Without a doubt, IDX is one of the most important things for your real estate website to have when you’re trying to generate leads. IDX websites make it possible to do so much for generating leads and getting traffic to your website.
These days, most agents are using IDX in some form or another to capture leads and convert them into clients – But many agents aren’t taking full advantage of the lead generating power that IDX has to offer.
Today, I’m breaking down exactly how to use IDX to get real estate leads, traffic and yes, even how to rank higher on Google as a result.
Why is it important to have IDX on your website for lead gen?
There are many reasons why you’ll want to have IDX on your website when you’re focusing on lead gen. First and foremost, it helps you understand where in the buying process your traffic falls, which in turn helps you convert that traffic into leads, and ultimately, clients.
As a general rule, people who are looking at specific properties on your website are further along in the buying process, and therefore more likely to convert.
Think about it, when you first decide to move to a new place, the specific property isn’t really in the forefront of your thought process. You’re much more interested in learning about the location you’re moving to (assuming you even have THAT figured out yet).
These types of leads are much more likely to benefit from a neighborhood farm page, which highlights key features of an area, such as parks, schools and places of interest.
When a lead starts looking at specific properties in a neighborhood, town or city, you can bet that lead has already decided the area is a good fit – They’re ready to consider their options, find a property that fits their needs and budget, and begin the process of purchasing or renting a place to live.
It’s not just about lead gen with IDX – It’s about keeping them on your IDX websites
When thinking about lead gen for real estate, it can tempting to focus so much on getting leads to your IDX websites that you forget about the next most important step: Keeping them there.
Sure, leads are fantastic, but if they don’t trust you, you’ll soon find converting them to actual clients becomes a nigh-impossible feat.
In the past, we’ve written about social proof, basically a fancy way of saying people, including future clients, trust you. Normally, this buzz word gets tossed around a lot when talking about real estate testimonials, but it can apply to every aspect of IDX websites.
Think of IDX websites like a resume, and every person who visits it is a potential employer. You want to make sure your real estate website not only presents your listings in the best light possible, but you as well. You want a website that shows people you’re the authority on living in your area.
After all, you know your stuff – And by displaying real time information to your visitors about the properties they’re most interested in, you’re letting everyone else know it too.
Not only that, but by displaying current, up-to-the-minute information in a clean and accessible way, you’re keeping your visitors eyes on your content, and away from the real estate behemoths like Zillow and Trulia that so often dominate local search results.
(Want more help in the fight against Zillow? Check out our Facebook group, Beat Zillow, for tips and tricks for agents, by agents! Otherwise, read on)
What kind of leads do you get with IDX?
Like we mentioned above, IDX can work wonders for your lead gen efforts. But you’re probably aware that some sources of leads just aren’t worth the effort. Fortunately, leads you get through IDX tend to be high quality.
We mentioned one of the reasons for that above – These are people who are further along in the home buying process, and are eager to purchase their new home.
Leads you get through IDX websites tend to want more information on specific properties, as well as information about the neighborhood or community they’re interested in living in, so be sure to come to a conversation prepared.
If a lead connects with you through your IDX, consider sending them additional information as an icebreaker.
If these leads are indeed further along in the home buying process, they’ll probably want to schedule a showing or contact an agent, so be sure to be attentive and ready to have a conversation when you see these leads enter your CRM.
Getting leads with IDX websites
One of the most effective ways to get traffic to convert into leads on IDX websites is by locking content behind a form*. With the right real estate website, or a little web design know-how, this can be done quickly and easily and allows you to create contact forms to get vital lead information such as name, phone number and email address.
Easy Agent PRO’s IDX websites, LeadSites, are built for this sort of thing, and allow you to quickly design pages and create opt-in forms to capture lead information. To learn more about LeadSites and schedule a demo to see one in action, visit our page to learn more.
*WARNING! When using a form like this to capture leads, always remember that less is more. While it can be tempting to collect as much information as possible, so you have a detailed picture of each and every lead you plan to contact, generally the more info you ask for, the less likely people are to fill out your form.
We find in general asking for name, email and phone number is acceptable, but if you’re struggling to convert traffic, and are confident in your ability to connect with your leads over email, you may want to consider dropping the phone number request. Some people find it less threatening to provide an email address than a phone number these days, which may help you get more leads into your system.
Market report data is a popular thing to hide behind a sign up form, as many visitors are interested in viewing in the data. Likewise, home valuation pages and occasionally even neighborhood pages all make prime targets for this strategy.
Keep them coming back for more
The best way to build trust with a future client is through repeat visits to IDX websites.
Creating listing alerts is a great way to do this, as it keeps your name current in their inbox every time a new listing pops up in their area. Listing alerts also have the benefit of keeping the attention of the hottest buyers, and allowing you to easily identify those buyers by their repeat visits to your website.
How do you get traffic to IDX websites?
Ok, so we’ve covered converting traffic into leads, but what if you’re struggling with actually getting traffic to your website in the first place?
There are a couple of ways to make this happen, and each method has its’ pros and cons. Let’s start with the one everyone should be doing, no matter what their situation:
Getting traffic with SEO for IDX websites
SEO, otherwise known as search engine optimization, is yet another fancy term you hear a lot when talking about generating leads with your IDX website.
SEO is the process of building IDX websites and the content within in such a way as to rank higher in search engines, such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. There are hundreds of ways to do this right, and just as many to do it incorrectly, and we’ve covered much of that already in several other articles, which I’ll include links to at the end of this section.
Let’s go over some best practices you can use in your content to get it to rank higher and draw in more traffic.
First and foremost, be sure to be optimizing your farm/neighborhood pages so they rank in local searches. Be sure to include the name of the area you’re talking about often – aim for 5% – 8% of the article to include this keyword.
Google (and other search engines) generally like content that’s longer, so aim for at least 600 words, or ideally, around 1500 to 2500.
What’s in a name?
As a general rule, you’ll want your content to stand out – It’s easier to rank for terms that aren’t already flooding the search engines. Instead of titling your neighborhood posts “Melbourne”, or even “Living in Melbourne”, try more unique headlines like “Melbourne Real Estate Guide”. A good way to know how competitive a keyword or headline will be is to search that term in google. Then compare the number of results the search engine finds with other terms.
As you can see, one of these terms is going to be much less competitive than the other:
Once you’ve optimized your post, be sure to display IDX on these pages for maximum effect.
If you’re writing an article about “moving to” or “living in” a particular area, be sure to target new movers and link out to your IDX content. For a great example of this, check out Karin Carr’s blog, which does a fantastic job of hooking potential leads with everything they want to see.
SEO is slow and steady
Don’t expect your content to jump to the first page overnight – SEO is a slow, methodical way to achieve long-term success. You can expect your SEo efforts to bear fruit over time, but expecting to see anything substantial before 3-6 months in unrealistic.
Fortunately, there are ways to get more immediate results, though as you might expect, they often include spending money and are usually only sustainable as long as you continue paying in. That’s why, no matter what else you’re doing to draw traffic to IDX websites, I strongly suggest putting in the time to create an optimized, SEO friendly website.
For more information of SEO and how to use it in IDX websites content, check out these handy guides:
5 Indispensable SEO Tips For Your Blog
How to use backlinking to boost organic traffic
Rea Estate SEO Keywords for a Healthier Blog
Explode your SEO with this free app
How to rank on Google with SEO
Advertising for traffic and leads with IDX websites
The other side of the lead generating coin is advertising, which allows you to create campaigns in Google, Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, or anywhere else you think potential leads are hiding.
Ads are a great short-term approach to getting traffic to your website, and in the right circumstances, they can become a vital part of your business in the long-term.
Take Google for example; It’s easy to set up Google ads and get high intent traffic by targeting the keyword “[your area] homes for sale”. You can then run forced registration, like we mentioned above, to get cheap leads through the traffic you’re drawing to your website.
If you’re a more experienced marketer, or you have the assistance of a marketer who’s familiar with Google ads, you can even use geo-targeting to find new mover prospects through Google. Check out this document from Google which goes over how to set up geo-targeting for your ads.
Finding an audience for your IDX websites
Whether you’re using Google, Facebook or something else, you’ll most likely be asked to set up an audience when building an ad. Continuing our theme of fancy terms that mean relatively simple things, an “audience” is just a group of people you want to target based on specific characteristics or interests.
As a real estate agent, many of these will be off-limits to you, as there are several protections in place to prevent discriminating in who you target based on race, ethnicity, age, gender, etc.
However, what we’re interested in is a person’s interests – Specifically, you’ll want to focus on targeting anyone with a real estate interest, as this means they’ve been looking at real estate information online.
You’ll want this ad to link to relevant content that includes your IDX, which you can add to the content via shortcode.
If all this sounds like too much, don’t worry – We’re here to help. Easy Agent PRO has options for LeadSites users who want to set and forget their advertising – Including options for both Google ads and Facebook. To learn more, visit our website and schedule a free demo.
SEO Strategies For IDX
If creating content and optimizing it for your website seems like too much for you to handle, you should know that there are options for the agent who is short on time.
Agents using LeadSites, for example, have access to new, done-for-you articles twice a week, which they can then edit and personalize to maximize their SEO in a fraction of the time.
Niche and neighborhood pages are another great way to create content for your website that, with just a little bit of SEO, can really stand out and drive traffic to your real estate website. (Not to toot our own horns, but Easy Agent PRO also offers SEO optimized farm page writing as a service to its clients)
Lastly, blog posts about community events with links to IDX pages, or IDX embedded into the page via shortcode, are a great way to attract traffic. The more specific and niche these posts can get, the better, as it means you’re competing with fewer agents for that coveted top spot on Google searches.
For example, one LeadSites user built an entire page as a guide to viewing Christmas lights in his area. The post blew up and became wildly successful, even landing him a spot on the local news.
Check out the video below to see how he did it:
How to use IDX for Facebook leads
Your IDX can also come into play when building Facebook ads, and the platform offers some unique ways to make that happen.
For example, you can build a carousel ad, which is an ad that shows several pictures back to back, to create a collection of price points to appeal to anyone viewing the ad, regardless of their price range.
For the agent who loves being in the limelight, try creating video content to promote your neighborhoods with links to your IDX pages in the ad.
It’s easier than ever to create video ads these days, as anyone with a working cellphone can capture decent-quality footage of their town and turn it into content.
Another strategy that works well is to build ads centered around market update info, and then link to market report pages on your real estate website. You can again use the aforementioned strategy of creating forms on these pages, requiring lead info to view the market reports.
New listing alerts also work very well, usually in tandem with a landing page dedicated to signing up visitors for future alerts, or the tried and true IDX pages we’ve been recommending in other ads.
Ready to start using IDX for lead gen?
No matter how you decide to decide to approach your IDX, by now you surely see you have a versatile tool at your disposal for not only bringing traffic to your website, but also converting that traffic into leads.
In all honesty, I recommend a combination of the strategies mentioned above – It’s important to use advertising to draw in traffic, but be sure to create optimized content that will push your website to the to of the search engines over time.
Sign up forms make for a great way to generate leads once that traffic has arrived – Just make sure to fine tune all of the content on your site so it keeps people coming back for more.
We use the term “leads” a lot around here, but at the end of the day, a lead is just a person, like you or me, looking for a new place to call home. If you can empathize with them, and think about what you’d like to see when shopping a home, you’re much more likely to make that connection and become their new agent.