We live in a digital world and businesses understand that there are a number of easy and affordable vehicles to help increase notice. Without question, a website provides 24/7/365 access to you, your brand and your service. A website is a great start to get more exposure but does a new site automatically draw in site visitors? There are variables that impact site visitation ranging from how popular you are in your local market, to do you invest in advertising to are you active with other social media platforms. Healthy human beings have a balanced diet and healthy websites have balanced sourced acquisition.
Agent Success in the digital marketing world understands the balance of methods by which users arrive at your website: sourced acquisition. There are multiple pathways by which you can lure and entice visitors to your website. Acquisition categories such as, direct, organic, paid search, social, and email are the most common. Each of these categories are a source to bring people with varying interests to your website. Furthermore, just like a balanced diet, your website needs an acquisition balance.
Take a look at the video below for a quick overview on these 5 sources of real estate website traffic, then keep reading below for more detailed descriptions and lead gen tips!
Sources Of Real Estate Website Traffic
Direct Traffic
This acquisition category tracks site visitors who know you, know your brand and know your service. These site visitors directly type your website domain address to visit your homepage. In many cases, these visitors are a combination of recurring or existing customers. There are some cases where these site visitors are considering doing business with you and are returning to your site. Lastly, there are some cases where site visitors are looking to learn from you through the unique content you have on your site, which still presents an opportunity to win a customer through a longer sales cycle. Either way, this direct acquisition category is a testament of the power of your brand.
Directly typing the website domain address lands the site visitor on the website homepage. The homepage is the first impression a visitor will have about your website and you. Most websites have a specialized picture or image that is located as a primary visual to be first viewed when landing on a website. Here is some good insight regarding the direct acquisition category. If your website experiences a higher than normal bounce-rate (a ratio of time a site visitor leaves after coming to your homepage), then consider either changing out the main picture or image of your website (known as the hero image) or reposition some of the content on your homepage.
The best way to boost Direct traffic is to build your brand, get your name out there, interact with people through social media, and yes, run advertisements… Anything you do is bound to have an impact on your ability to generate direct traffic.
Organic Traffic
These site visitors use keywords to find your website. The organic category is divided into two parts: keyword search and content highlighting keywords (blogs). Search Engine Optimization tactics are heavy-handed in the organic category especially regarding keyword searching. For digital marketing, the concept of keywords for your service, your brand and your geographic area will be a recurring necessity. If there is one universal truth about digital marketing is that content is king! That’s why blogging is popular because it’s a SEO tool to promote original content as well as functioning as a keyword promoter.
Many people still like to read; however, the average attention span is decreasing; therefore, blogging is popular to get a concise messaging, again, using SEO keywords. Typically, a blog will be attached to your website allowing for your website header and footer to navigate your site visitor to other pages within your website. If your blog can reach page 2 or better in the keyword search, there is a great opportunity for your site visitor to visit other pages within your site. So an organic acquisition tip would be to make sure your blog has a keyword represented multiple times and to make sure your blog has some call-to-action to grab a visitors contact information.
Organic traffic improves when you create content that
Paid Search
This acquisition category also focuses on keywords pertaining to your brand, your service or your geographic location. The difference is, that these alluring keywords are incorporated into a paid advertisement. Generally, this type of advertising investment catapults your advertisement to near the top of your site visitor’s page one of the keyword search. Assuming the keywords are relative and popular, there is a near guarantee that site visitors will land on your website. You can choose some characteristics of what kind of site visitor you desire and you can choose what website page you would like your visitors to land on your website.
There are a lot of options here and rightfully so. When you invest in paid advertising, you should expect an elevated flexibility associated with an elevated level of site traffic. There are two myths associated with paid advertising: 1) it’s too costly & 2) once you start, you will lose volume if you stop. None of those myths are true unless you want them to be. Paid search advertising is mostly established as charge-by-click. So daily limits can be placed that once keyword searches have exceeded your charge-by-click (site visit) limit, then the advertisement is suspended until the next day.
Additionally, if your website has content or service appeal, the changes are good that a pay-per-click site visitor will return to your website through a direct acquisition. So advertising is a great source of site traffic that often supersedes the patience needed for the timeframe to grow organic traffic.
Dynamic ads are a great way to grow your paid traffic. Setting them up can be a challenge, so be sure to check out our dynamic ads guide before you get started.
Social
This acquisition category presents a major opportunity to leverage and divert relationships with other social media platforms to increase your website visits. Do you have Facebook, Twitter and Pintrest followers? Do you create Instagram stories? Then these followers represent an untapped asset for building your website traffic. Create a bridge in your posting to these virtual communities through offering a link to one of your website pages. In other words, treat your social media post as if it is an advertisement for the follower to learn more at your website through clicking a link at the end of your post.
This creates a digital continuity for your messaging, and it creates a homebase (your website) where you can increase your content for building more brand authority. Social media postings are great, but they only allow you to provide snippets of information. Create your social media teaser and push these people onto your website. This doesn’t cost a dime to do, and chances are good that you already have an established following of customers and prospects in your social media platform groups. Now is the perfect time to meld together social media and your website and there is a special acquisition category to measure your success.
Email is still the most used communication tool in digital marketing. However, it is also the most ignored messaging as well. However, there is an acquisition category to track your email campaigns to lure contacts in your CRM onto your website. Assuming your CRM contains prospective customers, your email drip campaigns should inform, appeal and nurture your potential clients. Each email should offer something of value if the email recipient clicks the email link and lands on your website. Although this strategy is a little older, it can still be effective depending on the communication behavior of your would-be customers.
Although there are more acquisition categories, the above represents a healthy way for you to maintain visitation to your website. For most there is a balance to the above categories that can vary based on your direct and organic traffic sourced categories. If you choose not to invest in paid search traffic, then the other categories need to be strong with site visitor appeal. An ideal percentage would be to have your traffic sourced 40%-50% organic, but this is a longer journey through SEO tricks and tips. Direct and paid search traffic should be ideally 20%-30% with social acquisition trailing at 10%-20% of your overall sourced site traffic.
Sprinkle in email traffic and your website sourced acquisition traffic is healthy.Working on your own drip campaign? Check out these tips to improve your ROI.
Healthy sourced website traffic is the foundation for agent success in the digital marketing world. Although this balanced sourced site visit approach is not overly complex, it does take some time to develop, feed and nurture. This is where companies, like Easy Agent PRO can counsel or lend a direct hand in increasing sourced acquisition site visits. Obviously, the end result of a website is to gain more customers, it does start with a healthy volume of traffic that gets qualified through a number of steps from prospecting to lead generation to nurturing to customer readiness. Start your site visitation health check today… or call Easy Agent PRO for sourced acquisition health assistance.