Florida Realtors with their large markets of out-of-state home buyers find that their real estate website – both in terms of search engine visibility and marketing positioning – becoming a more critical marketing element in their continuing business success.

The setback in Florida property values can be used in a real estate website marketing strategy tailored to attract American retirees who experienced depreciation in their retirement accounts and investments. Finding the keywords, adding the web content retirees are looking for, as well as maintaining an active real estate blog on current market conditions are critical steps to getting visible to an out-of-state market.

Four factors help contribute to shaping Florida’s current real estate market:

1. Florida’s jobless rate is higher than the national average,
2. More people moving out of the state for the first time in decades creating a greater buyers’ market,
3. Midwestern and Northeastern retirees prefer moving to a warmer climate, and
4. No state income tax.

With these factors in mind, refining keywords and search engine optimization to reach retiring Baby Boomers and the wealthy may well play a part of a successful online marketing campaign. Two of the biggest target states for the Florida wealth migration are New York and California. Tom Golisano, the Buffalo Sabres owner gave tax savings as his primary reason for his Florida home buying move.

Besides targeting out-of-state wealthy and retiree migrations, Florida real estate websites also are targeting the Hispanic migration moving from South and Central America. As the Hispanic population grows, bi-lingual real estate websites position themselves to reach the largest inward bound market – Miami alone draws over half of its foreign home buyers from Latin America. Along with bi-lingual real estate websites, Realtors are traveling major cities of South America to hold property investment seminars extolling the benefit of Florida’s home values and the weak dollar favoring South American currencies. Most Latin American investors are buying for the long-term – short-term speculation buying is not a part of the new buying wave.

IMCD’s search engine optimization, online Internet marketing and graphic design expertise have helped Florida Realtors position their real estate websites to hone in on Florida’s current market mix. Contact us if your real estate agency needs a real estate website that is effective in generating new sales leads.

Granted, a real estate website is a key element of a real estate marketing campaign, however every Realtor knows building relationships is also key to finding new and referral homebuyers. Combining relationship building with your online presence is key to creating an effective real estate website.

For over a decade, IMCD has developed real estate websites the meet both needs – high search engine results and a platform for a natural “conversation” between the agent and their web visitors.

The architecture, search engine optimization and wealth of content start agents and brokers off on the right foot for establishing a visible web presence. A standard, customized “About Us” web page gives real estate agents the freedom to reinforce their personal brand. In addition, IMC has found that agents using optional “Meet Our Agents” web page, integrated blog or Article Manager have the most effective real estate websites. These brokers and agents have a greater capacity to easily add up-to-date content to their website that helps build relationships as well as improve their standing in search engine results.

In marketing their home buying and selling services, real estate agents face an apparent dichotomy in marketing: on the one hand, they need to constantly reinforce their personal brand, which in website terms would mean their name is a specific and personal keyword to their brand. On the other hand, the keywords for their market are impersonal and heavily used by their competition. In building a personal brand agents face the marketing situation that personal keywords are not heavily searched and impersonal keywords are highly used.

IMC’s Agent Select real estate websites effectively join search engine optimization for the impersonal, highly used keywords with the use of the “long tail” personal keywords so agents can establish and maintain a visible web presence along with marketing that reinforces their brand on every web page.

In a random sampling of real estate websites built by agents using simple real estate website templates, the common mistake agents make is putting most of their marketing emphasis on their name as the key selling point. If they are only looking for home buyers or sellers who have heard of them, this may be sufficient marketing strategy. However, as an online real estate marketing strategy to gain new customers, it is a recipe for a poor return on their web investment.

For your effective real estate website, contact the online marketing experts at IMC, we know your market and how to position your branding message online to reach that market!

Realtors know that a competitive real estate web design is essential to establishing a highly visible online presence and improving their marketing.

With over 80% of home buyers turning to the Internet to search the available homes for sale, it pays to market online…if your real estate website is high on the search engine results.

How can a real estate agent find a real estate web design to compete with the national real estate websites? First, realize it isn’t a hopeless task – search engine rankings are in a constant state of change. Hitwise.com found that the top ten real estate sites, for all their search engine results dominance failed to interest 75% of the market.

The reasons for this may be two fold:

• Home buyers are looking for local companies that show expertise in the market and
• Searchers are using search terms of three or more words.

Both of these reasons favor personal real estate web designs over national listing websites.

With recent changes in Google’s search algorithm, local companies are given greater visibility. Interestingly, Microsoft’s Bing and Yahoo’s searches already ranked local companies higher in their searches. Now agents have a more level playing field in the search engine most of the market utilizes.

With the evolution of search techniques – people are using more words in their searches – long tail keywords are driving 80% of the traffic most real estate websites receive. The more long tail keywords agents can find for their market – and use – the wider they can cast their online fishing net. Just as in any sales funnel process, the wider the beginning of the funnel, the more people make it to the final sales stages. It is always a percentage game.

IMCD Website Design creates competitive real estate web designs that place clients’ websites on Google’s, Yahoo’s and Bing’s front page. By balancing graphic design, search engine optimization (SEO) for popular and long tail keywords, as well as helpful content for home buyers and sellers, real estate agents are able to utilize effective web designs to fast track their web marketing to profitability.

As recently as a few years ago, no one was using search terms over 5 words long. Now, as web visitors realize how powerful the search engines are at ferreting out specific information, keyword searches using 6 to 8 words has grown to 10% of the online searches.

Contact the SEO specialists at IMC to see how you can improve your online marketing and take advantage of long tail keywords for your market with our successful Agent Select custom and semi-custom real estate web designs.

Why should your real estate website tell a compelling story? Simple, home buyers and sellers, like most people are intrigued by stories. Your real estate website is your bully pulpit for creating your personal brand and brands are always made more memorable by having a story. Recitation of dry facts is as ineffective in real estate markets as it is in schools. Research has found that students retain 10% of what they learn in lectures after one year, whereas students not only retain all they know when learning in environments where there is a multi-dimensional story, they often know more since their curiosity is piqued and they continued learning.

Marketers know this and use it to imprint brands into part of the culture. The biggest brand in the world, Coke, has its story: originally getting brewed in someone’s backyard in Atlanta. Microsoft’s story? A college dropout becomes a billionaire and helps his early employees become wealthy.

Real estate websites have two main areas and ways agents can present their stories. The most obvious one is the  home page and the “About Us” page. Stories told from the “client’s benefit” point of view generate the most sales leads. Why? Because people love to read autobiographies. When website visitors can identify with a problem you helped someone solve in buying or selling their house, they then see you as the real estate expert that can eliminate a pain point in their life.

Testimonials can serve as very powerful mini-stories on your real estate website that reinforce your brand. Third party tales of benefits received are the most sought after marketing devices. These stories not only reveal benefits received, but by the nature of their objectiveness in the mind of the web visitor, they reinforce the credibility of your story and market positioning.

IMCD’s websites provides several optional add-on web page to our real estate websites that agents can use to craft their stories toward the buyer, seller or investor markets. Each market has different needs and different benchmarks for success. Trying to appeal to all markets on one page alone, such as the homepage, divests agents of the opportunity to add keyword-rich content that matches specific real estate keyword searches. Hitwise.com found that on many sites, the preponderance of visits came from these “long tail” searches. By adding web pages with different compelling stories, agents build a wider sales funnel and reap better lead generation rewards.

Just as home buyers rely on real estate agents to handle their transaction from start to finish, experienced agents rely on real estate web design companies to handle their real estate websites so they can focus on selling homes.

For over 14 years, IMCD has been helping agents field award-winning, sales lead generating real estate websites.

Instead of reinventing the wheel, real estate agents using IMC’s real estate website designs benefit from the following key design & SEO components:

1. The graphic design is balanced. The images support your real estate sales message, attract the visitor’s attention, are not over-powering and are fully search engine optimized.

2. Real estate web design incorporates Web 2.0 features of contact forms, blogs, and new property notification email sign-ups.

3. Intuitive and optimized navigation. All website pages are within 2 to 3 clicks of the home page and the navigation architecture allows the search engines to index the importance of each pages content.

4. Cascading Style Sheets are used to optimize keyword use throughout the website’s architecture. IMC makes the use of your use keywords count the most!

5. Professional marketing support. Your headlines and web content are created using both marketing and search engine optimization principles. In search engine results, keyword placement is critical to gaining first page results placements.

6. Graphic designs utilizing color palettes that attract most people. One of the common short-comings of amateur real estate web design is the creator uses color combinations that appeal to them without realizing a great body of marketing study would quickly show them that their choice of colors repels of 75% of their visitors. A tried and true formula is always a more timely and higher return on investment choice than the school of hard knocks!

7. Flash slide shows that balanced between graphic emphasis to your message and search engine optimization of your website and included in your basic package. Often web design companies charge extra for Flash slide shows, however, IMC builds the benefit of Flash into every custom web design and customized template web design.

As a real estate professional, side step the online marketing school of hard knocks and accelerate the effectiveness of your online real estate marketing campaign with one of IMC’s cost-effective semi-custom template real estate web designs. Contact our web design specialists to see how quickly you can upgrade your online marketing performance!