Seems like a simple question with a simple answer. Most people will instinctively say, “to build my business”.

While that is a good objective of any business website, it leads to yet another question, “How will your website build your business?” To get to the answer to this question, we need to go a bit deeper.

As with most website strategies, we must first identify your target audience. Who are these people? What are their needs? How can they help you with your general goal of building your real estate or lending business?

The intriguing part of identifying your audience is that you will most certainly find different groups of people who you are targeting. Each of these groups will have different needs and will benefit your business in different ways. You may find that unique objectives are required for each group.

Let’s take a look at several potential audiences of your website and how they differ.

Potential Clients (Prospects)

These are people with whom have no prior relationship with you. They found your website through a search engine, a referring link from another website or from one of your offline marketing channels.

NEEDS: Potential clients are usually looking for information. They are trying to become as informed as possible as to make the best home purchase or get into the best home loan for their situation.

OBJECTIVE: Convert these web visitors into clients. This means getting them to call or email you.

GETTING TO THE OBJECTIVE: This group is looking for information, so provide it. This is where blogging on the market, community and other relevant is very effective. If you come across as an expert in the field, people will be inclined to conduct business with you.

How many times have you heard someone say, “I sure hope my… (fill in the blank with an profession you choose) …knows what they are doing.” If your site shows that you know what you are doing, it is bound to pay off.

Past Clients

I heard a statistic a couple of years ago that 67 out of 100 people surveyed 60 days after the close of escrow couldn’t give the full name of their real estate agent.

When it comes to home loans, the numbers are even worse for people using the same mortgage broker for subsequent refinances.

How can someone who doesn’t remember you refer you to friends and family or use you for their next transaction?

NEEDS: For those who have recently moved, they are looking to become acclimated to their new neighborhood. Mortgage brokers, your past clients want to stay informed as to when they should refinance to save money.

OBJECTIVE: Continue to provide value to your past clients, so that they will use you for their next transaction and will refer you to other potential clients.

GETTING TO YOUR OBJECTIVE: Once again, information is the key. The difference with this group is that you already have a relationship. Leverage that relationship.

Send your blog content to past clients via email (a service that Draven Creation can provide). Use surveys on your website and via email to find out what your past clients need and then fulfill those needs. Provide a way for your past clients to refer people to you, right from your website.

Referrals

I ask a friend if they know a real estate agent they could refer. I could take that referral on blind faith or, more likely, I will take that recommendation with a grain of salt and will research that agent on my own.

That is where your website comes in. My friend could say, “I recommend XYZ agent, but don’t take my word on it, check out their website at www…”

NEEDS: Determine that the referral of an real estate agent or mortgage broker is a good recommendatio.

OBJECTIVE: Convert the referral into a client.

GETTING TO YOUR OBJECTIVE: Show your knowledge, professionalism and track record on your website. A bit of personality coming through doesn’t hurt, either.

Show your past transactions, your marketing plan or graph out how you have saved past clients on their home loans.

Current Clients

You’ve got them. You are listing their home, finding their new home or are getting them into a home loan.

NEEDS: Find the perfect home or home loan, or insure that they are getting the highest offer in the shortest time on their home.

OBJECTIVE: This is where your website can save you time and effort. Just as a good corporate website can lower the customer support needs of a company, a good agent or broker website can service your clients without additional time and effort on your part.

GETTING TO YOUR OBJECTIVE: Home searches, homes by email updates, mortgage rate updates and market updates articles can provide the information that satisfies your current clients’ needs. Best of all, you won’t have a dozen voicemails to return to answer what homes have recently hit the market or what did rates do today.

Information is the Key

By now, you realize the common thread for each of these groups is value-added information. Be the source of information and people will be compelled to do business with you.

Have you identified your audiences? Do you recognize their needs? How can your website satisfy those needs while advancing toward your objectives?

I say, write all of this on a piece of paper and keep it next to your computer. It will keep you focused on obtaining your objectives.

These new “neo-blogs“, as Dvorak coined them, utilize the Wordpress software for more than blogging. Through the effective use of template design, plugins, widgets and pages, a website built on the Wordpress software can become a full-fledged website and not merely a blog.

This is a real turning point for blogging.

For the past 6 months, a slow change has been happening. Blogs were becoming more robust. No longer are all blogs simply linear, chronological posting sites.

Blogs now have supporting pages of content and content organizationed based on topic, age of the content and reader value.

In fact, the best of the new breed don’t feel like blogs at all. They feel more that magazine websites.

I am so in favor of this new trend of what I have termed “blogsites”, that Draven Creation hasn’t built a traditional blog format site all year. It has purely been extending the Wordpress system to create content centric websites, even when the client isn’t going to blog.

Choosing to use Wordpress as a content management system for your website or blog is a strong choice because:

• Website maintenance is easier. Updating content is much more difficult without a content management system.
• Traditional, chronological blogs only showcase recent content. Using advanced techniques, past content can be highlighted. Groups of posts can be combined to create featured content.
• There is no need to have a website and a blog. Search engines love blogs, so why not add your traditional website content as pages to your Wordpress blog? Maintaining and promoting 1 website is much easy and cheaper than doing the same for a website and separate blog.

Draven Creation builds exclusively on the Wordpress platform, using the latest techniques and trends. This strategy provides our clients with custom, value-added websites that are easier and less expensive to build and maintain. Call for more information, 209.679.5801 or send an email.

When someone visits a local real estate agent or mortgage broker website, they have questions and are looking for answers. The better job you can do in answering those questions, the more valuable you are to that potential client.

When I reference answering questions, I am not talking about the ability for site readers to post questions for you to follow with an answer. While this can work when done properly (a great example is Trulia Voices), I am actually talking about the overall content on your website.

When writing any content for your site, you must first consider the audience. Who are they? What is of value to them? What questions might they be seeking answers to?

By focusing on the audience and their needs, you stand a better chance of converting them into clients.

Each page of your website and every blog post should answer a question.

Blog posts are easy to follow this guideline. Identify a question, make the title of the post that question and go about answering the question in the post. This makes writing posts easier and can have great search engine benefits (many people search by asking questions).

Website pages can be a bit trickier to determine what questions to answer. Let’s look at a few common real estate agent and mortgage broker website pages/sections to identify what questions can be answered.

The About Page

Here is my own personal pet peeve. I rarely read an About page that truly adds value to the audience.

These pages tends to focus too much on the agent or broker and their personal lives, clubs, organizations, on and on and on. While this paints a picture of you to your audience, it doesn’t provide the information that they went to this page for.

When someone goes to your About page, they are looking for you to answer the question, “Why should I trust this person with the largest transaction of my life?”

Does your about page answer this question?

For Sellers / For Buyers

Your site is local, maybe even hyper-local. This means that you focus on transactions in a city or even in select neighborhoods.

This is where you differentiate yourself from the larger, national real estate and mortgage websites. Your focus provides extreme value to a smaller audience, but one who has better revenue potential for your company.

Keep your Seller and Buyer information localized. Answer questions like, “What should I know about buying or selling a home in this city or neighborhood?” and “How does this agent’s expertise in this area make them better qualified to sell my home or find me my dream home?”

Loan Process

Portraying your knowledge of types of loans and the general loan process can be a huge benefit to a mortgage broker. The process can be overwhelming to consumers and they want to rest assured that their mortgage broker knows what he is talking about.

As a mortgage broker, you must also battle the concerns created by bad press of consumers getting sold mortgages that weren’t the best products for them. Information is your weapon in this battle.

Answer questions like, “What types of loans are there and how do they differ?“, “What loans are right for each type of borrower?“, “How does recent economic changes affect borrowers in my city?”

Keep the audience in mind at every step of your website development and you will be rewarded with more visitors, longer visits, and hopefully, more people contacting you directly.

There are many similarities between a home for sale and a real estate agent website. I think the most important commonality is that of the effective use of negative space, known as whitespace in the web design world.

If you, as a real estate agent, go to list a home, do you not make suggestions to the homeowner on how to make the home look more appealing? If a room is full of clutter, knick-knacks and too much furniture, do you suggest that items be placed in storage while the home is listed? The goal is to make the space to appear larger and more inviting.

It has always puzzled me why so many real estate professionals who understand the concept of layout for a home break all of those same rules on their websites. So many real estate agent websites are crammed full of content, images and widgets that they feel cluttered, cramped and disorganized. Much like a home before it is professionally staged.

Strategic use of empty space is inviting on a website, much as it is in a home. If you walked into a home and every square inch of the floor was covered, what feelings does that invoke? Could you focus on any one thing, or would you be so overwhelmed that you couldn’t focus on anything?

Use your home staging skills to identify is you have enough whitespace on each page of your website. Determine what adds value to the reader and what aids in your goal of converting that reader into a client. Everything else must go.

Think about it, are people coming to your real estate website because they need the weather widget on your homepage to tell them what the temperature is?

To learn about effectively using whitespace on your real estate website, read Website White Space and Give Me My Web Space. Both of these articles will help you to reach the optimal goal of 35% of your website containing absolutely nothing.

For a busy restaurant, there is always a plan or strategy involved in with seating guests. It is up to the hostess to implement that plan in a way that allows the guests to feel welcomed, yet not corralled like cattle.

In a way, the patrons are looking for guidance. No one goes to a fine dining restaurant expecting a sign saying, “Sit Anywhere You Like”. That is for fast food and truck stops. Instead, patrons expect someone to greet them and let them know that, “We have a wonderful table prepared for you. Right this way…”

Would you believe me if I told you that your website visitors are looking for that same sort of guidance? It seems strange, but it is true.

People are busy and overwhelmed with constant stimulus. When they visit a website, they don’t have the time or energy to fully explore every aspect of the website. They expect to be guided to the most important parts of the website. Essentially, they want you to tell them, “Right this way…”

This sort of guidance is prevalent in the better e-commerce sites throughout the Internet. Surf sites like Buy.com and Amazon.com and you will see predominate sections like “Deal of the Week”, “Featured Products” or “New for You”. These sections draw the visitor in. It is a good thing to, because no one has the time to browse the thousands of pages on those sites.

This tactic is what is commonly referred to as a “Call to Action”. This is a way of motivating your website visitors to take some predetermined course of action, usually leading to some type of conversion.

Unfortunately, you rarely see a strong call to action on a real estate or mortgage website. Instead, all facets of the site are equally laid out for the visitor to choose from.

This may be due to the difficulty in identifying a call to action or what is a conversion for a real estate or mortgage website since people don’t purchase homes or home loans online. It isn’t as simple as someone buying a book from Amazon, but there are many strategies for real estate agents and mortgage brokers to apply.

Ask yourself, “Where do I want my website visitors to go?”

• Is there a section of your website that does an excellent job of portraying your expertise or knowledge of your market?
• Do you capture leads through newsletter subscription forms, MLS search registration or comparative market analysis request forms?
• Mortgage brokers, do you have an application form on your website?
• How about getting them to pick up the phone and call you?

These are all places that you should be leading your website visitors toward.

Choose a path to “recommend” and predominately place a link to that path on virtually every page of your site. Remember, “Right this way…”

To learn more about calls to action, read How to Improve Online Sales with a Sharper Call to Action by John Alexander. For more information on real estate website conversions, check out MyTechOpinion.com.

Now that you have answered that question, does your real estate website represent your business niche? Could a new visitor to your website identify that niche easily?

Try this little test. Ask people in your life that know you are a real estate agent, but aren’t familiar with your business niche, to visit your site. Ask them to identify what you type of real estate transactions you specialize in. If they can’t, you have some work to do.

The solution to this isn’t to simply add a line to your homepage that says, “Specializing in…”. It requires a more holistic approach.

Your website needs to have a look and feel that your target clients find appealing and can relate to. It also needs to provide valuable information for them, through original content and links to related resources.

This may sound like a lot of work, but it is a sound investment of time and money. Most home buyers turn to the Internet first, which means that your website will provide the first impression of your business. Don’t you want that first impression to be a good one?

These are questions that you should be able to answer.

If you are seeking return visitors, inbound links and viral marketing for your website, it is crucial that you give the public something different. No one is going to be compelled to tell their friends about a real estate website with a canned buyers and sellers guide, a dated About page and an antiquated home search. There is nothing special about that type of a site.

In his book, The Purple Cow, Seth Godin stresses the need to differentiate yourself from the competition through being remarkable. While you may already be doing this in other aspects of your business, you need to extend that mindset to your online marketing effort. Especially since many potential clients will be assessing your abilities based on your website before they see a flyer or hear your listing presentation.

The blog, Creating Passionate Users, takes the idea of being remarkable to an entirely new level by asking if you are “remarkable at every scale?” Could one of your client’s see a single page from your website and be able to identify it as being yours? Not by design, but by the content? That is a tall order, but is something to think about when evaluating your site.

Ideas for making a remarkable website are beyond the scope of this article, but will be discussed in future posts. For now, take a good look at your real estate or mortgage website and ask yourself, “What here is worth talking about?”