Great New York Times Article on Engagement Thresholds

On the 25th of June the New York Times published an article by Barnard Lunn entitled Build an Insanely Great Web Service. Not only is this article worth reading because it gives the reader the opportunity to read the work “suck” as a descriptor in a New York Times article which I just find amusing, but it offers a great model of the engagement thresholds that websites and services need to think about. The article is written using a start up web service as a model. The applicability of what the author Mr. Lunn says does not stop there, however. The concept can easily be transferred to any website and web service. Viewed through the lens of real estate sites, we see a clear structure in which to think about how users interact with websites. The time thresholds that he lays out are:

• 30 seconds: “I get it.”
• 3 minutes: “I’ve used it and still get it, and it has not annoyed me yet.”
• 3 days: “I find this really useful or fun.”
• 3 weeks: “I am raving about this to other people.”
• 3 months: “I couldn’t imagine not having this, and I’m boring my friends telling them about it.”
• 3 years: “How weird to see this on Oprah.”

(Lunn, Barnard, New York Times 6/25/09)

Now, I am not saying that your real estate website is going to end up on Oprah — though I would not rule it out. But in the mean time, lets look at this structure in the context of a well designed real estate site being used by an interested potential buyer. (Please note that I am going to add a threshold that I feel was overlooked):

• After 3 seconds visitors should like the site design, be able to identify where they should look first and find it easy to read. (Things to think about: Design and Layout)
• After 30 seconds visitors should have clear idea of what your site has to offer them and most importantly what the next step is that they can take. (Things to think about: homepage content and calls to action)
• After three minutes, your visitor has used some of the functionality on your site. If it is well organized and the functionality is intuitive, they will still see the value in your site because they will find that they can easily access the information that they are interested in. (Things to think about: ease of use of your sites functionality and navigation)
• After three days they have fully explored your site, read information on you, your market area and used all the applicable functionality. They find it useful and at this point contact you. (Things to think about: quality and amount of information available, easy and obvious conversion tools)
• After three weeks they have found that your website integrates seamlessly with their property search process and your personal service. They continue to use the site to save searches and ask you questions as you set up viewings. (Things to think about: Lead management and contact utilities)
• After three months they have found the house they want and close on it. They can’t imagine what the process would have been like without your website and your personal attention. (Things to think about: how integrated is your website to your current client management)
• After three years they are ready to buy again and call you . . . or they see you on Oprah and are really impressed. (Things to think about: the value of continued contact with past clients, how good Oprah looks in that pant suit!)

Using these time thresholds as a structure to think about your website is a great way to take a tough look at how your site encourages the engagement of potential and existing clients. If your site is not up to snuff, the possibility of losing potential buyers at any one of these 6 stages is a very serious reality.

The moral of the story is always look at your site from the user’s perspective. Your site should be all about what the potential client is looking for and what you can offer them that they haven’t even thought of yet.

Increasing Reach and Engagement: Integrating real estate search technology on your website

Sean Purcell nails it when he says “the premier ingredient in creating real estate success: lead generation.” Let’s look at how putting property search capability on your site can expand your reach and increase visitor engagement as part of your lead generation activities.

The search function on most real estate professional sites can be broken down into two types: integrated IDX property search and framed IDX property search. Since Union Street Media specializes in IDX integrated real estate web design, we’re often asked what the difference is and which is better.

Framed IDX is often cheaper. But if your real estate website is a part of your online marketing plan, there are significant advantages to an integrated IDX solution that should be considered.

Let’s start by breaking down the components of real estate search technology that matter most to online marketing.

Anatomy of real estate search technology

Search technology for property is a combination of four things:

• Data The MLS data can be hosted on a third party provider or on your site
• Search Interface Flexibility of the search interface to reflect your customers’ desires and your local expertise
• Visual Design Ability to keep your agent or office branding intact throughout your customers’ search process
• Technical Design The code used to display the listings and search results can have implications on your SEO and other marketing objectives

Understanding how these four elements interact can help you make an informed decision about what kind of search technology to deploy on your real estate website.

Your property search and Google

People looking for something will often start on a search engine. The NAR has said that over 80% of housing searches begin online (I bet you’ve heard this from every single technology vendor for the past few months). A fair share of those searches started at Google. You want your property search to be visible to Google in order to reach those people.

From a marketing standpoint, a big difference between integrated IDX and framed IDX is how they appear to Google. On an integrated IDX site, the property data is hosted on your website. That’s part of the integration. On a framed IDX site, the property data is hosted on a third party’s website and “framed” into your site.

Google doesn’t see visual design on websites. It only reads code and data. So while a framed IDX site might appear to be showing all the property data to a human eye, Google doesn’t recognize that the framed data is part of your site. This means that any SEO value from showing property on your site would be lost in a framed IDX site.

Your property search and your brand

Once people find your real estate search website, the next thing you’ll be wanting to do is provide them with an engaging experience. Engaging experience is web marketing geekspeak for “help them find stuff by making the search easy and effective.”

The design of a framed IDX search is often shared across a vast number of real estate websites. This can make integrating the design and branding of your office site with your search technology difficult.

Integrated IDX sites inherit the design styling of your site because the data is on your site. For this reason, it is often easier to maintain branding consistency on your site with an integrated IDX property search.

Widgets and other real estate tools

Integrated IDX sites also offer the capability to add widgets such as a quick search on every page of your website, easily configurable one-click real estate searches and other tools that you can use to promote property and encourage visitor interaction with your search technology. You’ll also want the ability to add extra information to your own listings on your site (if your MLS allows this) so that you don’t get a “duplicate content” penalty from Google. Some framed IDX searches offer these things and some don’t.

These extra tools and widgets have become more prominent and important in the past year as a way for agents and offices to differentiate their specialty knowledge in a geographic region, customer type or property type.

Some questions to ask your real estate search technology provider

Choosing the right technology for your real estate website will always come down to weighing the costs against the benefits. Here are some questions to ask your technology vendor (whether you’re using integrated IDX or framed IDX) so you can plan your online marketing efforts accordingly:

• Will Google and other search engines consider the property information part of my site for SEO purposes?
• Can I change the design and color scheme of the list and detail views to match my site’s branding?
• Can I set up one-click searches and provide links from anywhere in my existing site?
• What incentive do you have to improve your search technology in the future?
• Can I show extra information about my property that is only on my site (avoiding duplicate content issues with Google)?

If you found this article helpful, you may also be interested in the “Is your code hurting your website” post.

Is your website code hurting your online marketing efforts?

Tables. Font tags. CSS/XHTML. Eyes glazing over yet? Well try to keep the lids open just a little longer. I promise to make this as fun as possible (or you can just skip to the video at the end).

Your web design is just a bunch of text

If you “view source” on your website you’ll see a bunch of text. That text is “the code” of your website. Your web browser (Firefox, Safari, IE, Chrome or whatever you use to surf the web) reads the code and then draws the website on your screen. Search engines and other computers also use this code to learn about your site. In fact, the search engines don’t look at what your site looks like at all, only what is written in that code. A search engine is only reading the code and doesn’t care how pretty your website looks.

A pretty web design could be the result of good or bad code. You need to view the source to be able to tell the difference.

There are many ways to write code and get the web browser to draw the same thing. Some of the ways to code the site are “bad” and some are “good.” And the only way to know if the code is bad or if it’s good is to look at the source. Your site may look pretty to you, but it may be miserable for other users or unreadable to search engines.

What does “bad” code look like?

Bad code can look like a lot of things. Unless you’re a web developer you’re going to get bored in a hurry if I go through all expressions of bad code. But I’ll give a quick way to tell if your code is really really bad.

Some key indicators of web code that might be hurting your internet marketing:

• If you see <table> in the code but there are no spreadsheet-like tables in your content.
• If there is almost nothing that makes sense to you when you read it and you see <object> and a bunch of other non-meaningful in the code.
• If you do not find <h1> in the code anywhere or if you can’t make sense of what comes right after it
• If almost all of your code involves <image src= followed by stuff that doesn’t make sense.

What makes “bad” code so bad?

Bad code is anything that doesn’t support your business objective. For the rest of this post I’m going to assume that your business objective involves internet marketing.

Here are two ways that bad code can get in the way of your internet marketing (I bet there’s more):

1. If your online marketing strategy involves using search engines, then bad code is anything that gets in the way of the search engines.
2. If your online marketing strategy is targeting visitors who are impatient with slow-loading websites, then bad code is anything that slows down your website.

Bad code derailing your search engine optimization efforts?

Bad code can be responsible for a web page that looks great to humans, but is completely unreadable to a search engine. If you can’t find anything in your code that makes sense, then the search engine can’t either. The search engine will treat it just a page full of random gunk. The more readable stuff in your web code, the more likely a search engine is going to find your page useful.

SEO efforts are harmed when the search engine spiders can’t read your code.

You will always need some sort of code to make the page work, but you want all that structural code to be as minimal as possible. Think of it like a percentage. You want a high percentage of stuff you can read compared to the stuff that is structural code. The search engine is always going to like sites that have the most useful content, they have to in order to remain relevant.

If another site has a better good code/bad code mix, then it will rank higher than yours.

Take Google, for example. If Google started returning all garbage pages that weren’t any good and some other service returned pages that were full of useful content, then more people would use the other service. And if more people used the other service then Google would make less money selling the ads they sprinkle around the margins of their search engine results page.

At the end of the day you’re marketing to humans and so are search engines. Both like lots of good content.

The search engine may be a machine, but it has to keep real humans happy. One way the machine determines whether people will be happy to see the page is by determining how much useful content that anyone can read is on the page compared to how much structural stuff that might be good or might not be so good.

Bad code frustrating your users?

Sometimes the way a web site is built can really slow it down. This is usually where people start talking about Flash and how evil it is. I won’t do that because there are ways to use Flash that don’t slow down a web site. All the same, make sure your site isn’t using too many graphics or a complicated layout that uses a bunch of the <table> things I noted above.

If your code is too complicated or includes a lot of images, it may be slow to load because the browser has to sort out the complicated code and then go fetch the images. Yes, seconds do matter to web visitors.

Bad code slows down your visitors, too. Bad for internet marketing.

Just because broadband is getting better penetration doesn’t mean we don’t have to worry about load time either. Because now we have a lot of cell phones and other mobile devices starting to browse the web and these little machines on their internet connections work faster when you have more good code.

I’ve got bad code! I’m firing my web designer!

A word of caution here. You might have bad code for a variety of reasons. Here are two things you should consider before getting too worked up:

• If your website is five or more years old, remember that your website may have been good when it launched. New good coding methods are always being developed.
• This second one might be hard to take. You might have made design requests that could only be accomplished with bad code. Like a gigantic full-page image of some sort, or a great big animation or video, or very very specific control over where every pixel is on the screen. Sometimes meeting client demands can result in bad code (though your designer should at least give you a warning that you’re going into bad code territory).

I don’t want to read all this, I just want to watch a video about internet marketing and code

Here you go. My favorite internet marketing musician, SEO Rapper brings you through everything you need to know to keep your code all good.

Flash and SEO: Google now does Flash

Google just announced that they have made some improvements to how they crawl (i.e read) Flash content.

Some highlights:

• This only applies to SWF files, not FLV (FLV is a common video format used with Flash).
• Googlebot will read the text from the SWF (not images that look like text, but actual text content).
• Google will discover web addresses that are in the SWF file.
• Google will not discover web addresses inside SWF files that do not use text as the link

There’s a few more points so if you’re geekily inclined, read the Google Flash announcement.

Week in Review: 3 Block Quotes

Guy Kawasaki on viral vs word of mouth

Viral marketing is typically reserved for programs where the advertising is talked about as opposed to the product itself. A good example are viral videos, where the humor trumps the brand, ala Cadbury Schweppes drumming gorilla video—humorous partly due to the Phil Collins soundtrack, of course—and the parodies which followed). Word of mouth is the actual sharing of an opinion about a product or service between consumers. Your viral marketing only works if it gets people talking about the product itself. If it doesn’t, you might create some laughter and awareness, but there won’t be a change in sales.

Read the full thing.

Greg Swann on single-property sites

If we can do it, we want for buyers visiting one of our single-property web sites to move into the home in their minds — just from the experience of the web site. If we can’t get them that far, we want to answer every question they might have, passively, from the web site — both to satisfy their itch to know and to establish our transparency. We want for buyers to long, to marvel, to exult about the tiniest details in our homes, treating our single-property web sites like the Christmas Wish Book. At an absolute minimum, we want for our sites to dominate their time. The more time they spend on our site, the less time they have to spend looking at other homes.

Read the full thing.

Marc Davison on the development of the real estate web

I think we can all agree that building a relationship is the truest segue to creating a client. But when real estate emerged online over a decade ago it made a conscious decision to forgo that time honored method of building business. Instead, it lunged at the consumer. Baited. Switched. You know the rap.

Read the full thing.

My fave Bad MLS photo this week is for all you Harry Potter and/or fixer-upper fans.

Understanding and Using AIDA (including 22 things you can do to improve your site performance)

The name Aida (made famous in Verdi’s opera) means “visitor” in Arabic and “reward” in Swahili. This post is about the marketing acronym, related to visitors and rewards, outlining consumer attitudes: Attention-Interest-Desire-Action. I’ll present the concept, orient it in relation to your site visitors and give you some ideas on how to use this conceptual model for your own marketing.
Read more

Short followup on Craigslist and HTML

The HTML that will allowed on Craigslist should be enough to make a nice layout. You get images, tables (as much as I abhor table-based web development), headers and the font tag. Sure it’s like we’re rolling back the clock to 1999. But it won’t be too difficult to make attractive ads with the tags allowed.

I would consider the outcry to be pretty much a false alarm (let me know if I’m wrong here). But it still provided a great opportunity to listen to customers and hear what they think about real estate marketing efforts.

Real Estate Internet Marketing “Map”

During one of the final panels at Real Estate Connect in NYC I was sketching in my notebook the process of how users get to websites, and what we ultimately want them to do when they get there.

I took a few minutes to draw it up when I got home, and this is what I came up with. It’s far from complete, but seems useful in explaining how firms like ours use “web 2.0″ technologies to get traffic to our client’s sites. I thought it might be useful in providing a visual framework to illustrate the process. Personally, I needed something to organize the constant flow of information, ideas, sites, tools, etc., that constantly cross my desk/inbox/RSS feed.

Do you think this is a useful and/or accurate way to represent this?