Real Estate Webmasters Site vs. Ultimate IDX Site

Some of the goals of any major real estate website makeover, such as the one I accomplished for my own Denver real estate website, are to:

• Increase user satisfaction with more and better organized content, leading to more repeat visitors.
• Improve ease of use with good and easy to use navigation and clear calls to action
• Improve SEO factors, resulting in more organic search hits on more keywords
• Improve trust / authority factors, leading to more consumer / user registrations and contact forms completed
• Improve and simplify lead management back end functions, resulting in easier broker and agent lead management, and better lead to transaction conversion ratios

In this article, I will post some of my initial Google Analytics and other results for my Ultimate IDX website as compared to my previous Real Estate Webmasters website.

Comparison Periods

Before: Jan 1 2009 through June 30, 2009, the final six months of operation of my old REW website. By this time, the site had finally “aged” and “matured” in the eyes of the search engines, was generating fairly good SERPs, and I had terminated all AdWords PPC campaigns a few months earlier, in May 2008.

After: Jan 1 2010 through June 30 2010, six months after converting from the REW proprietary site and IDX to my new Joomla open source website and integrated Ultimate IDX platform. By this time, the search engines had adjusted to the new platform, plus comparing using the same period as for the prior year more appropriately accounts for seasonal market factors.

Other Contributing Factors

During the first year of operation of the new website, minimal new content was added, so an increase in new content pages should not have been a major factor. In November and December 2009, some new content was added in the form of about 30 new dedicated subdivision specific pages, plus on-page embedded links to about 60 other already existing subdivision specific pages, all in my primary market areas, each of which results in a new url for SEs to find and index, for a total of 90 new indexable pages/urls. However, partly offsetting the impact of the new pages and internal links, 36 pages for some communities, those that I determined to be too far outside of my preferred market area, were tagged “noindex,nofollow”, but allowed to remain on the site.

The idea was that since Google indexed page counts had not been increasing for some time, apparently a result of Google’s reported tendency to cap indexed pages based on overall site rank, that allowing those less desirable pages to drop out of the indexes might open up indexing slots for the newer content. Plus, from a marketing point of view, since I don’t service the distant areas, removing those pages from the indexes and SERPs would also mean fewer consumers using my site that I would not want to work with anyway, and more consumers doing searches for subdivisions in my target market areas would find the new pages. That seems to have been effective, as Google has since indexed between 30-40 of these new urls, including 22/30 of the new dedicated subdivision pages, and the other SEs have indexed even more. Plus, visitor counts are up somewhat, and nearly all of them are in fact within my target market area.

Overall SERPs did improve somewhat for the preexisting community pages, which I believe was primarily a result of my new ability to totally re-design the IDX summary search results and details pages to include many additional data elements, such as subdivision names and zip codes in the summary results, and virtually every available IDX field in the details pages, providing many more data elements on both types of pages for the SEs to find and index. I could not do that on the REW site. However, due to the complexity of determining the pages actually impacted and SERP improvements for any particular page or set of pages, no attempt has been made to determine the exact ranking improvements at a granular level. The overall statistics shown below reflect the net results, which should suffice.

Statistical Analysis

Visitors: Up 24% with new site.

Unique Visitors: Up 26% with new site.

Time on Site per Visit: Down 25% with new site.
See following page views explanation for why this is actually a good thing.

Average Page Views per Visit: Down 14% with new site.
Possible explanation:
The old site had only 8 IDX results per page, while the new site has 25. Search summary results also default to most recent listings on new site. As a result, repeat visitors rarely need to look at more than one page to see new listings since their last visit. The new site navigation structure also provides better multilevel drop-down and slide-out menus, which lets users find and get to what they are looking for quicker, with less page browsing and reduced need to click on main pages to get to sub-menus. The enhanced search form, with many more search parameters, also significantly reduces the number of searches and amount of search results browsing required, by providing more criteria for very focused and precise search results for the user. In summary: This decline in average page views is OK because IMO users are actually able to use the site more efficiently.

Bounce Rate: Up 32%, from 33.1% to 43.9%.
Partial explanation:
The site was getting many more MLS# and address specific SE hits due to more IDX details pages being indexed as a result of better SEO on those pages than before, primarily because of significantly more content on each property details page. Those MLS# and address specific search users would typically use only single page view since they go straight to exactly what they were looking for. Observing this trend, in late 2010 I removed the IDX details pages site map from Google Webmaster Tools and other SEs. With this change, the only IDX details pages seen by the SEs will be properties in my primary market areas, for which I provide summary search results (most recent 25 listings) and links to details pages, in the applicable community and property type specific content pages. Those should now be the only IDX details pages found and indexed by the SEs. This seems to have been very effective, as the bounce rate has gone back down to 34% since that change, and according to my Jan-Mar 2010 Google Analytics stats.

Returning vs. New Visitors: Up 25% for new site.
This is a very good result, as I want more return visits from serious buyers.

Lead Registrations as a Percentage of Unique Visitors: Up 91% with new site.
This I primarily attribute to a somewhat better lead capture form and process, and also to better overall user trust and satisfaction with the new site. I think it looks better and is easier to use, and my users apparently agree.

Number of Lead Registrations: Up 142%!
This result is from a combination of higher number of unique visitors from better overall SEO and SERPs, plus the higher lead capture rate, and many more lead registrations is the real proof of success of the new website platform, design, functionality and ease of use.

Lead Quality: This is hard to determine without more and better follow-up, which I will be working on. But my “gut feel” is that lead quality is about the same or somewhat better. A few users still register with bogus email and/or phone numbers, but the percentage doesn’t seem to have changed much. And certainly the overall increase in registration counts more than makes up for those few!

Conclusions

Obviously, the long term improvement in visitor counts, returning visitors, and lead capture rates and numbers are all very good.

Future Plans

• Increase appropriate blogging and blog comment activities on this and other “do follow” blogs to increase incoming links and link value.
• Continue to add subdivision specific content pages, focusing on higher value subdivisions and condo buildings in my primary market area.
• Improvements to IDX features, including Google map search, which is vendor dependent.
• Specific search criteria and details pages for investment/income property types, to increase SEO for investor type searches and investment oriented leads. (Partially completed Sept 2010)
• Better follow-up on the leads that do register. This is a constant, ongoing effort. Efforts to improve lead follow-up via lead referrals to other brokers/agents in 2010 were not successful. That effort will continue, as there is no way for me to personally follow up on every lead given the number of leads I am getting every week.