How to Use Your Website to Attract Commercial Real Estate Clients
Most commercial real estate websites are structured around a group of listings and not much else. Perhaps that is because many agents or brokers don’t want to spend more time on improving the website. That then leaves a good degree of marketing opportunity unexplored.
As a direct result of this lack of website planning and involvement, most brokerage websites rank poorly for a given location; they then compete with each other online at the same generic level. The only way those brokerages can then attract reasonable volumes of enquiry is through the use of the industry portals. Those industry portals charge a large fee for priority property placement. Ordinary listings in the portals are then relegated to the lower levels of page rank amongst other listings in the same location. You can see why we need vendor paid marketing funds to promote any quality listing!
Industry Portals?
Whilst the industry portals are valuable in the marketing process, they are not the only online method of marketing, and as mentioned earlier they are quite expensive. If agents and brokers took more time in optimizing their websites through using some very simple strategies, the rates of enquiry from those websites could be enhanced in so many ways.
Things you can do with your Website
Here are some ideas to help you structure a better commercial real estate website for your brokerage, and perhaps for yourself:
- Keywords – Choose a set of keywords that match your location and then your property type. For example you should select a few locational words that reflect your property location. Generally those words will be suburb and city names. When choosing keywords related to property type, the first level of the hierarchy will be the property type such as office, retail, or industrial. You can then select a subset of words relating to the property such as warehouse, office layout, shop front, property size and property improvements. If you carefully select the main words that apply to your location and property type you can build your property advertisements around them.
- Meta tags – Behind each website page there are a series of meta tags that help the search engines decide what a page and a website is all about. It is very easy to set these Meta tags to the keywords and property descriptions that match the activities of the office concerned. A good website developer could advise on just what the correct Meta tags should be to help search engine exposure for the brokerage.
- Landing pages – Whilst each website should have a carefully crafted home page, there should also be some special landing pages in the website that are designed for special property locations, activities or services, and property types. Each website can thereby have keywords and page content designed accordingly. In that way the website exposure to the search engines can be optimised.
- Website content – Write articles regularly for loading to your website; two or three articles per week are an ideal number. Those articles should talk about the region and the property types. In that way the search engines can see that information exists within the site that may be of use to enquiring people from search engine activity. That strategy then lifts search engine exposure. Ensure that the articles are informational and not advertorial.
These four simple strategies are very effective. If you want to lift the results you are getting from your website, then these processes will help you greatly.