by Ryan O'Grady, on 29th August, 2010 •
Earlier I posted an article outlining the Importance of your Real Estate Blog. Here I’m going to provide an example of how powerful a blog can be in increasing traffic to your website.
We are going to use this site www.silkwoodmedical.com.au. Silkwood Medical are a plastic surgery company based in Bondi Junction, Sydney. They built this website around 18 months ago and although the site looks very nice it does not rank well in search engines and therefore does not generate too much organic traffic. The site has no blog associated with it and news articles are posted to the website in pdf format.
Our solution was to create a blog which looked exactly the same as the client’s website and place the blog on a separate url www.silkwoodnews.com.au. The idea of this, is that a user will jump between blog and site or site and blog without realizing they have been redirected to a new url. The client would then post articles through the blog which will build up pages in search engines driving traffic back to the blog which in turn will direct traffic to the original site.
This has worked very well and the blog now rates high in search engines in many key words which the original website does not. Some of these key words included on the first page of Google for the blog are:
- macrolane sydney
- ulthera australia
- breast macrolane injections
- breast injections macrolane
- ultherapy cost
- ultherapy reviews
- cost of face ultherapy
- facial revolution
- macrolane breast enhancement sydney
- macrolane injections sydney
- skin tightening ulthera
- ulthera laser in sydney
- ulthera reviews
- ultherapy costs
- video ulthera
Because users now receive the Newsletter via email and a link back to the website, means traffic is driven to the blog. This is better for their business as readers are likely to view other information about their services and could lead to an increase in new business.
Unfortunately, the General Manager of the company left a few months ago so content has not been updated since then. However, the main Silkwood Website receives between 55% to 65% of its traffic from the blog site and this would spike significantly each time a post was created and an email sent to subscribers.
In summary, by attaching a blog to the website will increases the amount of pages and content in search engines resulting in increased traffic. Also, a great way to encourage users to frequent your website is to post your newsletter through your website, further increasing traffic.
Note: if you do not want to set up the blog on a new url you can cerate a sub-domain for the blog eg news.silkwoodmedical.com.au
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by Ryan O'Grady, on 5th August, 2010 •
In a huge industry move realestateview has just acquired Myhome one of their key competitors in the real estate portal space. This move by realestateviw follows their recent expansion into other states and territories across Australia.
As Petra Sprekos explains on Property Portal Watch the “acquisition complements realestateview.com.au’s existing offering for estate agents and consumers and will substantially increase content”. It will be interesting to see whether Myhome will remain free for agents to list properties.
This is very exciting, as now an Industry based portal is the 3rd largest in Australia and should start gathering real momentum to have a shot at Domain.
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by Ryan O'Grady, on 7th July, 2010 •
As a sales person regardless of whether you’re selling real estate or real estate websites, a pivotal point in your success is justifying to a client why the service, product or asset is worth the investment outlay. In real estate web development this can be a difficult task, especially if the client sees very little value in the web. However, this is now become a whole lot more easier thanks to a service offered by a company called The Ad Network.
The Ad Network is a specialist digital agency which focuses in real estate advertising representation. They’re basically the middle person between advertisers (who wish to market their products and services) and website owners (who’s audience is the advertiser’s target). The Ad Network perform all of the leg work in finding an advertiser who matches your website profile, looks after the contracts and the relationship, serves the ads on your website and then provides you with a quarterly cheque for the advertising revenue your site has made.
From a recent press release:
“The Ad Network represents Australia’s biggest Real Estate Agents, including Raine & Horne, Century 21, First National, Richardson & Wrench and Laing + Simmons with exclusive advertising rights. They have also established themselves as Australia’s leading real estate industry network, working with a variety of partner sites within the real estate industry including Myhome, Rentfind, Homeloanhints and the Real Estate Institute of NSW.”
You might wonder how this links in to your own real estate agency website given you are not operating a head office website. In recent times, The Ad Network has seen a strong demand for targeted local area marketing, where advertisers are looking to promote their goods and services to a specific audience in a particular geographic area. In an industry first The Ad Network placed ads on an individual office website Richardson & Wrench Mosman (here Sales Results and Property Page along with their sales and news alerts). These ads were negotiated independently from the R&W network and relate solely to Richardson & Wrench Mosman with the reported advertising fee being 5 figures each month.
This is quite a significant return for RWM given the average website outlay is in the thousands not tens of thousands. Obviously, the normal real estate agent website would initially not attract this type of advertising revenue but over time through building up a readership and audience it is possible. Basically, the more people that come to your website, the more revenue you can potentially make.
If you’d like to find out whether your website is suitable for advertising, you can contact Rowena Gupta at The Ad Network Rowena@theadnetwork.com.au.
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by Ryan O'Grady, on 14th May, 2010 •
Today, Homehound launched “Home Style” which is an interactive gallery displaying images of ideas for home renovations. They have 10,000 + photographs which they believe will provide inspiration for key room makeovers and renovations within the home.
James Hannan, General Manager of Independent Digital Media says:
Home Style’s galleries of interiors and exteriors will help users decide what to do next with their homes. “Home Style is a fantastic new offering from Homehound, created to assist with generating ideas for designing the dream home on any budget.”
“It offers home hunters the opportunity to visualise what they might do when it comes to decorating, updating or renovating the home they’re about to purchase. This new section will inspire our audience and help drive engagement throughout our site. The increased engagement we will add value for our member agents – keeping our audience on the site longer, looking at more pages and in turn more properties.”
I found the “Home Style” section very visually appealing and the search functionality is also quite interactive. What they have done is tag each image with a number of search variables which allow you to select tags/criteria and the results will filter out images which are not within your criteria.
If you were looking to complete a renovation or makeover, then I think you would certainly spend some time drawing inspiration from this section of Homehound.
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