Ask yourself “How many visitors does it take to get to a lead?”

In fact, when interviewing a potential client, often times the conversion is close to dismal findings. Depending on design features, and a real understanding of Marketing, you should really get fairly decent ratio numbers of sniffers vs real Leads.

Conversion comes from on-page conversion optimization & keyword representation. It pays to understand what Marketing is, and what it’s supposed to accomplish too. And I have found, 95% of all Small Business Owners do not understand these things. Especially because that is not their chosen Profession. What they do for a living is. So there is no fault or blame there.

 

The Factors On Your Web-pages

 

Most people have heard of Search Engine Optimization. Few talk about “conversion”.

First, this whole concept pre-supposes that you are starting off with a most wanted action. Sometimes it is Branding, sometimes it is Leads. And many times, it is both lead capture and branding that you are asking your website to do.

If Leads are your goal then your call-to-action is critical. Other features (that may not be that necessary anyway) on your page, can distract the viewer from your objectives.

 

The factors that may increase or decrease conversion are:

Asking them to sign up (making your call-to-action clear)
A Text Box (these are those tabled boxes that break up your body copy)
Color can attract or distract
Too many buttons
Animation
Offer Placement. Where are you placing your call to action?
Above the fold, or below the fold
Variety of Call-to-Action
Frequency of your call-to-action

 

These are just a few of the attributes that may help your lead count to go way up.

 

The Real Estate Business (as an example)

 

There are reasons that studies found that Pay Per Click search engine results often render poor conversion rates. Specificity.

The reason is that you can only use high volume keywords with pay per click (PPC). These high-volume keywords are by their nature generalized. They are also the most profitable for the engine. But what may profit the engine does not always profit you. (That’s not to say that PPC doesn’t have its place in a search marketing campaign)

9 times out 10, I am asked to “make my site #1 for “My City real estate”. While this is a worthy objective, it is at best very short sighted. Words like “City real estate”, “city homes”, city condos”, are all high volume in just about any city you research.

However, a successful Marketing Campaign must employ search engine click-through’s that are made up of general & specific “streams of traffic”. This is because traffic is a comprehensive endeavor. You wouldn’t just rent out 1 or 2 of your penthouse units and leave the rest of your 150-unit apartment complex empty? You couldn’t expect profitability, would you?

 

However, this is exactly what most Agents do when they go after a few high-volume words.

 

Traffic is made up from various inquiries into a search engine. Each inquiry represents a limited amount of possible traffic, determined by the placement in the engine, for a particular keyword or key phrase.

So long story short, a few keywords aren’t going to make your business. You need a Universe of words in order to get monster traffic and lead conversion. And a massive amount of activity to boot. Additionally, not all keywords or traffic are created equal. Step out of Real Estate monetarily and imagine yourself as Jeff Bezos at Amazon.com. What would delight you more? 500 visitors that typed in “Books”? Or 500 visitors that typed in “Harry Potter”? Or better yet, “Harry Potter, Sorcerer’s Stone”? The more specific you get, conversion goes up and the closer you can get to that elusive very high conversion ratio. If you don’t really understand this, then you should start a conversation with me. It’s that important …

The challenge, however, is that the more specific you get with your keywords, the less traffic you get. So, you need to represent a large amount of these specific keywords that produce low traffic by themselves. But combined, create a large stream of very convertible traffic.

By optimizing your Marketing factors and your keywords or key phrases that drive people to your business, you will take your visitor to conversion ratio up to a respectable number.

 

In Conclusion

 

When you have focused onto your target or ideal market, created an outstanding Elevator Pitch, developed your Unique Selling Proposition (USP), and you have published persuasive and compelling Marketing to separate from the competition, you are now ready to:

Have something good to say
Say it well
Say it often

And with that in mind, it pays to know and understand what Marketing is, what it’s supposed to do, and how to “optimize” all of it …