How to Make the Most of Your IDX Data To Drive Traffic and Leads
Let’s assume that you have chosen an IDX provider that places property search content directly on you site, how can you make the most of your investment in this technology?
The main trick to making the most of your IDX is to leverage saved searches to increase your visibility and drive more traffic to your website. The scale and breadth of how much you can do with this tactic depends on what types of search data your IDX provider offers. WolfNet offers a range of features designed specifically for real estate agents to increase leads in this way.
If you are new to real estate technology, and want more information on what IDX is, take a look at our “what is IDX” primer.
Drive more traffic with IDX
Drive Local Search Intent
A quality IDX platform will allow you, and your clients, to create and save searches. For your clients, this is great because they can save specific home and neighborhood search criteria and be notified of new listings. For you, as an agent, you create a variety of searches and import them into location specific pages.
For example, you can create a search for luxury homes in a particular city or neighborhood. Then you can write unique content describing the neighborhood, focusing on the things that people searching for luxury homes would be interested in (e.g. school ratings, crime rates, demographics, etc.). Don’t hesitate to use your own IDX search to pull this data, if you have access to it (WolfNet offers an add-on neighborhood and school data search functionality). Creating neighborhood pages like this, give you better chance to rank for local searches. The nice thing is that since IDX data is dynamic (it will update as listings sell and new ones appear) your page will continue to look fresh to the search engines, which will keep them coming back, ensuring that your pages stay indexed and seem relevant/timely.
You can create as many pages like this as you want, but be sure to keep them updates as neighborhoods change/evolve.
Showcase Niche Expertise
Let’s assume that one of your specialties is lakefront homes. You can create an entire subsection of pages about lakefront properties on this, that or the other lake in your target area. As with the example above, you will want to write good/valuable content about each lake. For example, how big it is, how good the fishing is, etc. Some of this information may be a little bit harder to come by than the neighborhood info we mentioned before, but the extra work will be worth it.
Or, maybe your expertise is in condos, because the condo market in the city happens to be booming, like it is here in Minneapolis. In case you haven’t picked up on the formula here, here it is again – create a saved search for condos in each particular neighborhood and write unique content describing that neighborhood (e.g. how walkable is it, crime rates, call out any landmarks and major attractions and conveniences, etc.)
Leverage Existing Traffic Sources
With property information living directly on your site, you can easily share listings on social networks like Facebook and Nextdoor. Doing so allows you to tap into the billions of people who frequent these sites daily. Yes, Facebook recently changed its algorithm to make it harder for organic content to be seen, but if you have a large enough following, it’s still worth it.
And don’t forget Craigslist! Sure it may be seen as yesterday’s tactic, but Craigslist still gets a huge amount of traffic on a daily basis. WolfNet’s property search has a built in way to easily create and repost Craigslist ads. There is an art to writing great Craigslist Ads, but it’s definitely still a channel you should utilize.
Capture More Leads with IDX
Leverage Exclusive Data
There is property data out there that the big aggregator sites like Trulia and Zillow don’t have (e.g. original listing price, time on the market, etc.). What those sites share is only data they have collected (e.g. days on Trulia and price changes on Trulia). For homebuyers who are further into their search, this information could be very useful in determining their negotiating strategy and to understand the market better. You can provide them this information by integrating VOW data into your IDX site. We have written a lot about IDX/VOW integration, and WolfNet does provide a VOW add-on solution for our IDX customers.
Timely Inquiry Responses
In the real estate business, timeliness is everything. Most people expect to get responses on the same day, and many expect a response within an hour. If you are managing a team of agents, lead distribution can be a bottleneck that significantly impacts your response times, and in turn, client capture rates. Creating an efficient system to appropriately allocate leads to your agents is key. WolfNet provides brokers several ways to manage lead distribution by either funneling all leads to a central brokerage email address or sending them directly to the listing agent.