The Real Estate Guide to Driving Traffic

According to the National Association of REALTORS, over 90% of Homes Buyers use the Internet in their home search. In fact, it's the first stop for over one-third of all buyers. Today, the Internet is a staple in the real estate search process, so much so that an equal number of buyers found their homes online as found their homes directly through an agent.

As the Internet becomes a primary source for buyers, it's crucial to make a best first impression. This means getting noticed in a pool filled with major SEO and SEM budgets geared toward driving traffic to real estate destination sites. It's not an easy task, but here are some highly efficient ways to drive traffic to your real estate platform:

• Supply locally relevant content on communities, neighborhoods, and schools – With well over a billion real estate searches starting on Google alone each year, it's crucial to be in those first pages to even get a shot. And half or more of those searches contain some level of geography in the search (a city, county, neighborhood, school district, etc.). So supplying locally relevant content makes a huge difference in the net you cast and in the relevance of the content you present.

• Create unique community, neighborhood, and school landing pages – This a great way to bolster site content, boost your website's content to the top of search engine results, and cast a wider net of likely search terms. To complement this, generate paragraphs that draw people in. This engages better (producing more time on site) and is more natural to people than statistics, charts, graphs and tables. Coupled with a well-thought strategy around page tags, domains and paid search, this will give you an upper-hand from the competition.

• Utilize display advertising - Beyond your site, there are also entirely new ways to get yourself and your listings in front of your desired audience. With the latest advances in display advertising, it's possible to "bring your listings" and other unique content to the consumer rather than asking them to come to you.

• Creating "search widgets" that can be used on partner sites, mobile devices and social media networks – Sharable widgets that can be placed on social media pages to drive links back to the main site. Like display advertising, this can help you engage searchers before users even get to your site. The consumer then gets to search your listings where they're comfortable and clicks to your site when they find what they're looking for. This enhanced experience promotes your brand and your listings all at once.

The arsenal of tools that you need to drive traffic to your site is ever-expanding and ever-crucial. Onboard is continuously creating new and more effective ways to help get you noticed and make you stand out from the crowd.

To view the original article, visit the Onboard Informatics blog.