The site needs to provide information and resources that potential buyers and sellers want to see. It isn't about you, your excellent sales results or your company's long history. On the first visit to your site, you'll lose or keep that visitor long-term based on whether you've given them what they want for information.
1. By Far, It's About Searching All the Listings
Hopefully, your MLS system provides you with an IDX feed. IDX is "Internet Data Exchange" among real estate brokerages. It allows you to present a search page where your visitors can search the listings of all participating brokers.Careful gathering of web site traffic statistics has shown that this listing search page is by far the most-visited page with the longest time spent there by visitors. Without it, you're simply not going to get the traffic you want. Opinions about whether to force sign-up to search vary significantly. You might want to test both ways to see which works best in your area.
2. Area Market Trends and Statistics
Individual MLS rules will dictate what you can display on a real estate web site as far as sold statistics. You may only be able to place gross annual stats. However, most will allow you to provide these statistics to potential clients who make a request for them.This is also a great way to capture prospect email addresses. Do some surface and long-term statistical graph representations on the site, and then offer a form for them to request more detailed reports. You'll find this quite popular with both buyers and sellers, and you'll expand your prospect list quickly.
3. Local Government Resources
Provide pages with brief descriptions and links to city, county, state and federal government offices in the area. The descriptions help the visitor to determine which link they need to visit and help the search engines to rank your page properly.4. Maps, Maps and More Maps
Don't assume that your site visitors are from the area or have even been there. Provide maps that help them to figure out where property listings are located, especially when your MLS uses neighborhood or subdivision names as area field identifiers.There are now many free interactive mapping services on the web that you can integrate into your site. In vacation or resort areas, this is one of the most popular site features, as almost none of the buyers are local.
5. Local Utilities and New Resident Information
Don't think that this information is not helpful because they're already moving and not a potential client. Many buyers move into rental units while they search for a home to purchase. If your site helped them to get their utilities set up in the move, you're a leg up with the competition to help them with their home search.Another less obvious value to this page is in saving you time with clients. It's really easy in your closing process with buyers to send them a link to the page on your site with who to contact for electricity, phone, gas, etc.
6. A Blog, if You Can Do One on Your Site
1. Keep visitors returning for fresh information: By making regular posts to your blog about current events, activities, neighborhood association meetings and more, you encourage visitors to visit regularly for the latest info.2. Position yourself as the area expert: Regular posts about local codes, regulations, real estate market trends, etc. position you as the knowledgeable professional they want for their transaction.
3. The search engines love them: New and changing content gets better search engine exposure than a static site over time.
