Web Site Design and Development

I’ve been meaning to write another article about how the enthusiastic tail of real estate blogging frequently wags the dog of analyzing and understanding how our web sites attract and convert business.

The Real Estate Tomato finally provided the impetus when they ran a post yesterday with the title:

The 7 Reasons Why Your (Future) Clients Should Care That You Are Real Estate Blogger

I don’t want to appear like I’m picking on the Tomato or the co-authors of this article, most of whom I don’t know.  However, I do think that focusing on what future clients should care about begs a more interesting and potentially profitable question about what past and present clients actually do care about.  To be sure, as they say in the stock market, “past history does not guarantee future results”.  On the other hand, if you’re about to embark on an activity that’s going to consume at least an hour or two per day for years on end, it helps to go into that activity with the attitude that you’ll investigate what actually does happen, as opposed to what should.

My What-Clients-Should-Care-About Wish List

From my perspective, I’d love it if my clients cared that I’m a real estate blogger. In fact, it’d be great if they cared that I was a Honda owner and over six feet tall, because that would further narrow the field down to me. If they all wanted guys with brown hair who originally come from Rhode Island and now live in Cameron Park, then hey presto: I’d be a shoe-in.

What They Should Want versus What They DO Want

It turns out, however, that clients have their own ideas about what they care about.

There, are, moreover, a few reasonably good ways to get at what those things are that your client cares about:

• Ask them, and they may tell you.
• Listen to them when they volunteer information.
• Use web analytics to find out.

I could stand some improvement when it comes to asking my clients what they care about. When I started Elite Properties, I had all sorts of forms and systems in place before I got around to writing my Customer Satisfaction Survey, for example.

By listening to clients, however, I’ve learned that they usually liked a few things about my web sites and my agents:

1. We don’t make them register before letting them search the MLS.
2. The web site is easy to use.
3. We return phone calls and emails quickly.

Adding web analytics gives us more information.  To be sure, web analytics is a little bit of a dull-edged tool in some respects. For example, it tells me that about 35% of the people who reach the home page will click right on through to the basic search page, versus only about 11% for the blog. It also tells me that more than 80% of the people who reach me for the term “Sacramento Real Estate” stay on the site, while only one third of the people searching for “Sacramento Real Estate Blog” make a journey further in.

However, returning again to the listening to clients category, the thing that most makes me a believer in the power of online search tools is the number of people who end up being clients who start a conversation as follows:

“Hi, my name is so and so. I found a listing on your web site…[goes on to give MLS number or address].”

My agents and I have talked to literally hundreds of people who’ve started conversations like that. In that same time, the number of people who’ve mentioned my blog can be counted on one hand.

So What Do Clients Want?

The beauty about my empirical knowledge that clients like to look at houses online is that it fits so well from what I have reasoned about my clients according to Cartesian first principles.

You all remember Descartes: “I think, therefore I am.”

Here’s my crack at the real estate version: “I buy and sell real estate, therefore, my clients are interested in real estate.”

This is not just garden variety true.

It’s true by definition.

So Why Should I Care About What My Clients Care About?

Caring about what I think my clients should care about is another way of saying that I care about me — and they already probably guessed that before they ever happened on my blog.

In contrast, caring about what my clients do care about helps me to design a site with a clearer path to the goals that they have for a real estate web site, and it helps me see my writing in light of the things they care about. 

In the end this is all self-interest, of course, and it’s nothing new.  This is classic Zig Ziglar: “You can get anything you want, if you help enough other people get what they want.”

The hang-up is, you have to get other people what they really want. Getting them what you think they should want doesn’t work.

There’s a lesson in that for this blog as well, but one could argue that I haven’t learned it yet.  Stay tuned!

One of the many great views on your web site data that Google Analytics provides you with is information about your bounce rate sorted by search engine keyword. I was intrigued when I looked at this the other day, partly because of Dave Smith’s recent article on bounce rates, but also because it fit into my recent article about integrated blogs and web sites.

I’ve pasted some data from Google Analytics for my Sacramento real estate site here (with a few fields omitted for the sake of clarity).

Looking at the numbers, I was struck first of all by the good news that I had a really low comparative bounce rate exactly where I want it — for the key word “Sacramento Real Estate”. My bounce rate there is a meager 18.66%, meaning that more than 80% of the people who reach me for that keyword go further into my site. Moreover, I know from another site analysis tool I use that about 35% are clicking straight through to my basic search page (with still others clicking through to other search options). Perfect!

On the “negative” side, my highest bounce rate is for another phrase that brings a lot of people to my site, “things to do in Sacramento”. (When I first started the site I had a separate blog about Sacramento Things to Do as a “fluff piece”. I still get lots of traffic for it.) For that keyword, about 3/4 of the people who reach the site end up searching elsewhere, which is not surprising given that that’s not what my site is really about. This is not something that needs to be fixed, unless I start selling theater tickets instead of houses.

One statistic that was not surprising to me is the bounce rate for the phrase “Sacramento Real Estate Blog”, which is 66.7%. This that may come as a shock to other bloggers who are steeped in the conventional wisdom that buyers are blog readers looking for an expert. Two thirds of the people looking for the blog go no further into the site, while more than four fifths of the people who are looking for real estate do go further.

The Point of All This, And I Do Have One

Web site analytics tools like Google Analytics (by the way, did someone say FREE?) can provide you with valuable insights into what your visitors are actually doing when they reach your web site. What pages do they visit? Where do they go next? What keywords are getting you buyers? How many visitors are returning?

Often the results are not what you’d expect — and when they’re not, this can be the best information of all. For example, in the numbers at right, I noticed that my bounce rate for Sacramento Condos is 32.08%, but my bounce rate for Sacramento Foreclosures is 62.5%. Yet those pages are almost identical. Perhaps I need to go see how to improve the foreclosure page.

Or take the matter of the low conversion rate for the blog. Are there ways to improve that? Of course there are.

I feel a definite “follow-on article” feeling coming on.

One of the (many) great things about the Wordpress blogging platform is the huge number of enthusiastic supporters who write third party plugins. Very often, if Wordpress doesn’t seem to do what you want yet, you can find a Plugin that will modify its behavior so that it will.

With plugins, you can turn Wordpress from an already great open source blogging platform into a fairly complete content management system.

The plugins I’ve downloaded have usually worked quite well “out of the box”, though from time to time I’ve done some “minor” tweaks — minor, that is, from a programmer’s point of view.

Here then are my candidates for the Top Five Wordpress Plugins. Naturally your list will depend on what you want your Wordpress installation to do.

Spam Karma 2
Top Five? Forget it — this is the one! As far as I’m concerned, No Wordpress installation can be considered complete until Dr. Dave’s outstanding Spam Karma 2 is installed and activated. Spam Karma 2 deserves its description as the “ultimate spam killer”. If you’re suffering from Wordpress comment spam, Wordpress now ships with Askimet, which seemed to work ok when I last tried it, but it always struck me that Spam Karma 2 caught more spam than Askimet. Moreover, Spam Karma 2 itself has its own plugin system, allowing people to modify and extend how it behaves.

Spam Karma 2 Moderate
OK, this is not technically a Wordpress plugin, it’s a Spam Karma 2 Plugin (which makes it a Wordpress Plugin Plugin — yikes!). The point of the moderate plugin is that Spam Karma 2 — perhaps being the “ultimate spam killer” and all — thinks that you’d never need to moderate your posts, presumably since it got all the spam. The moderate plugin fixes this by capturing the obvious Spam and then still letting you moderate your posts. This can be helpful, for example, if you’re getting a lot of people stopping by for the sake of arguing with you, which can happen from time to time. (See the CollegeHumor parody on Blog Commenters). As a special bonus, if you scroll down on the moderate plugin you’ll see that I sent it’s author, Peter Westwood, a fix for a minor issue I discovered with the plugin. This proves that even real estate brokers can make good contributions to Open Source projects if they used to be programmers!

Page Links To
One of the neat things about Wordpress is that you can use it not just to blog, but to manage web site pages that are not chronological. In other words, you can use Wordpress as a full-fledged content management system — which is a fancy way of saying it’s an easy tool for creating or changing the pages on your web site. Many Wordpress themes support adding pages, so when you add a page to Wordpress, you automatically get a link to that page added on your menu. But what about the case where there’s already a page somewhere that you want to link to. Maybe it’s part of your IDX system, for example your MLS listing search page that’s maintained by another company. Now what? The Page Links To Plugin let’s you add some code to a sort of “dummy” page, which in turn tells the navigation system to link not to the page, but to whatever web address you tell it that the (ta da!) “page links to”.

Page Category Plus
I recently discovered Yellow Swordfish’s Page Category Plus, and installed it immediately because it struck me that by using it I could set up the page navigation at the left. Page Category Plus lets your pages have categories just like your posts do, so that using it, you can set up left hand navigation for all your pages. Being a programmer, this was not a big deal for me personally, since the old non-Wordpress way of tweaking the navigation bar (put it in a file and then just re-edit the file and FTP it up to the site) has always worked for me. What Page Category Plus allows me to do is create the very same look as I could achieve manually but have it all be part of the Wordpress page system. This means that custom web site clients could update their own pages themselves if they wish.

Better Feed
PlanetOzh’s plugin, BetterFeed, allows you to automatically make some neat changes to your RSS feed. Why would you care about what’s in your RSS feed? Well, for one reason, your RSS feed is what your subscribers see. So let’s say want to offer someone an incentive for subscribing, an idea I’m testing out on my Sacramento Blog. I’m using PlanetOzh’s plugin to add some links to the Subscriber-only content directly into my feed. (Please note that you don’t want to add anything really secret this way, since chances are pretty good your feed is available to non-subscribers as well — that’s how people turn into subscribers is by accessing your feed. But in the case of discount coupons and the like, if someone thinks they found a “forbidden freebie”, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Real Estate Internet Marketing Week In Review is a new weekly feature where I highlight either the authors and blogs and posts that I found interesting in my reading from the week past or that I thought Realtors® and real estate webmasters should know about.

My series on Comparing Real Estate Blog Platforms was a fairly general overview of real estate blogging options. A more in depth review of specific blogging software is available in Problogger.net’s Choosing a Blog Platform.

Thomas McMahon, writing for Toprank’s Online Marketing Blog, prepared a handy introduction and review of Google’s Webmaster Tools, which is a free set of tools that helps you see your site as Google does.

Whether you’re looking to extend your reach online, get free exposure for a listing, network with your peers, or what have you, an outstanding starting point is Oliver Muoto’s list of Web 2.0 Companies Realtors® Should Care About.

My own marketing philosophy is summed up neatly in the equation SEO + IDX = $$$. For those of you who think you have an online image that needs to be nurtured, however, Bobby Carroll has an interesting article on Digital Brand Management. Again, I offer this position not because I agree with it, but in spite of that. PT Barnum is reported to have said “I don’t care what they say about me as long as they spell my name right.” I might paraphrase: “I don’t care what they say about me as long as my marketing is successful enough that you’re reading what I say about me.”

And now for something that I do agree with, Brad Carroll recently posted this outstanding article on why you should not force your users to register before allowing them access to your IDX web site listings. I’ve agreed with this opinion for years because of the money I’ve made specifically from people who told me not having to register was why they chose me. Brad takes this a step further and explains the psychology and reasoning behind this.

Finally, my friends at Sellsius Real Estate posted this worthwhile blogging tip:

If you are a real estate broker or agent, do a post on closing costs, with a breakdown of real estate transfer taxes, and estimated costs, and put it permanently in the sidebar. Every serious buyer or seller will click it. You betcha. It’s a good way to market your real estate expertise.

Readers, did you happen across a site or blog that should be included in our Real Estate Internet Marketing Week In Review series? If so, please let us know!

This is our third and final installment in our series comparing real estate blogging platforms, having a blog that’s part of your main real estate web site. Earlier articles in the series include:

Part 1 — Real estate social network blogs

Part 2 — Stand alone real estate blogs

An Integrated Web Site and Blog Solution

I believe that the best place to have a blog is as an integral part of your web site. By integral, I mean at the very least having it on a subdomain of your web site’s main domain name, though it’s far preferable to have it as a folder off your main domain name.

For me this is not a theoretical idea. For the better part of the last four years, I’ve made my living leading teams (and now, as a broker, a company), whose main source of leads was a successful web site and blog combination. If I point to the web addresses themselves you can better see the structure:

The web site home page is: http://www.sacramento-home.com

The home page of the blog is: http://www.sacramento-home.com/real-estate-events

There are a number of reasons why I think this configuration is ideal, but it boils down to this: eyeballs and fingertips. You need to have the eyeballs of potential home buyers and sellers finding you first when they start looking for a solution — hence the eyeballs. As for fingertips, their fingertips need to be clicking on listing information that you provide, so that when they’re ready, their fingertips can be keying in your phone number.

Background: Pay per click is expensive
Pay per click gets a bit of a bad rap, but really there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with it. We like the “click” part. It’s the “pay” we’d rather dispense with if we can. The online “sweat equity” that we use to dispense with pay-per-click is search engine optimization.

1) Good Search Engine Optimization Requires Lots of Fresh Content
The search engine boost that having a blog will give you is often overstated, but one thing is certain: becoming an authority in a competitive market requires lots of original content. So even though a blog is a web site is an HTML page, the tools that have evolved to blog will help you enormously. Even though I am a web site developer, it is still much, much easier for me to post to a blog than create a “traditional” web page, simply because the tools I have to do the task make it so much easier.

2) Good Search Engine Optimization Requires Natural Incoming Links
Once upon a time, Realtors® were some of the Internet’s biggest fans of reciprocal linking. I link to you. You link to me. Everyone rises in the search engine. Several Google updates later, reciprocal links are no longer valued as they once were. However, bloggers are still notorious for quoting (and linking to) other bloggers.

3) Having the Blog Integrated Means Good Internal Links – Naturally
If your blog is integrated into your web site, naturally each blog post you write will have a link to your home page, your search page, your contact form, and lots of other places where a visitor can begin the path toward becoming a client. There’s nothing problematic there — it’s just good internal site navigation. This means that the benefits you received from #1 and #2 above are going to be passed on as much as possible to your main site without even a whiff of SPAM.

4) Your Best Offer is on your Web Site
In Part One of this series, one of the criticisms we had for social networks was not the question of who owns the content, but what is the content being used to promote and sell. Unlike 90% of the authors who write about blogging, I don’t think that the main goal of blogging is to establish you as an expert. Certainly I don’t have a lot of buyers who call me up and say “I heard you were an expert.” What I DO have is a lot of buyers who call me up and say “I saw a house on your web site”. I think we can dispense with a lot of the silliness that’s written about real estate blogging with a simple quiz. It’s fill in the blank:

“My ideal customer is someone who is pre-approved and has a strong need to buy or sell a ____________ this weekend.”

Did you say “house” or maybe “million dollar home”? If so, great! Now you know why your blog should be on your web site, with a clear path to your real estate search. If you look at my blog, you’ll see you can get to the search page at least two ways from any page, and three from the home page. In fact I think it should have three from every page. I think I’ll go change it.

If you filled in “Realtor®”, then you need to go get your picture printed on BOTH sides of your business card, so you can stay busy flipping it over and smiling.

7) Your Web Site Can Support Other Search-Friendly Work
Are vacation homes popular in your town? Then how about a directory (literally a “directory”, or computer folder) with different pages about vacation homes? Now your blog can support the directory by being your vehicle to announce new features to what in effect has become a “mini-web-site” on a less competitive niche keyword.

6) Competition is Fierce
Back in the reciprocal linking dark ages, many of us would put up five or ten sites or more, optimized for different keywords, since the effort required to boost any single site to the top of the search engine results was fairly mechanical and well known. Nowadays you need a sustained and focused effort to master the search results for even a moderately competitive keyword. That’s why we recommend a clear click path to your best offer, and focusing most of your efforts on a single site (except perhaps for link building and other promotional work, which may of necessity get you out into the world).

In Part 1 of this series on real estate blogging platforms, we discussed social networks like ActiveRain. In part 2 we take on another low cost alternative, the standalone blog.

The Stand Alone Blog

Companies such as Blogger.com allow you to set up and run a free blog. If you want, you can purchase a domain name and point it to your blogger account. I recently helped Purva Brown do this with her Sacramento Real Estate Gal site.

On the plus side, with a free blog, and a domain from Godaddy.com or another low cost Internet domain registrar, you can have a blog up and running for less than $10 per year. Just add the sweat equity of an hour or more of writing every day, and if you pick your keywords and topics wisely, you’re in business!

Also on the plus side, if the social networking sites buried your content under layers of clicks (e.g. State -> County -> City), the stand alone blog puts all your content right there on the home page. This is a very good solution in terms of Search Engine Optimization, especially if you take care to optimize the “front matter” that appears above your posts.

On the minus side, I believe that the big down side to the standalone blog approach for Realtors® is the is the problem of how big your audience is. A lot of (electronic) ink is spilled on the virtue of establishing yourself as an expert and gaining a following in blogging, but the fact remains that the blogs with the biggest audiences in real estate are not about their local areas, but are really blogs about blogging, or blogs about real estate trends or technology in general.

At the national level, It’s great to have a readership of 4000 or so out of hundreds of millions of Americans. But if your focus is local, your local area blog will do the most good when integrated into an IDX solution where your users can search for real estate listings. Otherwise you’re developing content that may attract a search engine, without the “killer offer” of homes for sale.

In Part 3 of the series, we’ll address this problem when we take a look at the third (and, we believe, the best) option for a blogging platform — combining your blog and web site into one site.

One other possibility that we should mention in passing is creating “a standalone blog”, but setting it up on what will later be a full fledged web site. Though it may seem counterintuitive to put a blog in a “subdirectory” when there’s not much going on in the main directory, the advantages to this approach are the ability to begin to get content indexed and to establish reputation with the search engines. (The well known “Google sandbox” effect is used to describe the fact that Google does not rank new sites very well). Though somewhat more expensive than creating a free standalone blog and later moving it to a web site, this approach ensures that all the links to your content will remain in place once you move.