If you have a real estate website, then the whole point of your overall marketing strategy is to get as many people as possible to your website, ie: build a strategy to get traffic. If you don’t have any website traffic, then there isn’t much point to having a website at all.
While the above is true, it can even be taken a step further to say that: if you don’t have quality traffic coming to your website, then there isn’t much point to having a website at all.
I remember 6 years or so ago, we rebuilt the Artifakt Digital website completely from the ground up. We wanted it to look more modern, but of course, we also wanted it to function better, funnel traffic more efficiently, and generate better leads for us.
We did get quite a bit of traffic, so as part of the rebuild, we spent a lot of time analyzing the decisions we made and balancing them between what we wanted and what the data told us we should do.
At the time, I was mostly concerned about the pure number of visitors and page views regardless of the quality, but I learned a valuable lesson as part of that rebuild project…
6 months after our relaunch of the new website, I noticed that our website traffic had dropped by around 50%, which was obviously really concerning to me, and resulted in a number of meetings with our SEO team. When you rebuild a website, you certainly would expect the traffic to drop a bit, but that number seemed really high to me.
But I also noticed something else that was more important…
The quality of leads we were getting was a lot higher than what we’d gotten prior to relaunch. That meant that while we lost a good amount of the traffic we were getting, the quality of the traffic we were getting was a lot higher, which resulted in better leads.
And that happened because of all the planning we did, the data we researched, and the content consolidation we did. I knew we removed a lot of pages, and while at the time I thought that was bad for our overall SEO strategy, it turned out to be exactly what we needed to: clean up old pages that our target audience wasn’t going to, and replace it with content they did want to go to; even if that meant pushing away some of the traffic we were getting.
What I learned is, while bringing in traffic is important, bringing in quality traffic is even more important or the rest doesn’t even really matter.
In our rebuild of Artifakt, for example, I noticed that a lot of the traffic we were getting was landing on the more technical blog posts that we wrote about web development. That means, a lot of our traffic was interested in development, or at least found us from some similar topic. And overall, that’s pretty useless to us.
Our target audience is: North America’s top-performing real estate agents, and really, if someone is not a real estate agent in North America, and they visit our website, that’s not really that useful for us.
So, we changed our strategy.
We changed Views, our marketing blog, to ONLY have content about real estate marketing or, at minimum, content that agents would be interested in. We put wrote several eBooks, reports, and guides with the sole goal of helping agents. In general, we put together an entire strategy that we thought would really empower real estate agents to give them the information they need to build strategies themselves, or have the information they need to interview the companies providing the strategies.
So now, when the agents I first talk to say: but my website gets a lot of traffic, I’ll usually say: so what. If that traffic isn’t the type of high-quality, target-audience strategized traffic, then who really cares?
Bottom line is, you should plan your strategy around your target audience and what appeals to them. If you do rebuild your website, it’s ok to lose some of the traffic you’re getting to get the right type of audience.
Want to learn more about SEO and get more traffic to your website? Our SEO Strategy Building Guide is a mix of curated content and self-guided workbook that will help provide insight on how you can build and implement a modern SEO and overall search strategy.
