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Posted by John Lockwood on October 10th, 2006

I was talking to a Realtor® colleague the other day who was good enough to call and let me know one of my sites was down. Over the course of the conversation we started talking about search engine optimization and the like, and I told him my opinion that as more Realtors® compete for top keyword positions and the search engines continue to refine their algorithms, search engine optimization has become more difficult and labor intensive.

What that means for Realtors® is that traffic is harder to lure to your site. This raises the stakes for being able to convert more visitors once they get there. This agent told me he was paying $600 per month on pay per click advertising, but when I brought up the issue of landing pages, he said “What’s that?”

With that question in my mind, I thought we’d start with the basics. I would suggest that some of the confusion about landing pages springs from the fact that there really are two good working definitions. A landing page should do either one (preferably both) of the following two things.

1. Contain content that a search engine will consider to be appropriate for a high ranking for a keyword combination that your visitors will be searching for.
2. Contain an offer and a way to contact you that will be compelling enough to convert a visitor into a lead. (Generally in a real estate site we want a conversion to a buyer or seller lead. For an eCommerce site the definition of conversion may be an actual sale).

So a landing page can be a traffic generator, or it can be a lead generator once the traffic gets there, or both.

You can think of a landing page as a sort of a minature version of your entire site and your entire Internet marketing campaign (or lack of one). All Realtors® — whether they can turn a computer on or not — fall somewhere on the following Internet Marketing Spectrum.

Real Estate Marketing Spectrum — Where Do You Fit?

Of course, in the best of all worlds, your landing page will rank high in the search engines, and your visitors will convert at a high rate when they get there. (High traffic plus high conversions, quadrant 1).

Perhaps the next best case is where your conversion rate is somewhat low, but you’re so good at generating traffic that you still make a good living. (Quadrant 3). I myself spent many happy years in quadrant 3, and I suspect that most of the current cult of real estate blogging is driven by the fact that blogging is a great quadrant 3 activity.
Also acceptable is the case where your traffic is paid for (for example, pay per click), and your conversion rate on the pages they land on is high enough to more than cover your costs. In this case, you’re likely to have low traffic and high conversions (Quadrant 2).

The worst case, of course, is where you have low traffic and low conversions, i.e., quadrant 4. One case of this is, of course, what many Realtors® do: they have no web site at all. Actually this isn’t as horrific as it sounds, because in this case the agent has zero web site traffic, and zero web site conversions, but their financial outlay is also zero. So at least they have company floor, open houses, cold calling, and whatever other prospecting tools may be in their arsenal to work with. Another possibility is the favorite of listing agents, the YIHAWS option. (”Yeah, I Have A Web Site”). In other words, you paid somebody something to have a site, so you can tell your sellers where your site is. You may still have pitifully small traffic and conversions, but since having the site may help you close a seller to get a listing or two, the money spent on your web site may not be a total loss.

We’re going to talk more about landing pages in Part 2 of this article, but for now, just remember that the goal of a landing page is to get you and your web site out of quadrant four.