Why Smith?

The Smith Group™ System

Real estate agents and brokers who are clients of The Smith Group™ sell well over $1 billion in real estate per year. TSG designs some of the best looking, most easy-to-navigate websites in the entire real estate industry. What’s more, the applications that run behind the scenes are among the most robust and most integrated applications available to agents and brokers… Anywhere. In short, TSG sites (1) keep viewers; (2) find new viewers; then (3) allow real-time communications between agents and potential real estate buyers.

1. Better Websites: Bounce Rates, TOS, Return Visits, and ROI

Without Website Return on Investment (ROI) it doesn’t matter how highly your site is ranked on any Search Engine, or even whether or not putting your web address on marketing material is a good idea. If visitors are not sticking around to view properties then your website will never work no matter how many people you trick into going to it.

Bounce rates are an indication of whether or not visitors are staying on your site, or quickly clicking the back button and moving on… For example, if your website’s bounce rates are 60% it means that for every dollar you spend getting people to your site, even down to the ink on your business cards, hiring an SEO company, Pay-Per-Click programs, etc., $.60 is lost and can never be recovered. This is low ROI. Oppositely, get the bounce rates down and the ROI goes up.

Time on Site (TOS) is an indication of whether or not your site is delivering the information your visitors need and whether or not their desired user experience is being realized. The more time they are spending on your site, the more you’ve got it right. If both of these are good, or even rising, then visitors will tend to return over and over — and the need to search competitor sites is significantly diminished.

What Reduces Bounce Rates?

• Quality Branding: Create a clean, commercial look and feel. Use large format, commercial grade photography.
• Design Locally: Franchise and other template sites fail miserably simply because what is useful in Kansas City is not appropriate in West Palm Beach. Nothing should look the same. Design elements should be local, personal and highly professional. That said, visitors don’t care about you — at least not initially. They are not on your site to read about you and your family — they want to see properties.
• Simple Property Searches: Don’t ask your site visitors to fill out forms the size of a mortgage application, or give personal information, just to view listings. Keep property search forms simple. That is, get visitors to your product quickly — Properties!
• Reduce Page Jumping: Create page efficiencies for maps, calculators, photos, videos, and other support materials.
• Be Wary Of Tech Fads: Just because technology allows you to do something doesn’t mean you should do it. Example: The newest fad of searching for homes using a Google map — probably the worst user experience possible, but technologically cool.
• Lose The Text: People don’t read essays on the web, as a rule, so keep the text short and bulleted — do your SEO stuff elsewhere.
• For Listing Clients: Many visitors are potential listing clients, looking for the best agent to list with. Design sites that work for these visitors and not just for buyers.

2. Drive Visitors: Short and Long-Term Solutions

SEO Rule: Driving traffic by getting a good Search Engine ranking, or any other method, is near meaningless without having low bounce rates and high ROI. Most agents/brokers contemplating a new site immediately ask the question, “How will people find me? I need to be ranked on the Search Engines!” The question they need to ask is “Am I worth finding?” Remember, a bad website is worse than none at all… The world doesn’t need another lousy website [we call this "web abuse"]. In many of the markets that The Smith Group™ goes into, the highest ranking websites on Google are the worst sites, and those that are ranked on the first page are not even the top-producers. Hmmm… So, what do you do?

Creating New Habits: A Short and Long-Term Strategy To Drive Site Traffic

Drip Email Campaigns (short-term): The quickest and most cost-effective way to drive visitors to your site is with a carefully branded digital email or hand-held campaign. Third-party email systems do not work — not because they don’t work, but because they stand-alone, it is cumbersome to transfer emails continually into these systems, and are used intermittently when users “get around to it.” TSG has integrated a true drip email system into our web applications. This application is designed to be low maintenance, branded, integrate with the front-end of the website in such a way that inquiries coming from the site are automatically added to the drip campaigns, and fully opt-in/opt-out functioning. The suggested new goal [or habit] for the agent or broker, then, becomes acquiring new email lists and creating a newsletter format that is useful to potential customers. When these campaigns are activated new site traffic increases almost instantly. Used long enough, a “snowball effect” takes place with new visitors continually entering the site and return visitors coming back.

XML FEEDS and Parallel Listing Tracks (short-term): The Smith Group has integrated a dual system with regards to listings. The first (1) is the traditional IDX feed system, which is integrated along with the agent and broker MLS. The second (2) gives the ability to upload specific agent/broker listings directly into The Smith Group™ system. The TSG system allows for dramatically enhanced listings; with 50 hi-res photos; 5,000 character listing descriptions; multiple PDF uploads; exact Google mapping; multiple video links, and more. When these listings are uploaded into TSG’s databases, they are automatically XML fed to leading portal sites. What’s most important is that these feeds link directly back to the agents/brokers Smith websites.

Social Media Integration, Blogging, Content Streams, and Search Engine Optimization (long-term): The current rules regarding SEO and disseminating content throughout the Internet requires us to cram as much regurgitated digital junk and reciprocal links as we possibly can into as many servers as we possibly can. Like it or not, this is the game. Let’s face it, however, your business is to sell real estate. It’s not messing around on Facebook™, Twitter™, or any other social media application, blogging, and just eating up time clicking. Acquiring and counting up digital friends is a meaningless exercise. That said, social media sites — if created for business purposes –can be a worthwhile networking environment. TSG has created an administration section that enables your website to be the conduit to your social media sites and Skype™ video conferencing. As well, continually updating fresh site content, creating landing pages, blog discussions, and link exchanges, are critical for any SEO program. The Smith Group™ integrates a fully administrable WordPress™ application (a full-functioning secondary site integrated with the primary site) which allows nearly unlimited page creation, post creation, theme design flexibility, open-source plug-ins for a variety of widgets, applications, tools, and such.

Over time, these applications can have an enormously important impact on your SEO endeavors, eliminate the need for 3rd party SEO companies to take your money for natural ranking promises, or having to pay Google on a Pay-Per-Click basis. In other words The Smith Group™ allows you to take control. As these applications begin to take root, new visitors will be driven to your high ROI website.

3. Communicating In Real-Time With Your New and Returning Virtual Walk-Ins

WHO’S ON YOUR SITE — THESE ARE YOUR VIRTUAL “WALK-INS”!!!!!

Traditional real estate website structures have been dependent upon tricking visitors into submitting their email addresses, having visitors fill out inquiry forms, or hoping that visitors pick up the phone and call.  This is reactive.  These reactive approaches do not allow the agent or broker to proactively engage virtual walk-ins.  TSG’s “SAM” allows agents and brokers to engage in immediate, meaningful digital conversations; such as area community discussions; appropriate listings; buying and listing processes, etc.  The way in which The Smith Group™ has integrated our SAM™ application into our client websites, how we train agents and brokers on how to use it effectively, has been responsible for many millions of dollars in real estate sales for our clients.

 A Few Stealth Application Module (SAM™) Features: Using Technology to Influence Social Complexities and Develop New Relationship

1. View in real-time everyone who is on your website, how many times they’ve been there, how they were referred, where they live or work, what pages visitors are viewing, even how long their mouse has been idle.

2. Integrated means by which visitor or agent/broker can initiate real-time chat discussions.

3. Allows agent/broker to page push remote visitors through website to appropriate listing.

4. Integrate with mobile devices.

5. Hold chat requests in queue, create multiple chats, transfer to other agents, record for reports and analysis.

6. Language translation.

Validating Your Website Success

Agents and brokers spend a lot of money on “brick and mortar” facilities, interior design of these facilities, creating and managing “floor duty” schedules, training new agents in the traditional methods of real estate sales, paying franchise fees to use another company’s trademark, etc. All the while, the vast majority have technological handicaps that are severely threatening their very existence. The traditional method of hiring a 3rd party web development company who does not understand the real estate industry, or depending on the franchises to understand your local environment is dangerous to your business. These are the “train wrecks” that The Smith Group™ is in the business of cleaning up. Our clients are partners. We sit with them regularly to understand their needs, to have them help us innovate new systems. Our clients point to TSG with the knowledge that we’ve helped them actually sell real estate — not just produce a pretty website. Over time, these relationships and strategic alliances help agents and brokers actually validate the success of their technology budgets.