Understanding your real estate website’s traffic statistics helps you refine your online marketing approach and improve you Internet presence.

RE/MAX used Google’s analytics to rethink their real estate website. After incorporating changes spurred by website traffic analysis feedback, RE/MAX improved their return on investment by driving leads to their real estate agents for less money.

However, in order to use the statistics, you need to understand what the statistics are reporting.

Website traffic analysis software, such as Urchin and Google’s Analytics, allows you to review:

• which search engines or websites are directing traffic to your site,
• which pages receive the most traffic,
• which pages are the highest entry and exit points, and
• average time visitors remain on your website.

Three main areas to look at are “hits per day” which includes search engine spiders checking the site; “sessions per day”; and “pageviews per day”. To measure how captivating your site is, simply compare the number of sessions to the number of pageviews. Google Analytics reports give this figure as “Average pageviews per session”. The higher the number the better since it indicates that your website viewers are checking more than one page per visit. Sessions that only have one pageview usually indicate that your visitor came and went without finding value in your site. Google also gives you feedback on the average amount of time website visitors stayed on your site.

The other area you should check is the “unique visitors”. This indicates visitors browsing your site from different IP addresses. This helps you figure whether you have repeat visitors from one area, such as a search engine’s spiders, or visitors from several sites. One item to also take into consideration is you may have several hits from services like Comcast or Qwest that actually are unique visitors that are using the same Internet portal.

One caveat is to beware of certain free analytic software since the price of the free software is to allow advertising on your site. Internet Marketing Consultants (IMC) uses traffic tracking software that accurately follows user browsing patterns without turning your website into someone else’s revenue generator.

IMC uses software that tracks search engine ranking as well as Google Analytics and Urchin’s traffic analysis software to fine-tune real estate agents’ websites to position themselves to capture their target market. Contact us today if you need a website that brings you a return on your Internet marketing dollars or if you are adding to your marketing muscle with a new site.

The constancy of a real estate website keeps your marketing presence strong through the unpredictable nature of the market. The April 2008 homes sales figures show an increase in residential sales that surprised market forecasters who figured for a Fall 2008 turn around in the real estate market. Then comes June’s figures that surprise everyone with the steepness of housing drop. The chief economist for the National Association of Realtors pointed out that April’s imminent sales contracts picked up, notably in regions that suffered significant price drops, “Bargain hunters have entered the market en masse, especially in areas that have experienced double-digit price declines.” The sales figures did not note whether the buying market was driven by home buyers or investors capitalizing on the home prices.

The April sales contracts turn-around was most marked in the Midwest and West real estate markets, possibly indicating that these markets have homes priced to meet both a buyer’s interest and borrowing capacity. Even with the bad news of the economy reacting to both home sales figures, continuing subprime credit ripples, and the federal bail out of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the good news is real estate is a hot topic, keeping it in the consumers mind.

Besides the multi-billion dollar bailout, Congress is currently considering giving another tax break to home buyers. If the bill passes, it may help reinforce the improvements in residential real estate sales. Another real estate tax break may give impetus to releasing the pent-up demand built up by a population increase that has not seen a corresponding increase in home sales. The United States continues to have home sales levels taht are more typical of the market 10 years ago. In the last 10 years, the population has increased by 25 million people. The 2009 resale housing market will be affected by another long term economic situation: the increasing cost of building new new homes. With China’s economy hungry for steel, copper and oil, the cost of materials and transportation is increasing, which has a direct affect on the entry level pricing for new home construction.

With the attention to real estate in the news, a real estate agent website ranking high on the Google and Yahoo searches stands to harvest leads from the market-tracking home buyers. These buyers are finding current mortgage rates and the low real estate prices matching their personal loan prequalifcation levels. Although April’s mix of sales did contain a high number of foreclosure and bank sales, it was not the majority. A real estate agent from the Gulf Coast of Florida remarked about the banks’ pricing of foreclosed homes, “The ‘real’ is back in real estate and homes are now affordable.” With June’s figures and lower home prices, investors are finding certain real estate markets where the rental income exceeds the mortgage payments and thus a good time to invest.

If improving your real estate website with a blog or simply getting your own real estate agent website has been on your back-burner due to the market slowdown, now is a good time to seriously put it on your Action List. With the threat of inflation in the news, buyers are looking to protect their wealth by investing in good deals on vacation condos, second homes and retirement properties. These investors are most likely to make their moves in the near future, as interest rates start moving up. Internet Marketing Consultants’ real estate websites have helped many real estate agents increase their warm leads and home sales. Is it time to see if IMC can help you increase your warm sales leads and home sale closings?

Internet Marketing Design creates real estate websites that organically rank high on the Google and Yahoo searches by coupling professional graphics, content-rich writing and search engine optimization (SEO). IMC’s real estate website designs have a history of providing real estate agents with high ranking sites that garner 10 to 40 warm leads a day. With an SEO strategy that finds niche markets, each guestbook lead is pre-screened since they have arrived at the guestbook through a specific keyword search.

Organic ranking is the term used for websites that are returned by the search engine for a keyword search, not the websites that turn up due to either placement or pay-per-click payments. Organic search engine ranking is the best ranking for your real estate website to have, since most homebuyers searching the Internet for their next home or a real estate agent to list their home for sale follow the organically listed websites first.

Breckenridge and Denver Colorado are just two of the of the many major markets that IMC clients enjoy top-billing in the organic searches for keywords for both general real estate and niche market properties. With clients around the United States, our clients have found that the investment in a an IMC real estate website design has paid for itself many times over with the new business it attracts.

With the addition of IMC’s successful Version 9 hybrid custom-template real estate website, real estate agents have a platform for launching their personal web presence with added traffic and content generating optional features such as Feature Listings, article managers for adding local area information articles and a Real Estate Blog. The IMC real estate blogs are efficient at attracting interest to your domain name instead of driving business to a nationally owned blogging site.

As with any market, “market correction” downturns call for better investment of marketing budgets. With over 90% of real estate customers turning to the Internet to check the market’s offerings, a real estate website professionally designed to organically rank high for your keywords is crucial to your market presence. IMC’s website designs have the successful track record to help you carve out your niche in your local real estate market.

New Realtors need all the real estate marketing exposure they can get. According to National Association of Realtors recent report on their 2007 surveys Realtors who have been in the real estate business 2 years or less earn a median income of $10,500 a year and only get 2% of their leads from referrals. What can a new Realtor do to increase their chances of success in that critical first two years of building momentum - the time period when most Realtors quit the business for a more secure paycheck? Internet Marketing Consultants (IMC) recently introduced its Version 9 Real Estate Web Design especially designed for new Realtors.

When the marketing budget is tight, as with most new Realtors, one of the best investments is in a professional real estate website. Internet Marketing Consultants (IMC) has over a decade of helping new Realtors enter the market with a real estate website that has a very polished and attractive layout, engineered to rank in the search engines (and thus attract leads) as well as a modular architecture to which additional selling tools can be added as the marketing budget grows. The modularity feature of the site allows for future expansion with a number of avenues - blog, neighborhood news, additional buyer, seller or investor pages - available to add keyword-rich content to your website.

Version 9 comes in seven different color schemes that were chosen after studying market data on what color schemes attract visitors to a website, and more importantly, what color schemes tend to make visitors want to stay. Visit our web page to view the different color schemes. Of course, as a website design company, IMC can customize your real estate website design with a custom color scheme as a website upgrade design feature.

As with the rest of IMC’s Agent Select website designs, Version 9 can be upgraded with a custom homepage that features a Flash slide show in place of the main banner image. This real estate website design is very versatile in its ability to adapt any number of customizations to the basic website.

Although Version 9 was created to give new Realtors the advantage of starting out with a cost-effective real estate website design, veteran real estate agents were quick to see the advantages of the versatile design. Recently IMC finished a Version 9 real estate website that included a custom home page, the real estate blog, neighborhood news articles tool, and the featured properties listings tool. The Realtor was aware of the advantages the various Internet real estate marketing tools gave his company - both in appealing to home buyers searching for their next home as well as the search engines combing the website for content.

Stack the deck of business cards in your favor by getting your professionally designed real estate website to attract that 90% of the market using the Internet to search the listings in your market.

In a competitive real estate market, control of your Internet marketing means directing how you appear to 90% of the potential home buyers searching your market. The National Association of Realtors (NAR) reported earlier in 2008 that the number of home buyers using an Internet search to check the latest listings of homes for sale increased almost 10% from 2007 to 90%. Yet, according to a report released May 14th, only 60% of real estate agents have a personal real estate website. The remaining 40% depend on their real estate firm’s website for Internet visibility or work for a real estate company that has no Internet marketing.

This is a boon for real estate agents who have secured their domain names and personal agent websites, and even more so for agents who invested in a professional real estate website design that has brought them attention, traffic and leads.

The benefit of having your own real estate website is that it builds credibility to you as a professional Realtor and drives leads to your phone or email inbox. From Internet Marketing Consultants’ (IMC) research, one of the greatest points of leverage for an agent’s personal website is adding a real estate blog. You can research blog effectiveness for your real estate market - simply type in your market’s keywords and check the personal agent or local Realtor websites that rank and keep tabs on which ones consistently rank high. Of those ranking high, you can do some secondary research and see how many times a week or month posts are made to the blog.

Just in a quick search on May 15th, the number one real estate website for “Dallas real estate” has a blog with at least one entry a week. The number two position for “Cleveland real estate” also has a very active blog. In the very competitive market of Chicago, the first local real estate website ranking on the first page has a very active blog.

IMC has found blogs to help its clients Internet presence in several ways:

• the blog adds keyword-rich content to the site,
• it is the easiest way to add content and address real estate issues in your area, and
• the blog software “pings” the major search engines, telling them a post has just been made.

Search engines usually browse inactive websites every three weeks. Real estate websites that add material on a regular basis get be checked every week. With a blog entry, the website is checked every time the search engine receives a ping.

In a time when the majority of property searches occurs on the Internet, your professionally designed IMC real estate website is a key marketing asset where you can control the content and are in the driver’s seat to increase your visibility.

1. How does real estate website optimization deal with niche real estate markets?

Discovering real estate niche markets is a two pronged discovery: the real estate agent’s market experience and a search of keyword usage databases. The reason for directing several web pages’ content to a niche market is to harvest the small quantity, but high quality leads. The use of the niche keywords provides the screening process that tells your website visitor exactly the market you can help them with and tells you exactly what kind of property your visitor is searching for.

2. As an agent, I don’t have direct control over my website’s meta tags - what can I do to boost my website’s rankings?

Due to years of “keyword stuffing” of meta tags - the practice of putting any subject related keyword in the meta tags regardless of the web page’s actual content - search engines assign a low priority to meta tags. The highest priorities go to a web page’s content, the quality (more than quantity) of incoming links and the amount of web traffic your website attracts - all areas a real estate agent can control on their website.

Real estate agents are actually in the driver’s seat for helping their website’s visibility. Investing in adding a blog and neighborhood news tool and taking some time every week to add content on your real estate market is the best thing you can do for your real estate website. Next, follow some of our earlier tips to make sure you have taken advantage of all the qualified (i.e. have to do with real estate in some way) areas you can to place incoming links to your website. Third, make sure you have your website address on your business card and direct your clients to visit your website (and give you feedback).

3. I hear that Flash is bad for websites and yet some of the highest ranking real estate websites are using it, what gives?

The reason some designers caution against the use of Flash is that it does take up valuable real estate on the web page and does not provide content that the search engines can read, especially any words that are graphics and not text. Some Flash home pages also are so graphic intensive they take a long time to load, causing a certain percentage of website visitors to quickly leave. But this well-intended advice must be balanced with the idea that appealing to the search engine is not the main purpose for your real estate website.

Flash is a very effective marketing tool to present a captivating real estate slide show. Catching the attention of your website visitors is the doorway to capturing leads. On the technical side, there are ways to limit Flash’s loading time. True, the search engines can’t read the graphics, but if the real estate website is designed correctly, there is enough content on the page for the search engines to index the page. Bottom line: your real estate website is a marketing portal whose target is the website visitor. Create the site that has an attractive design and the best content and the search engines will follow.

Internet Marketing Consultants (IMC) takes a systems approach to creating a seamless real estate Internet marketing strategy and website design. With the continued migration of real estate clients migrating to the Internet to do their real estate searches, effectiveness of a real estate website in attracting and landing leads is ever more important.

IMC integrates the eye-catching design and content as well as a website platform that allows real estate agents to react swiftly to changes in the markets tastes and direction.

In the ever-evolving world of the Internet, IMC’s marketers, writers and designers are always studying and implementing the latest website standards, content presentation and search engine optimization techniques. Yesterday’s successfully launched real estate website always improves the one to be created tomorrow.

In helping our clients establish a high return on investment Internet presence, part of IMC’s Internet marketing system includes:

1. Keyword research with agents to hone down market areas and discover under-served area niche markets;
2. Creation of fast loading, attention-grabbing Flash slide shows;
3. Setting up a website framework that allows agents to add content to the site easily and in a search engine friendly manner through feature listings, blogs and neighborhood news tools; and
4. Linking busy real estate agents with professional writers to provide excellent real estate market material for the website.

If your real estate website investment has not brought you the warm leads that other successful agents are enjoying, then it may be time to boost your image and Internet presence by contacting Internet Marketing Consultants at (303) 688-1331 and we can go over the first step in improving your financial picture.

It is our mission to help our clients Win on the Web!

We take a holistic, synergistic approach to internet marketing. We realize that the sum of a truly effective web presence is greater than the sum of its parts. Let us help you take your internet marketing to the next level.

Internet Marketing Consultants, a premier real estate website design company, started out in the photography side of the marketing business. In 1995, as the Internet began gathering steam, we added website creation to our marketing arsenal. As you can imagine, IMC has evolved into more of a website design and creation marketing company, using photography to help the Internet marketing.

Over the years of creating websites for presidential hopefuls, top Fortune 500 companies and small regional business, market demand moved IMC into focusing on real estate website design. After 10 years we have nine templates that provide the foundation for our hybrid custom and template designed websites, with a tenth design in the works.

Real estate agents from the top firms - Keller Williams, RE/MAX and Coldwell Banker have used IMC’s real estate website design services to create agent websites to generate more leads for them than their brief bios on the main brokerage websites.

Though focusing on real estate websites, IMC’s search engine optimization, content generation and photographic editing skills have use our small business website system to create business websites for a wide variety of businesses. The fundamental process is the same: tell the world the benefits of your business, create the keyword rich content and set that in the background of an artistically pleasing design. IMC has found the balanced design that fulfills the website visitors’ desire for solid content, clear navigation and interest-grabbing graphics.

One of IMC’s strongest traits is adaptability. Adaptability to customer’s website needs, website visitors’ taste and search engines search algorithms. This adaptability has led IMC to its current position as a cutting edge, website design company. IMC values its high customer satisfaction and retention track record as a sign that it has helped its clients successfully stay on top of Internet and real estate market changes.

There is no time like the present to use IMC’s website design capabilities to boost your ascending real estate business star. As in all areas of the real estate business, in a tough market, success favors professional experience - yours and IMC’s.

In real estate, location and appearance is of supreme importance. For real estate websites, ranking location on Google’s and Yahoo’s searches and the website’s appearance are of critical importance. Reliance on professional website designers brings necessary expertise and attention to these Internet marketing details.

High visibility in the market that 90% of home buyers use is important. Internet marketing has proven its effectiveness for real estate agents and brokers who invested in websites that have kept them on the first pages of Google and Yahoo. Each area has its own real estate market niches and search word variants that are necessary to know when positioning your real estate website.

Internet Marketing Consultants (IMC) has helped many top-notch real estate firms establish commanding presences on the Google and Yahoo search results through the design of the websites content and finding and using the strategic keywords for the market.

IMC’s commitment to developing effective lead-generating real estate websites has helped real estate companies in Colorado, RealEstateColorado.net and ColoradoHorseProperty.com move up to and stay in the top 10 search results for their real estate keywords. IMC also works with the real estate agents to present the best bio page, from coaching points of how to write for the customer to enhancing agent photos that may have been taken under poor lighting conditions or with distracting backdrops.

IMC offers the most advanced real estate Internet marketing tools to leverage the most from the Internet exposure. Blogs and neighborhood news tools are regularly used by the top selling real estate websites - feeding the interest of the visitors with open house dates, local news and new listings and also providing the keyword content indexed by the search engines.

MLS listings are easily integrated into the IMC created real estate websites along with the ability of agents to promote their featured properties. Agents use the featured properties tool to showcase their properties and then write articles in their blog or news tool to further showcase the property’s neighborhood’s features.

IMC has experience helping agents From British Columbia down to California and from Oregon to Texas and Colorado to Florida and up to the New York market. Regardless of whether the real estate markets’ economic picture is picking up or still in a recession, the real estate websites have proven to be valuable investments for generating leads and follow-on sales. Similar to “If a tree falls with no one to hear it, is there a sound?” it may be asked, “If you have a real estate website that isn’t visible in the search engine rankings, can you be seen?” IMC professionally designed websites have a track record for visibility and visible results.