We were asked by the Cody Team to update their Ubertor website to a Responsive design that would render perfectly on iPhones, iPads and other handhelds. They also wanted a true mobile site to improve their search engine results.
As part of the makeover we designed a new logo for the team that was more contemporary.
At the same time we integrated the CREA DDF feed to add more listings to their website and make it more useful to visitors.
Cody Team Before and After – Ubertor Responsive
The key to marketing success lies in focus and consistency — creating a meaningful message and repeating it to those most receptive to it. The following five tools, in no particular order, are a combination of technological time savers and organizational tools to make your marketing programs and client contact easier to manage. Any Realtor will find them useful.
Dropbox is simply a great tool to share documents with others, and store all of the stuff you need to keep. It is called cloud storage and is like having a second hard drive to store documents and photos. It is secure, easy to use and can be a real time saver.
From a client perspective it is a great way for a photographer to provide photos for your listings and in turn you can share listing photos with your clients or website provider. You never have to worry about sending emails that bounce because the attachments are too large.
Instead of filling up the hard drive on your computer with contracts, addenda and other documents of your previously closed deals, they can be stored on a service like Dropbox. You can also use it to sync files between your home PC, office PC and iPad.
If you are getting design work done or printed materials have the designer share proofs and finished material in Dropbox so you can review them from any computer or smartphone and in turn share the folder with anyone else involved.
Evernote is a fantastic tool for information gathering and storage. For a Realtor it can be real time saver and streamline your marketing efforts. You can clip articles, websites, images and content from any website and store it for easy retrieval from any device and any place. Great for gathering content for blog posts.
Keep notes about every conversation in specific client notebooks. Group notes by buyer name in a buyer notebook and keep qualification notes, consultation notes, property tour notes, negotiation notes and transaction notes, as well as all associated documents in one place.
Create a customized property tour including the MLS sheet of all homes customers will preview. Include hyperlinks to the map and a calendar entry for the associated showing times right inside one single note.
Forward all client-related emails directly to your Evernote account for a complete repository of all communications with your buyer over the course of the buying lifecycle in one, easily searchable place.
You can even snap a photo of your handwritten notes and send it to your clients Evernote account for review later.
The MailChimp newsletter program is one of the top email marketing service providers around and it is free up to 12,000 emails to 2,000 subscribers a month. It is used so widely I don’t think anyone ever gives a second thought to the MailChimp branding at the bottom of your emails. With one of the most complete platforms available MailChimp has proven itself as an extremely useful and effective email marketing provider. It has great analytics for tracking emails. Lots of templates to choose from and importing client information is intuitive.
MailChimp is excellent for “drip” email campaigns where you create a series of four emails that go to your new prospects on a timed basis. After you have met someone add them to the mailing list and the first email can go out the next day. A second email can be sent a few days later explaining more about the service you offer, what you do and inviting them to join your newsletter mailing list.
You can also set up a market update newsletter template that you email monthly to your mailing list just changing the statistics each time, but retaining the same look and feel.
You can create a signup form which you can add to your website to manage newsletter signups. They enter their information and it goes directly into the mailing list.
Formerly Google Places For Business or Google+ Local, Google My Business is a new platform that makes it easy to manage all of your Google accounts in one place and add in your real estate business hours, photos of your company, and information about your services. This will not only help you get found better through organic searches, but also get more visibility for your Google+ profile.
Setting up Google My Business can easily improve your online presence for real estate by keeping your business information centrally located for Google. And as long as you continue to follow SEO best practices for your real estate website and Google+ page, this will boost your brand awareness and search optimization.
If you want to be found in a Google search for Vancouver Realtor as an example, setting up a Google My Business account is a key step in the process.
Social media is now a must-have for good real-estate marketing, and managing your various channels becomes much easier with Hootsuite. Think of it as a dashboard where you can monitor everything going on in your social media accounts and you can post to one or all from one place. It lets you update and keep track of your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social media accounts all in one spot — a huge time saver.
Hootsuite is particularly useful for Twitter. With Hootsuite, Twitter users can:
There are many more tools out there, but these are the ones we feel are most practical for most Realtors. If you have any favourites, please share them in the comments below.
Canadian small to medium businesses (SMB) are slowly changing their media spending according to a report from the Yellow Pages Group. While traditional media such as print directories will be around for a long time, digital platforms are inevitably taking over.
The average investment in online media amongst the SMB owners who advertise stands at 37% of their advertising budget.
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is essentially about making your website easy for both users and search engine robots to understand. Although search engines have become increasingly sophisticated we have had success raising small businesses and Realtors search results online by a combination of ‘White Hat’ techniques and guest blogging. SEO helps the engines figure out what each page is about and how it may be useful for users.
Ranking better on Google directly impacts your sales and increases website traffic. Consumers are making their purchase decisions online.
Learn more about the services we offer by clicking here. You can also read more about our Guest Blogging services by clicking here.
Recently we have been adding “Call To Action” forms on most pages of a website as you never know when a visitor will have the urge to ask a question.
Do they work? Yes if you follow the research in the infographic below. This was developed by Lisa Margetis of www.singlehop.com a pioneer in cloud computing. Click here to visit their website.
The number of fields, wording and the info you share all impact the success of converting visitors to clients.
This is an excerpt from the website Searchengineland.com which is an excellent source of search information.
“Hummingbird” is the name of the new search algorithm that Google is using as of September 2013, the name comes from being “precise and fast” and is designed to better focus on the meaning behind the words.
Hummingbird is paying more attention to each word in a query, ensuring that the whole query — the whole sentence or conversation or meaning — is taken into account, rather than particular words. The goal is that pages matching the meaning do better, rather than pages matching just a few words.
Google Hummingbird is designed to apply the meaning technology to billions of pages from across the web, in addition to Knowledge Graph facts, which may bring back better results.
What does this mean to you? To say it is a game changer is an understatement. The websites that respond to the change will definitely rise in the rankings so that only leaves the other ones the option of falling in the search results.
How are we responding to Hummingbird? In some ways it is business as usual as we have always created websites that provide useful, topical information to visitors in context, but we are more focused on adding original content throughout a website that reflects the type of search term we are hoping to rank for. For example if you are a Realtor and you want to rank well for the search term “Edgemont Village Homes For Sale” then we make sure the content of your website is related to the area and makes your website authoritative.
In a recent tweet we said “If you optimize an Ubertor website for visitors, there’s almost no chance that a Google algorithm update will penalize you. We do SEO right!”
If you optimize a #Ubertor website for visitors, there's almost no chance that a Google algorithm update will penalize you. We do SEO right!
— Mike Blaney (@GoodIdeas) December 11, 2013