Defining your online goals is the next big step. Chances are your definition of this will consist of three words; to make money. Of course this is your primary objective but in order to reach that ultimate goal you need to increase your web site exposure.

Your goals need to be broken down in writing. If you were to plan a cross country road trip, you would probably make sure that you had a map handy to help you get there faster.

This is especially true if you are cruising through unknown territory. Mapping out your goals will help you stay focuses and guide you through the process.

Today’s tech savvy individual may forgo paper maps for the new electronic ones called GPS. Consider SEO as your GPS and follow the turn by turn directions to reach your goals faster.

Remember SEO takes time and effort and with all the other things you have going on in your personal and business life, it can be easy to get distracted. Writing out your goals and regularly reviewing them will help you to remain focused on them.

Real estate profits are based upon the commissions obtained through the sales of property. Your question now is how you can use your
website to help you garner more sales. Increasing sales by use of your website will consist of converting viewers into clients.

Figure out what your percentage of offline prospects, (walk-ins, or those responding to mailers and other offline advertisements), that are converted into clients.

Use this as a baseline for what you hope to expect from your online conversions. Naturally, the two will go hand and hand and the combination will increase conversions in both areas but for now use this percentage as a starting point to focus on.

If possible, post a phone number on the site that is different than the one that is used in the office, so that you will be better able to track and differentiate your online conversions vs. your offline ones.

If you have already had a website in place and it has been already been effective in conversions, figure out what that percentage is and determine how much you want to increase it.

You should also examine each section of the site and try to determine which section is most responsible for the site’s success and why that is.

Be realistic when setting your goals. Start small and work your way up. A very important step when detailing your goals is to recognize how much business you can effectively handle. You may be inclined to just shoot for the moon and employ all of the SEO techniques and bring in as many customers that you can.

Real estate is a service oriented business so ask yourself how many people you can service while maintaining your professionalism and providing quality customer service. This is especially true if you are a one man shop or an agent building your own page.

Reputation is a big part of your business and you’re only as good as your last deal. The last thing you want is to have too many clients to handle effectively which will negatively impact your reputation.

That means all of the work you put into your site was for nothing because instead of being looked at as an expert in your field, you will become known as the agent who can’t get the job done instead of the one who can.

You need to have a plan to handle the excess and you may want to consider partnering up with another agent and building a joint site or having a trusted associate that you can direct excess clients to. If you take this path, then make sure you have an agreed commission split worked out and do so in writing.

Another reason to start the ball rolling slowly is time management. Consider the life of a real estate agent. You work irregular hours based upon your client’s availability, spend time seeking listings that will hopefully match what they are looking for and spend time carting the clients too and from those listings.

Having a sudden influx of new clients can severely impact your usual schedule which is erratic at best. You will need to be able to ease into your sudden increase in potential clients so that you can take the time to convert them into actual ones.

The Internet is called the information highway and in order to travel it effectively, you will need to gather some information yourself. The best place to start is at the website that you already have in place. Look at your website from the standpoint of your prospective clients.

Another important piece of information is finding out what your competitors are doing. Go onto the web and type in various keywords and phrases that prospective clients may use to find real estate in your area and see whose site pops up. We will delve further into competitor snooping techniques later on in this book.

Gathering information is only one piece of the puzzle. Your site needs to give information to the viewers and it needs to be the information that they are looking for, not just useless fluff.

There are many ways to make your site more informative and do so in such a way that will cast you as an expert in your field. Two such ways are by posting articles and blogs.

These informative tools contribute to your site and finding sources to post about will be important to your online success. You will need to surf the Internet for e-publications that discuss real estate trends.

This will give you a constant source of fresh topics for both your articles and your blogs. This topic will be discussed more in depth later, so have your topics ready!

No one has to tell you that getting qualified leads is essential to any real estate practice. Since you already know that, I won’t go into all the reason that you need leads. What I will do is make suggestions on how to use your site to get qualified leads.

First a dose of reality. Not everyone who visits your site finds it informative and initiates contact will be converted to a client. Probably not even half, a quarter or an eighth.

That’s the way it is in real estate whether your lead comes from the web or a human referral. However, despite the fact that your percentage of client conversion may seem to be low, consider it from the standpoint of commission earnings.

If you only get two conversions from 1000 leads a month, a mere .002%, that still equals a very nice commission. Naturally the more leads you get, the more chances you have to convert them to clients.

There are those that will argue quality vs. quantity as far as leads go. Each may have a legitimate argument but the fact remains that being a successful sales agent also means playing the odds.

This means that you want to get a large quantity of leads and then filter out the quality ones to concentrate on converting. Converting them to clients will be up to you and your skills, but getting a large quantity to convert will come from your website.

Another consideration is prospective clients who may just have begun to consider buying a home but are not quite ready. People like this, whether they be walk-ins or have made an appointment are usually considered the bane of a real estate agent’s existence.

They have you drive them around all day, looking at houses all over town then say, “Thanks, we’re just looking”. Now the real estate agent has wasted the day and despite their best efforts at converting them, these same people may decide to use another real estate agent when they are finally ready to buy.

A friend of mine is planning to move to Kentucky in two years and she’s already visiting websites of real estate agents in that area, looking at houses and trying to learn about the different neighborhoods.

She likes one site so much that she constantly visits it and because of the information listed on it, she’s considering buying land there now that she can build on later instead of waiting two years to move and then purchase a home.

This is one of the beauties of lead generation from the Internet. People can browse houses online and then come back to you when they are ready without you ever having to leave the office. The trick is to make them come back to you.

Three ways to do this is by the use of email links, freebies, newsletters and information request forms. Lead generation will be discussed further in Chapter 3 – Build a User
Focused Site.

One of the main purposes of optimizing your website is to improve its position in the search engine rankings and thus on the search results page. While I encourage you to employ these techniques to achieve this, it’s important not to over emphasize your website’s position.

It won’t help you to have your site returned at the top of the search engine pages if your site is not attractive to viewer’s, doesn’t provide the information they need or is difficult to navigate.

This is why before you start worrying about getting your site to the top of the search result page; you need to make sure its worthy of that position.