When done right, building an effective real estate website is anything but simple.
It takes time, it takes patience, and it takes a great deal of thought. At Artifakt Digital, that thought and strategy are what results in higher-performing websites that perfectly encapsulates a client’s brand and voice.
As an agent, after taking all that time and effort, it’s easy to feel like all the work is done. Once your website has launched, you may simply want to kick back, relax, or focus on other things.
The truth is, though, that this is only just the beginning.
Your Website Always Requires Attention
From the moment it launches, your website needs consistent work to help it grow.
This is because a website is not simply a set-it-and-forget-it endeavor. Much like any investment, you need to put work in to continue seeing value from it.
Your website can do a great job of attracting, qualifying, and converting potential business, but it can’t simply do that by virtue of existing. It needs upkeep to help it continually progress.
So, after your website has launched, what are some of the things you can do? Here are five suggestions we make to ensure your launch plan goes off without a hitch:
1. Start On Social
While social media traffic is typically the lowest quality, it can serve an incredibly important purpose of simply getting the word out about your website. So, your first step should be to set up or optimize those accounts.
Start with all the tried-and-true options. Set up a Facebook page, an Instagram account, and a YouTube account to start compiling a library of content. Make sure that each links to your site and your site links to them.
Since your site is now launched, post about it (don’t ignore it)! Ask people for their thoughts, let them know to check it out, and give them a reason to continually check back in.
That’s because returning users are typically converting users. You will want them to come back time and again, so you should be continually “plugging” your website on social if you ever want to see your following grow.
Don’t worry, either, about posting about it more than once. Social media posts have a very short lifespan, and your audience is likely to be active at varying times, so post about it as much as it seems reasonable.
2. Craft A Lead Magnet (or Two, or Three)
If you’ve built your website with professionals, chances are you now have a huge bank of quality content on your site to work with. You should leverage it to create an even higher amount of quality engagement.
A lead magnet is a download of any kind that offers information in exchange for someone’s contact details.
Many agents will reserve this for their pre-listing presentation or marketing booklet, but there are many applications that can be sourced from your website, including:
- A compendium of recent blogs that have to do with a central topic
- Various checklists that help a lead feel more qualified
- In-depth neighborhood guides (such as “A Day In XXX Neighbourhood”)
The possibilities are endless. Now that you have had someone craft your unique value proposition, you can leverage it across a variety of downloads that will help your users better engage with your brand.
3. Start Blogging
If your website is strategized correctly, you will already have a strong SEO foundation that will allow your site to capitalize on your brand name and your geographic region.
Now, you need blog posts to get more granular and drive specific types of traffic to your website.
Blogging is one of the best things you can do for your site. Often, agents downplay its importance. Either they don’t do it at all, try to do it unsuccessfully, or they hire a team who’s specialty isn’t in real estate.
Real estate markets are cyclical and trend in various directions at all times. If you are going to blog, it needs to be deeply in tune with the market and what users are presently searching on Google (and other search engines).
Ultimately, while you can focus on big topics like buying or selling a home, these likely won’t drive high amounts of traffic to your site. They will help your site’s authority (or reputation), but won’t get people to visit quite as readily.
Instead, you need to have the SEO backing that informs what you should be writing about, what you should be saying, and what calls to action will cause people to act in your market.
4. Start Collecting Reviews
Every agent knows the importance of Google and how it influences the success of your website.
That said, it’s not simply about ranking for keywords on Google. Social proof is a huge element of their platform right now, and will continue to be an added point of emphasis in the future.
From the moment your site launches, you should have two things:
- A testimonials section on your site
- A Google My Business page
The former is for posterity, the latter is for function. Once your site launches, you need to immediately reach out to former clients to leave reviews for you on Google. If you have a roster of happy clients, this is a relatively small ask — especially since all you need is five stars and a sentence or two.
Not only will this look great when people Google you (or your team’s) name, but it can have a huge effect on the SEO performance of your website (and your overall engagement metrics).
After all, as a searcher, would you even consider a restaurant if it had 2.3 out of 5 stars? What if they didn’t have any reviews at all, would you book a reservation this evening? The chances are low.
Social proof is essential for the success of your website, and your real estate brand more generally. As an agent, you know testimonials fuel your brand, now you need to incorporate them on your site and online.
5. Start A Retargeting Campaign
From the moment your site launches, it’s collecting traffic.
Whether it is from people finding you through Google, going to your site from social media, or simply typing your URL into their browser after being handed your business card.
So, what do you do with all of this traffic? If you do nothing, chances are it simply becomes a number on a dashboard somewhere — fading into the ether and translating into no business at all.
If you think about it, you need to be marketing and re-marketing to each and every person who visits your website. That’s what retargeting does, and it’s essential to your site’s performance.
We recommend that every one of our clients sets up a retargeting campaign, at launch, in order to immediately capitalize on traffic that is coming to their site.
A retargeting campaign relies on a “cookie” being inserted on your site, which tracks a user’s movements when they leave and offers them tailored ads with your brand (and a landing page to match).
When done effectively, retargeting is a great way to sleep well knowing that you are marketing to anyone visiting your website (and for a minimal daily cost). It’s like having a personalized billboard, completely online!
Your Site Wants To Be Marketed
But it can’t do it on its own.
Instead, you need to make strategic investments to ensure that you are getting the highest rate of performance — in addition to the highest rate of return.
Now that your site is online, it’s not enough simply to look amazing. You need to find users, attract them, and give them a reason to return. By utilizing just some of the strategies above, you’ll be well on your way.
With up to date marketing trends relevant to today’s market, our report is a selection of curated content, information, and data that will give you an outline of what’s working right now in real estate marketing.
