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Staying Relevant Also Means Providing Value
By Ryan Ward | May 21, 2008
Yesterday I posted about the need to stay relevant everyday in this real estate market if we are to stay competitive as well as provide value to our clients. Another way to help sellers to obtain more exposure for listings and help you stay relevant is to find ways to market for open houses online. The AJC doesn’t offer paid marketing services for listing open houses for no reason and no matter what market you are in, you can compete online with your local paper and all of the big companies for the coveted traffic from buyers looking online for open houses.
We have ranked on the first page of Google consistently for the last year for the main Atlanta open house keywords with multiple websites and receive decent traffic from those consumers. However, the conversion from looky-lou’s online to bodies walking through the front door was a little lower than what we would like. So for today’s exercise in relevance, I set out to take our ranking for open houses, boost them and boost conversion. What better way to do it than to utilize the free mapping service offered by Google to put together something a little more interactive for consumers when they actually find your houses online? After all, open houses are the perfect place to utilize interactive maps. People looking for open houses are local. Unlike many website visitors, you are going to get traffic to an open house page from people that are within driving distance to that home. That means they are the target audience to use interactive maps because they know what they are looking for. Oh yeah - they don’t call them interactive for nothing! They give consumers control of the web.
With that idea in my mind, I went to Google’s documentation and created a snazzy little map to serve our Atlanta open houses. So now what we really want to do is get this page to rank as high as possible in the search engines by providing value to consumers looking for open houses and we want to make sure that we write a separate post on the blog 10-14 days prior to the open house linking back to the map as the reference point for consumers. The next order of business if you are going to try something like this is to make sure that you have strong internal linking back to this page. Internal links to your page tell the search engines that they are deemed important by you. The more the internal links, the more important the page is likely to be. Makes sense right?
Many agents say that open houses don’t work. I say that those agents are saying that for one of two reasons; they either do not know how to market them or they just feel that their time is better spent doing something else. I have had success with open houses as have many others. But you won’t have success if you just show up with a few balloons and a book to read.
Category: Open Houses |
Hello and welcome to my Atlanta real estate blog. My name is Ryan Ward and I run The Ryan Ward Group at Keller Williams Realty Consultants. Stay informed with information on neighborhoods, market statistics, homes and editorials on local, regional and national news that affects all of us here in Atlanta and elsewhere. If you have any questions about what you read or would like additional information, please fill in the form below or give me a call at 404.630.3187.
May 26th, 2008 at 10:37 am
Interesting…I will have to look into this! I have had much success with open houses. My previous brokerage had great weekend space in the local paper; write ups w/color photos of house and agent. They were always promoting this to us as a great tool. When asked, over 95% of my open house guests found the house from the signs. The remaining 5% from newspaper or the postcards I sent out. We know that Buyers (and Sellers) start their research online. Times are changing. Thanks for this idea!
May 27th, 2008 at 7:08 pm
I’ve worked with Google’s Maps a little and I have to admit you have come up with a very clean application there. I like the look of the icons and the balloon contents.
I do see the signs on the side of the road and the balloons just like you mention. In my home buying experience, I’ve never been to one (I live in Atlanta). Next time I buy I’ll have to stop buy and check out a few.
June 2nd, 2008 at 9:45 pm
Those are pretty nice. Did you code it yourself or use a web app?
June 3rd, 2008 at 10:52 am
Awesome post Ryan! Are you asking the people who show up how they found your open house? It’d be interesting to know how many people actually show up because of the map and open house page on your site.
Our company ran a full page ad in the newspaper a while back for our open houses. I had zero people show up that saw the ad. Only people that saw the open house online or saw the directionals showed up.
Thanks for the informative post!
June 3rd, 2008 at 11:14 am
I actually did it myself and moved it off of my blog and onto my website. I’m working on a way to make it easy for someone in my office to enter the listings simply by inputing the address abnd pulling from my IDX.
June 3rd, 2008 at 11:18 am
2 people came to the open house last week from the website. None from the newspaper ad. Go figure!
June 3rd, 2008 at 3:07 pm
Great stuff! I agree with you that OHs are successful if done correctly, and our newer technologies allow us to market them better than ever before!
June 15th, 2008 at 11:35 pm
So true most real estate agents complain about not being able to drum up anyone to an open house> But the work they do to get the word out or make anything happen is very minimal. I agree with you 100% Ryan an agent in this market must innovate and push the marketing boundries to find people that otherwise would never know about an open house or just that the home is for sale period. Anyway keep up the good work Ryan.