“If the FBI interviewed you today, how could you prove that you’re in real estate?” Questions like these make you sit up and take stock of how well you present your real estate services. Applied specifically to your Internet marketing, “How are people finding my real estate website?” Given the marketing sea change from newspapers to Internet homes for sale searches, checking the visibility of your real estate website is a must for future sales growth and, in some markets, survival.

Choosing your real estate web design company is paramount to creating the best foundation. All IMCD Web Design professional web designs incorporate the necessary search engine optimization, graphic design, web content and a content management system framework for continually adding articles, news and pictures. The search engine optimization is a basic building block to getting first page placement on the search engine results so your website is found by your market when they look for you with keywords.

Building on the web design foundation is your online business blog. A business blog allows owners to continually add keyword-rich informative articles on their area of products or services. The blog’s ability to notify the search engines every time a blog entry is posted also helps increase natural search engine visibility. Using the blog alone without an attached informative website usually results in wide swings of when your website is on page one and when it is buried beyond finding.

After the organic search engine placement, visibility can be purchased with banner ads and pay-per-click (PPC) marketing or search engine marketing (SEM). PPC marketing is paying the search engines to place your real estate website’s hyperlink and description on their first page of results. PPC advertising is priced in an auction setting, with the competitors for keyword placement setting its price. The best use of banner ads is placement on websites that complement yours for target audience, such as chamber or commerce and visitor bureau websites. For getting your business website visible in hot keyword markets, PPC and banner ads Internet marketing are a very effective though possibly expensive way to improve visibility.

Use your traditional marketing to steer clients to your online marketing. The latest poll from the National Association of Realtors found that 14% of buyers first searched for new home in the newspapers and over 80% went first to the Internet. As the age of the buyer decreased, the percentage of the demographic searching online for a home or real estate agent increased. Make sure all your traditional real estate advertising contains your company’s web address. Position your real estate services today for the route the housing market is taking.

Check all your electronic marketing material, from emails to blog entries, to make sure your business website’s address is in the signature or mentioned and linked somewhere. Take stock of what real estate community websites on which you are leaving comments and links back to your website. Are there more places to go?

Take inventory of how your potential real estate clients find your real estate company on the Internet. If your website is not visible on the search engine results, contact IMCD Web Design’ real estate web design sales team and make the move to generating greater sales leads. IMC, with its effective graphic design services can also produce that banner ad your real estate company needs to reinforce your brand and attract home buyers, home sellers, and property investors to your website.

The Web Marketing Association (WMA) assesses real estate web designs as one of the many business web design categories in their annual competition. The WMA’s seven judging criteria parallel the foundational elements IMCD Web Design uses in creating custom real estate websites as well as integrated into their affordable semi-custom real estate web designs. However, IMC adds an eighth criteria to the list: efficacy in generating sales leads and bringing real estate agents and brokers a return on their online marketing investment.

When creating a real estate web design for real estate companies’ sales window on the Internet marketing world, IMC uses the following seven WMA criteria to fashion a website’s marketing appeal:

1. Design;
2. Innovation;
3. Content;
4. Technology;
5. Interactivity;
6. Copywriting; and
7. Ease of use.

Design covers the graphic design, the ability of a website to please the eye and draw the visitor in. Good design creates web pages that “have a sense of balance that blends type, graphics, and rich media with the site’s architecture to create an enjoyable user experience.” The average real estate website entered into the WMA contest scored a 7.4 out of a possible 10 points. Once a real estate websites successfully gains high visibility on the search engines, the design is the next big hurdle in moving visitors to contacts.

As a major item used by visitors to judge your website, poor design lowers credibility and drives potential business away from a website. Interestingly, home builder websites averaged 8 out of 10 scores, higher than real estate agent websites, most likely because the graphic images of their homes and developments are central to the effectiveness of their website’s ability to convert curious web visitors to interested home buyers.

Innovation is adding a “wow” factor to the design, content or use of technology. Industries that ranked lower in innovation were business websites that derived greater return on investment from conservatively meeting customers expectations.

Content and Copywriting are closely allied. Content is the information provided and copywriting is way the information is crafted. The best copywriting contains elements of search engine optimization, originality, readability as well as the basic spelling and grammar. IMC knows how busy real estate agents are in their businesses and has found that offering our agent and broker clients the benefit of professional copywriting services often boosts the effectiveness of their websites content management.

Use of Technology and Interactivity are also closely allied in that as technology advances, real estate websites get more interactive. Basic interactivity would be the mortgage and financial calculators that are standard issue on Realtor websites now. Use of Technology, like graphic design, is a question of balance. As Paul K Kennedy used to say, “Just because you can do a thing, doesn’t mean you necessarily should do it.” Technology that helps web visitors is helpful, but technology that bewilders and confuses tends to drive hard won visitors away.

Ease of use follows on the coattails of graphic design since navigation is a key element of design and moving web visitors quickly to find both the information they are searching for and to the call to action. Graphic design and navigation are two deal makers or deal breaker elements to real estate web design. Done well, visitors stay. Done poorly, visitors go away. In this category also, home builders websites have slightly better ease of use than real estate websites.

When it comes to attracting web visitors, gaining visibility in search engine results, and generating sales leads, IMC has a long track record of positioning real estate agents and brokers for getting a return on their online investment. To improve your Internet marketing campaign, contact IMC’s real estate web design pros. We know how to attract more potential clients to your real estate company.

Denver real estate websites have an interesting challenge: what is the best marketing for so diverse a home buying and selling population. Denver is well situated in the center of Colorado’s Front Range with several top-notch universities, large corporate employment opportunities, an international airport and one of the biggest all season playgrounds out the back door.

Denver’s real estate market, with its many property acquisition drivers – need to be close to work, near a particular school, in a condo near downtown, in an upscale luxury home, or close to a road that heads out to a second home at a ski resort – demands multiple online marketing messages.

IMCD Web Design has helped several Denver real estate agents stake a claim on the gold rush of Google’s first page results for Denver homes for sale and property searches. Without the need for pay-per-click advertising. Behind each successful real estate Internet marketing strategy was a thorough research of the current market and an analysis of what was necessary to be competitive. The rewards of successfully marketing with a Denver real estate website are profitability in this active Colorado market.

IMCD utilizes its array of real estate marketing tools, sales web pages marketing specific market niches, to help Denver Realtors attract and prequalify their sales contacts. By targeting several markets as once, Denver real estate websites cast a wide, yet specific, net that will address whatever part of the market is active at a given time.

From Broomfield down to Highlands Ranch, real estate agents have depended on IMCD’s Denver real estate web designs to consistently bring leads and a return on their online marketing investment. Call our Colorado sales team if your Internet marketing campaign is not positioning you for the best results in Denver’s diverse real estate market.

Phoenix real estate websites drawing repeat visitors have two factors in common. The interesting aspect of these two factors are they are somewhat counter intuitive to marketing tendencies. Over-riding market tendencies are to list features of using a particular real estate agent or Realtor company and to strive for new customers. Successful real estate websites in the Phoenix and Scottsdale market do a good job of mirroring in their web content the principle of fostering current relationships.

The first factor is to follow the 80/20 rule on web content. Devote 80% of your web content going over the benefits clients gain from your real estate services or providing information that is helps further their home buying or selling needs. By only using 20% of your marketing on the features of your real estate company you adhere to a successful rule in marketing: “Make the advertisement a biography of your client.”

The second factor is utilizing a real estate website design that gives people in the Phoenix market reason to return to your website. Real estate blogs, article managers, and up-to-date feature listings serve as proven effective online marketing tools. Phoenix real estate websites that understand long-term sales lead generation, cater to the large percentage of web visitors who are people months away from actually initiating the process of buying or selling a house.

By providing a solid base of information and continually adding more valuable information to the website, Realtors place themselves in the position of expert and a person who understands the needs of the current market. With the severe “market corrections” in the Phoenix area, many people poised to go on the market read of the home devaluations and foreclosures and wonder “Is now the time to get in or wait?” Answering that question may be impossible for any real estate agent, however, by updating your website with information of the Phoenix market and reviewing points to consider, you help your web visitor ways to answer the question for their own circumstances.

Think of a web visitor’s computer mouse as your Phoenix real estate website’s remote control. Do you have the local real estate market information that will move your visitor to other pages in your web site or are they apt to change the Internet channel? If you need a real estate websites that will draw repeat visitors, contact IMC’s sales team to see how your Phoenix realty company can benefit from a more active and interactive online marketing presence.

Real Estate virtual tours, slide show or video tours of your listed homes for sale, is fast growing to be the way to maximize the leveraging of your real estate website Internet marketing. Real estate websites quickly adopted the static photo presentation of listings that traditional advertising copy used. However, given the capability of the Internet to just as easily deliver audio and video files, the nature of real estate Internet marketing is quickly evolving.

In 1997, when professional real estate websites were still in the start-up phase, very few Realtors used video tours on their websites. Only 2% of home buyers bought a house as a result of seeing a video home tour. Ten years later, the Internet is a hotly contested marketplace with realty firms, brokers, and agents putting up their real estate websites.

In the competitive real estate website market, websites range from business card websites unseen on Google to custom web designs formulated for top placement in the search engine rankings. Driven by the market forces, video home tour use has expanded and attracts almost 40% more views than listings with only photos. This extra traffic translates into enticing one out of four home buyers into buying the listed home.

More relevant to real estate agents, is the fact that 9 out of 10 people using the Internet to scout out their next home find video home tours useful in assessing a home and narrowing their searches.

Besides the benefit of leveraging the power of the Internet for real estate agents in appealing to home buyers, virtual tours help land clients selling their homes. In the current economy, any marketing advantage to speed up a home’s sale is desired by home sellers. Over 90% of home sellers wanting the maximum exposure of adding property photos to a listing. Real estate agents stand the best chance of selling a client’s home at the best price since Internet homebuyers are willing to spend more than traditional buyers and have been found to spend more on homes whose photos or virtual tours where professionally photographed.

Leverage your real estate Internet marketing to the max by adding virtual tours of homes and property. Between the price of technology decreasing and the use of virtual tours increasing visibility and home values, real estate agents can find that using virtual tours improves their return on their Internet marketing investment. IMCD Web Design works with our real estate web design clients to create virtual tours or add their virtual tours to their listings of homes for sale. Each IMC website receives custom graphic design work to give our clients the best opportunity to capture a greater share of their online real estate market.

In large real estate firms or businesses with marketing departments, being aware of the “silo effect” can help improve your real estate web design. The silo effect is when departments focus only on their goals (the silo) and not how all departments’ goals interact for the overall benefit of the company’s sales and profitability. In web designs there are at least three areas that need to all be addressed: graphic design, web content and search engine optimization.

Webmasters generally track the search engine optimization, while marketing focuses on making sure the graphic design is attention arresting and the web content is persuasive enough to turn visitors into sales leads. The silo effect usually manifests as marketing favoring a fantastic Flash presentation that really keeps a visitors attention and delivers the marketing message. However, when Flash is not used in balance with web content that the search engines can index or with areas for basic search engine optimization, then the super attractive website languishes well off the top search engine ranking pages.

When all areas connected with a website work together to balance the overall marketing effect of the triple titans of web design (SEO, content and graphics), then marketing gets their sales leads, webmasters get more traffic to track and the company enjoys greater profits.

IMCD Web Design’ creative web design team maximizes the effectiveness of our professional real estate web designs search engine optimization, web content (for SEO and marketing) and the graphic design. Our goal is not to provide our small business and real estate clients with a website, but with a powerful lead generation tool that brings home profitable business by consistent high search engine rankings and high conversion rates of web traffic to solid business contacts.

Our Internet marketing strategy is to get our real estate clients to the top of the search rankings in their very competitive markets. for our professional web design clients, our online marketing approach is to get their products or services ranked highly for their keywords, key phrases and long tail keywords. Just as it is hard to call it “sailing” if the boat never raises anchor, IMCD has a hard time calling it “Internet marketing” if a website is not visible for a company’s market keywords.

Contact IMCD’s sales team today to increase the effectiveness of your online marketing campaign with one of our affordable custom professional web designs or real estate websites.

Investing in your new real estate website without maximizing its search engine optimization is like buying a new car without any wheels and expecting to get somewhere. In short, search engine optimization (SEO) is the tool that gives your real estate website the traction to get anywhere with your real estate Internet market.

Recently, IMCD Web Design did an semi-scientific serious survey of real estate websites. The survey criteria was simple: visit real estate website designers whose sites are high on the Google search return, review their positive testimonials and then do a Google search in the markets where their happy clients are competing. What we found is that many designers as well as real estate agents apparently do not understand marketing on the Internet, or at least do not factor the financial return on the real estate website investment in their Internet marketing strategy.

A typical real estate website situation is the Realtor would give a testimonial on how great their website looked, how easy it was to work with the website designers and the compliments they  have received from their site. A Google search of their market using the usual search terms like “Sacramento real estate”, “Boise homes for sale” or “Seattle real estate agent” and even longtail keywords like “Los Angeles luxury homes” yielded no visible search ranking of the satisfied clients’ websites on the first five pages, much less the critical first page of results.

A quick look “under the hood” of the real estate agents’ websites found that, however beautiful and captivating the graphics, Flash slide show of area homes and scenery, or ability to find contact information, the websites lacked simple search engine optimization. SEO can get sophisticated and multi-layered depending on the need of your market and the time you wish to devote to capturing your potentially lucrative market. However, most real estate websites reviewed lacked even basic SEO.

Without SEO, the gorgeous websites were most likely found by people who found the web address on print advertising – a business card, post card or newspaper advertisement. Although print is a solid secondary advertising window, with 90% of the market using the Internet and maybe 15% checking newspaper ads in search of a home – print is nowhere as efficient in getting your real estate marketing message visible on the first page of the search results.

Make sure you have professional and experienced help with your website’s SEO to get you the visibility in the Internet market. Proof that you have the wheels on your real estate website vehicle? You receive steady, consistent and solid leads from your Internet marketing and are high up in Google searches for your keywords. If you are in a competitive market like Denver or Los Angeles, your tires may need white walls to gain attention – add a real estate blog or an article manager to make it easy to add content to your website. At IMCD we don’t let our clients only focus on the vehicle (attractive and captivating as our graphic design is) and forget that their website investment needs solid SEO to get traction on the Internet highway.