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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.

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).