Once you have driven the traffic to your website, it's hard to keep them. With bounce rates approaching 70% to 80%, it's easy to see that searchers expect to immediately get value form a website. Moreover, keeping visitors on your site for longer than a minute is equally daunting. So how do you improve these numbers?

Provide Rich, Local Content

One key in real estate is obvious—you need the listings people are interested in. But if everyone has the same listings via IDX, how do you stand out from the rest? Part of it is accomplished using the same techniques that got the visitor there in the first place—rich, local content. Allow people to explore the area and understand what the people, schools and activities in the various communities and neighborhoods you serve are like.

But it takes more than that. Really engaging people means allowing them to get taken in by the ways they can search for their "best place."

Engage Your Traffic in the Search Process

Well over half of home buyers stated that the "quality of the neighborhood" was a significant deciding factor in their purchase. The way people define "quality" varies based on who they are and what's important to them. Yet how many sites are there that let someone search for listings based on all the neighborhood factors that are important to them?