It is time your website started working for you.  Recently most successful real estate agents and brokers have set their gaols for 2009 and revised their business plan with steps to advance their goals.  But very few have included their website as part of thier plan.  Mailings, calls, ads, presentations are often all quantified activities, but not their website’s visitors, search placement or referrals.  Yet most real estate website owners will still “feed” it $400 – $600 or more a year in expense.   Why not apply the same measurements and standards that you apply to calls or presentations or mailings?

Below is a table of some Google search terms and related average monthly volume for Denver.  On average there are well over 200K searches on these Denver real estate terms every month. (You can look up the same info for your market using the Google keywords tool ) How many does your website get?  If your website just received 1% of the total volume (~2,000 referred visitors) every month how many transactions would that help you make?  What is your business plan to gather your share of this search volume?  Where does your website appear in the ranking for these types of searches?  Can your current website even compete or hope to get sufficiently high to get search referrals on phrases like these?

Having a website is no longer about have an internet “presence”.  Major marketers figured this years ago.  For real estate in 2009 it should be all about marketing and increasing your income.

The first step is to learn;

• how many visitors your website currently average per month,
• the cost per visitor,
• how many transactions your website was responsivble for in 2008
• and establish goals for for each of the above for 2009.

More to come in future posts.  In the meantime, if you have a questions or ideas please post a comment.