1200% Return on Your Real Estate Website

The title was to get your attention, but it's not in any way misleading.  Using the cost of a site at $600/year out of your pocket, your time to properly build it, and two $200,000 deals at 3% and a 60% split, it's a 1200% return.  In all honesty, if that's all you get out of it from the second year on, then you're not getting all the things done that you need to.  You could be doing a dozen or more deals a year.

Without further delay, here are the basic plan steps for a lead-generating real estate web site:

• Think about visitors first and search engines second - the engines want the visitor to find what they need
• Definitely offer IDX search very prominently, and don't make them register for it
  
• Create your own custom pages, but most need only be a few paragraphs of the right information
• Key the page title, meta description and content for each page to ONE keyword phrase, such as "subdivisionname restrictions" or "yourtown building codes" or "yourcounty land use regulations', etc.
• Again, a few paragraphs using that page's keyword phrase a couple of times and link out to relevant information, such as the county land use page
• Offer special reports, particularly with property sold statistics from your MLS, in exchange for their contact information
• Develop custom area-focused drip email campaigns to keep them around till ready to buy or sell
  

Here's a video on this subject with links to resources.   If you're not into writing these pages, I'll do it for you for about $30 a page, depending on volume.   Just realize that the search engines want what their visitors want, for them to find the specific information requested in one click if possible.   By creating the pages specifically for keyword phrases they're using, you make the engines happy and they reward you.