Your real estate website is the hub of all of your real estate marketing. In this video I explain the three top reasons that you should own your real estate website.
As real estate website designers and real estate marketing consultants, we’ve spent the last 16+ years assisting real estate agents, real estate teams and real estate brokers/brokerages in developing diversified and integrated marketing strategies.
You have many marketing channels available to you today; however, it’s essential that these channels all tie together in order for you to create a rounded cross-channel strategy.
At the hub of all of your real estate marketing is your website; then you have Real Estate Social Media Marketing: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter
It’s great that you diversify the channels from email, social media, print, advertisements, everything else, but at the center of it all is your website. And that’s what ties it together. I mean, this sucker should be developing a hundred plus leads a day for you. If you really want to develop a real estate business, have the salespeople making Coles have leads to give out to your agents.
Target 100 Real Estate Leads A Day Across All Your Real Estate Marketing Channels
If you’re a broker or have an ISA in place, a hundred leads a day is a great target number for your real estate website in terms of leads generated. Now, you’re never going to get there unless you number one, diversify the channels.
Tying Your Marketing Channels Together
Now, you put in effect SEO for not only just the website, but the videos as well. And this is where email and the other channels really tie together because between them all, you can dramatically raise the amount of traffic that you get seen to the website overall, by using a unified strategy, that’s each element or each channel is helping you build up the visibility of the other videos by driving traffic to them across different channels.
So, imagine it like this, a video on YouTube that you post, If you’re just starting off, unpromoted, you’ll likely get a couple of views on it.
It was really not going to be a lot. Um, Google and YouTube have two real separate entities in that. Google is a search engine for finding answers to questions, which is something that they’re really focusing on today. And YouTube is a video search engine.
How YouTube Ranks Your Real Estate Videos
YouTube’s algorithm ranks the videos by their popularity. Google’s search engine ranks pages by their popularity. These two things do sort of go hand in hand. Take a YouTube video, for example. If you publish that video to YouTube and then you send out an email to 10,000 people saying, go watch my video and 500 people go and watch the video.
That’s great in itself. You’ve got the 500 views on the video and YouTube acted as the place for it to be hosted. However, those 500 users that you’ve sent over to YouTube have now given that video, a number of views, YouTube knows how long these people went through the video.
So if they were, if the best videos are on YouTube or about 15 minutes in length. So if you went about, uh, if they have most viewers went to 10 minutes in length, then you choose going to think, okay, this is great. Um, a great video, we’re going to put it. Um, we’re going to push it up the algorithm for other people.
At the end of other videos that have been seen, um, when they show other related videos or just starts playing the next one, your video could be one of those now is important to drive as much traffic as possible. So that video, so one would, um, post the video to YouTube and then send that out in an email to your five, 10, 20,000 contacts, and then posted on all of your social media channels, and then probably boost the posts there. If you’ve got some campaign budget for that. And that’s a way to boost that video to get more visibility of it.
How Google Ranks Your Real Estate Blog Posts
Now, Google search engine, the blog post, and this is something that I do. So I have the blog about the blog and I have the blog post itself. So what I do is this video that you’re watching right now, this is going to go on YouTube. And then I’m going to embed this video in the contents of the page.
YouTube has scanned the video. They know what my video is about, and they’ve got specific data that I’m providing them on what my video is about, such as the the title, the description with keywords.
When you embed this video into the blog post on the website, and Google’s going to scan that. Now they’re going to see that there’s a relevant video, relevant to the content that I’m talking about. And I can break this up into a couple of different sections, but it’s all about creating this level of relevancy and then driving traffic.
Then you send out a certain number of emails saying view the blog post, and also push both the blog post and the video across social media. Promote them both equally. And this, altogether, as a real estate marketing strategy, is what really drives up the engagement.
With every blog post, you should have some sort of call to action in place.
So number one is to have a clear strategy for all of the channels where your pushing your real estate marketing, These channels all of work together, and create an effective real estate marketing campaign strategy.
If you just focus on one, it’s not great because you don’t get necessarily the support of the others, and you’re missing out on different audiences, and the impact of a cross-channel real estate marketing strategy.
It is a little more time consuming, in that some content has to be created for specific audiences; for example, you have a younger audience on Instagram than you do on Facebook. However, the effects will pay off ten-fold.
Ownership of Your Website
Think about Zillow, compass, Keller Williams, Coldwell banker, right? Those guys do not get a new website every year, every couple of years, every 10 years ever.
So difference when you’re a, when you, when you have a business of that size, right? You’re not replacing your website because it’s your website. A lot of real estate agents are we’ll go to a template based solution. Yes, they pop up fine. As far as some content comes with them and all that.
However, if you really want to build a website and if you really want something that is a part of your business. And like I said, at the beginning of this video, this sucker should be generating a hundred leads a day for you.
You need to own your website.
There’s, there’s no, there’s no ifs, ands or buts about this.
If your website provider goes out of business, that’s a problem for you.
If you develop a massive site and all your content is on it, that’s a problem for you. If your business grows, or technology changes in real estate,
Think About Owning Your Real Estate Marketing Assets and Owning Your Real Estate Website Like Owning vs. Renting A House
Think of owning your real estate marketing assets like like renting a house versus owning a house.
If you own it, it’s yours, you’re in the foundation. You’re in the mineral rights. You own the water rights underneath the property. You can make, you can make additions to it. You can change anything. You don’t have to ask anybody.
You can put a tunnel by the house next door and put a tunnel to the two, if you want.
So you could think about your CRM system or email marketing system or other systems like that. You can do whatever you want with it, if you own it. That means you can choose the CRM. That’s the best fit for the business. You can choose all these little bits that are the best fit for the business.
Either cost-wise functionality wise, um, you can add on other bits and make them talk to each other. Um, you can have agents come in and they can have their own CRM system, and you’re not forcing them to use yours. Let’s say if you’re a broker, some, some little niche advantage like this too, where if you have a platform system, number one, you don’t have access down to the foundation.
So you can’t always do all of the things necessary to get the best rankings you don’t have open, um, API APIs to make systems talk to each other. In a lot of cases, these are closed loop systems. They’re great for something to pop up. They serve an immediate need.
However, there’s a long-term goal is it’s as efficient to develop your own website from scratch than it is to go through the motions of setting up one of the templates and having it just as an expense, because if that goes away at some point later in your career, and hopefully a busier later in your career, and you’ve got more people, it is a much bigger problem.
Real Estate Marketing: Real Estate SEO
So if SEO, um, and lead generation are of the, on, on, on the list of things to do things to improve on this year, then certainly, uh, the first step in that would be to own the platform. If you’re investing in content, just like if you, you were investing in, you wouldn’t put a pool into a, into a rental property, uh, if there was nothing in it for you. And that’s the same thing with a website, if you’re going to invest in SEO, which is content building page, building a lengthy process, then, uh, certainly you want to own the platform and own the product of all of your work. Number three, stop switching providers. If you switch every couple of years, the links that you have, so not your domain name, but the forward slash whatever.
Real Estate SEO results builds up over a significant period of time. I mean, if you consider that it takes three months for a page to sort of fully rank, I mean, we’ll get results within a few days on most pages or videos or whatever it is that we’re posting. But if you think that over three months, that’s kind of like where the page is fully optimized. Then ditching a provider after two years is not a terribly long period of time. I mean, it, it, the, the life of that content is so much more than, than what you’ve, what you’ve cut off so early.
Stop Switching Real Estate Marketing Providers (Real Estate Website Providers) and OWN Your Real Estate Marketing
So switching providers is one of the worst things that you can do. And if you own your real estate website, you will never have to switch providers. You can have many different providers work on your website. The thing is hosted independently in an account with Google cloud. I mean, granted, you don’t own the actual metal box of the server anymore.
We have our very first client from like 2004 and we still work on their websites, but that we don’t have to, they work with us because they want to work with us. Not because they’re forced to work with us because we’re, we’re, we’re tied in like that. So it’s a good relationship for us to have.
We can also, because every, because you have the keys to the house, you can give those keys to any work, man that is going to do any aspects of it. So it doesn’t necessarily have to be us doing social. We have other people that work on SEO. We certainly interconnect with, uh, with, uh, with other CRM systems and, and other tools, whether it’s MailChimp, constant contact, um, you know, our IMAX CRM, product lion desk sync, like any of those guys, like you can, you can have your website talk to whoever you want, but this, this one asset of your business is the central piece of all of your marketing. And if you start changing providers links that you’ve given to the insurance agents and all of these back links that you might be, um, working to accumulate or, or different reference points, different URLs that you’ve put on postcards that somebody put on a fridge from a year ago, all of these things change and they should never change because you don’t know how long that business cards sitting on somebody’s desk.
Real Estat Marketing Evaluation
If you want to talk about the options for converting your existing template website into a standalone custom real estate website solution that you own outright, schedule a free real estate marketing consultation with my team.
As real estate website designers, we have over 16 years experience (as of 2021) building real estate websites for single agents, teams, and broekrages.
The cost of a custom real estate website is not dissimilar than the setup of a template based system with thousands of options, integrations, and customizations available.
