Hey Everyone! Hope you are having a great 2018 so far. I was going to start off the year with an article about Yelp and why it is so important to your business, but I thought I better start off with a short post on appraiser websites and why they are so important.
Think of your website as the central hub for your marketing efforts, everything you do to market your appraisal services on the internet should link back to your website to help it show up in organic listings in the search engines and on mobile devices.
There are thousands of places to get websites built these days and I have to make the assumption that you already have a website if you are trying to get non-lender work. If not, check out the Appraiser’s club for information on the websites we build and host for real estate appraisers.
Recently an appraiser told me about their relatively new website that they had built for them and they were not sure if they were getting any potential customers to their page.
One of the first things you want to determine is the number of people that contact you after they visit your website. Even if your website is getting visits, it is worthless unless people are taking the next step to contact you.
Make sure your contact information is placed throughout the website and that you have a mobile version of your website as well. That is a good starting point.
The next step you will probably want to take is to get some good analytics added to your website so you can see where that traffic is coming from, and if it is from the search engines, what keywords they are using to find your website.
You should be ranking for appraisal related terms as well as city or county specific terms within your primary market. You can do a quick search to see if your website is showing up and to gauge your competition by going to google/yelp/bing and search for terms like:
[cityname] appraiser
[cityname] appraisal
You can also just leave off the [cityname] and see if you show up for
real estate appraiser
home appraiser
and terms like that. That should give you a good idea of how you are showing up as well as your competition.
You can have thousands of visits a month, but if they are finding your website because you are ranking for the wrong terms (funny cat at appraisal, real estate for sale, etc….), then that traffic is pretty worthless to your appraisal business.
You want to determine your keywords as soon as possible, usually prior to building a website, but you can also make changes to your website to help the search engines and other websites determine it is actually an appraiser website.
So optimize your website for those primary keywords and use those keywords in your social profiles, throughout your websites, in your blog posts if your blog, when creating videos and in all of your marketing efforts.
I like to use google analytics to track my traffic.
Most likely if your website is showing on the first page of google, you are top ranking on all the other search engines.
The most important thing you should focus on this year will be your local search profiles. After you have your website online you should definitely focus on Yelp, Google My Business and Facebook. My next article will focus on why Yelp is so important to your business and how to claim your listing.
If you would like more information on optimizing your website, or getting a free optimized website by being a member of the Appraiser’s Club, please visit http://appraisersclub.com for more information and to attend one of our free webinars!
I hope you found this helpful!!
Bryan
