Realtor Websites?

[RavenManiac]

For all of you who are designing Realtor websites, how are you or your clients promoting your website to increase its exposure? In other words, which of these do you find is the most effective way to promote your client's site?

1. Newspaper Advertising
2. Postcards
3. SEO
4. Google Adwords
5. Facebook
6. Online Advertising (trade organizations, realtor.com, zillow, etc.)

Any advice is greatly appreciated.

[Ginger]

Hi there,

Nothing is better than quality content. The way to show the value over the Zillows and Realtor.com info is for the realtor site to have quality, fresh posts of local content that fits their niche or expertise and their keywords for SEO. Then if they decide to spend %% for paid ads they have somewhere to send them. If traffic is only generated via externally, it won't stick. It will take several months unless they already have a following.

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@gscoolidge | Support Nerd | Website Producer/Tweaker | IDX Integrations | Hosting Options

[RavenManiac]

Thanks Ginger. Good points and yes, I did focus on content and SEO so my client's website is good in that regard. Like most clients, they are just anxious to get some traction. I will say that the newspaper ad we did surprised me. They received quite a few hits from that, and I thought print was dead. 🙂

[seattlesavvy]

Hi Raven. Since 2000 I've worked with nearly 700 Realtors and at one point joined a team as the Marketing Coordinator where I'd manage the website I built using a retired version of the Lifestyle theme and qualified leads as they came in. We ended up becoming #1 for our MLS territory and within the Windermere brokerage at which point we were part of the team who opened Seattle's first Sotheby's.

To put it simply, the thing that made the most impact on the overwhelming results we got in leads was due to the blogging.

A few things I found made blogging fun and easy was...

I got a title rep to send me weekly solds, pendings and active stats which was quick, easy and informative. every week i was able to deliver that.

signed up for email notifications from the cities department of planning which would be the front line on any newly submitting building permits. any permits that were residential or impacted the landscape in a way that might be concerning tipped me off on getting to know architects and developers who came to know me and send me information as time progressed, and acted as a source of content that I'd get to blog about first setting the tend in serps regarding that topic.

volunteered as blogger/content writer for the newspaper which allowed me to write about the market and discretely insert outbound links from the newspaper to our blog.

also targeted the website to a specific niche and tailored the idx to search results within that niche.

i started that blog in 2007 and did for 2 years. although nothing has been done to it since, it still ranks for tons of various search phrases today. but it was most certainly due to being an avid blogger.

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