Greg Harrelson on Utilizing Websites and Technology for Leads

Greg Harrelson is an agent in North Carolina that grew his business by building high ranking websites. Last year Greg and his team closed about 1,600 transactions and gets 450 leads a week. Watch the video or read some of the highlights below to learn how you can use websites to get leads!

TRANSCRIPT

One of the things you have to know is if you have a website, you have to get users and traffic to the website to get conversion. It doesn’t matter how good it is and how well it converts if you don’t have traffic. There are really four main ways to get traffic to your website, first is organic meaning you have to build content, and it takes time. The other ways are paid traffic including Google AdWords pay-per-click, you can drive them to a property search or listing result and get them to sign up, or drive them to a home valuation tool which is most popular, and there’s a lot more traffic and leads and branding to be done in Facebook marketing. Most agents think if they don’t get immediate sales then the leads are worthless, but you have to follow up. Next is market reports, the most up-to-date market report of what’s going on and drive them to those landing pages. And then retargeting Facebook traffic is important.

How do you get organic traffic?

I am not doing any PPC or Facebook advertising, I believe they are good but I am not doing that right now. Because I invested heavily early on and made a content-heavy site I rank very well. Right now I am generating about 450 new leads on a weekly basis. And it’s all organic.

What are some keywords that people can pull up your website right now or links?

If you do Myrtle Beach real estate you are going to find two sites on the first page of Google for that term, which is a pretty good term. Myrtle Beach homes, Myrtle Beach construction, North Myrtle Beach, you name it you will find us. The quality of traffic doesn’t really come from those big terms though, the quality traffic comes from long tail community terms. I’m doing well on the long tail terms.

So what is a long-term plan if you wanted to invest in websites and building Niche pages, do you have to hire someone, how do you get the content, what is your strategy?

I wrote very little of it, I didn’t write it all myself I have somebody that works exclusively for me and basically what we do at this point is find if there are any communities that I haven’t done a page on and then develope that. I figured out what are the areas that I really wanted to work on and I just chose 10 in the beginning and I had someone write the content. The key is that we write the content, and then did a video on it, legitimate video, posted it on social media. Went to active rain and did some good blogs on it, and linked back.

It’s important to note that as Greg mentioned it’s not just adding content, they went out and built site authority. You can’t just build a platform that is SEO friendly and add content and know that is going to work. You have to have inbound links, site authority, social signals, stuff coming from YouTube, and stuff like that.

How many pages do you have on your site right now?

Three to four hundred probably right now.

I think this is important you’ve got to build content for the enjoyment of the reader. You have got to be thinking, Google will reward those who actually build a good experience for the user, so you have to build content thinking about what would the user need to know, what would they need to see, they want to see pictures, they want to see good descriptions of the property, about the amenities of the community, to be educational, they would love to see some video.

Now that the MLS has allowed us to have sold data on the website, you know Greg and I were talking about this, different ways to leverage this data, how are you using it?

One of the things that Zillow does very well in my opinion is they provide a platform where the consumer feels they can get real-time data. So like for instance, I mean I don’t want to debate about whether this estimate is good or is not good, I’m just not concerned about that debate right now, but the reality is the consumer can just literally click an app on their phone and they can get real-time data as to what the value of their property is. So what we’ve got to do is we got to figure out how we can empower the consumer because that’s what are failing.

Agents as I said in the beginning are really missing out on the home valuation leads because they call them once or twice and then they give up. You really should be keeping them updated on the market.

We all know that it takes a long time to convert an Internet lead early cuz you know they’re searching when they’re in the dreaming stage, and then over time you know they continue coming in the entrance to the buying stage and then we make a sale. Well home valuation tools even though we can get some instant sales and listings, for the most part these people are in the dreaming stage of potentially selling or they’re in the dreaming stage of buying. The real money in the home valuation leads is after the 12th month. If you ignore the buyer or the seller when they’re in the dreaming stage they will ignore you when they’re in the buying stage. So it really comes down to making sure that you’re calling them at least once a quarter and emailing them.

How long did it take for your website to rank that high organically?

In the beginning I mean it may have taken to dominate some really big terms it was probably 18 months to really dominate if not 2 years to really dominate. So when I said in the beginning I chose to invest heavily to build the website, when I chose to do that I knew that I was going to be investing money for a period of time to build this and I wasn’t going to get the return until later on. And that’s why people I think don’t do what I did, is because they don’t want to make the investment on the front and hope in the end that they’re going to get a return. They want to put in a dollar and see a return next month.