Driving organic search traffic

Unless you’re willing to simply buy leads for years to come, you want to create a lead generation machine, and start generating traffic from Google, Bing, Pinterest, and others to scale your business.

In our top 24 websites, the sites drive between 4,300 sessions per month to 30,000 sessions per month, with a substantial portion from organic and direct/referral traffic. If I sort by organic traffic only, 16 of the sites remain in the top 24.

For clients that I consult with on their real estate sites and coach to help grow their business, I’ve learned that “success” is relative and that the key to growth is acknowledging where each site is and taking the wise steps needed to achieve the next level in business growth. Don’t get distracted by someone else’s success. Most agents are not adequately investing in either their marketing or their websites. There is a huge opportunity for everyone at every stage.

Only 16.5% of real estate agents had success with purchased leads. (OutboundEngine Real Estate Marketing Benchmarks Report)

Building organic traffic and good SEO is like compound interest, it takes a steady investment over time and the results get better and better. Many of these sites are also driving traffic because the agents 1) proactively setup custom search subscriptions for each client 2) show their clients how to use Friends and Family and 3) add regular local content each month.

What I’ve seen in my wider research this year is that it is almost impossible to rank a website well if an IDX uses iFrames or subdomains. The good news is that we hate iFrames and subdomains almost as much as Google does, so you won’t find them at Showcase IDX.

Remember though, generating organic leads takes work. Just like in the physical world, it takes work to knock on doors, attend local events, volunteer, make cold calls, etc. Ranking on Google takes works too. The good news is that this guide shows some incredible success stories and shows you what settings to use on your IDX.

Nine of the most successful agents in our top 24 websites are single agents. In order to have a successful website, you don’t have to be on a large team or be a broker.

I loved finding this in our data because it shows what I’ve been saying.

Anyone can be successful, and it does not take spending thousands of dollars per month. Now, while I am a strong believer in investing in marketing to grow ANY business, many of these most successful sites were built by individual agents that simply carved out time each week/month to do the work to rank their sites.

In the long-term, organic traffic (what you get from Google/Bing/etc) is much cheaper than spending money on ads (paid media). Plus, what happens when you stop spending on ads? The traffic stops. The value of SEO (search engine optimization) is much closer to compound interest, where it only gets better over time.