10 Ways To Drive More Traffic To Your IDX Listings

So you’ve installed an IDX search product on your website. But now what?

How do you work on driving more traffic to your individual IDX listings to get more people interested in properties that are for sale?

After all, searching homes for sale is one of the primary reasons people are coming to your website. But they gotta know they can easily search new homes for sale once they’re there or you risk losing them to your competition.

So, how do you drive more traffic to your IDX search page? And more specifically, to your individual IDX listings? Here’s a few ideas…

10 Ways To Drive More Traffic To Your IDX Listings:

1. Email your database to inform them of the new IDX system installed on your website. Keep it brief, and include details on the benefits they derive from using it. Things like: saved searches, listing updates email daily/weekly, saved notes for each listing, et cetera.
2. Email individual relevant listings to your buyer’s leads. So say you just got finished with showing properties or meeting a first-time home buyer… Don’t just tell them they can use your site to search for new property listings. Email them direct links to the listings instead. It’s a subtle, but effective way to introduce people to the IDX search on your website.
3. When you post your listings on site’s like Craigslist (and the like), make sure you’re linking directly to the IDX listing page. Don’t link to the general IDX search page, link directly to the listing results page. You might take this a step further and force the registration form on default.
4. Start including more IDX data in your blog posts. Whenever you write a post related to the local real estate market, or about the local community, inject some IDX listings to complement your post. Some potential article titles where it’s relevant to include listing data are: Irvine Real Estate Market Report: January 2012 -or- Neighborhood of the Week: Laguna Niguel Real Estate. In both of those posts, I’m talking about the local real estate market, that’s a perfect opportunity to include IDX listing data at the end of my post.
5. (This one’s a “gimme”) You should have a simple & easy to access “Quick Search” on every page of your website. This way, if someone lands on your home page, a specific blog post, or on a page of your site, they know where to look to quickly perform a home search and access new IDX listings.
6. Create a page on your site titled “Listing Feed.” Here’s an example from one of our demo accounts. The idea here is to set an expectation with new readers that they can visit this page and access new IDX data every couple of hours to see new homes on the market. This is considered making your content “sticky.”
7. Link to your IDX search page in your email signature. I’d rather you link to your IDX search page in your email signature, than link to your Twitter account and other social networking profiles.
8. Turn your blog posts into PDF’s to hand to your clients just before you go out and preview homes. So say you’re going to look at a specific series of homes, print out the listing pages for each of the homes that you’re going to preview. On the back of the listing, you might include a post that contains rate quotes for the day-of. So the post might read: Irvine Mortgage Rates Report – January 25, 2012. On the front you have the listing information and on the back you have financing information. Both have links back to your website for more information.
9. Manually post links to articles about specific listings on social networks like Facebook. Include a description to pique people’s interest. A link to just another listing, isn’t all that interesting. But a link to a listing with some fun info on it, catches my attention. Zillow does this exceedingly well with their Tuesday Taste-Test Series. 
10. Make sure your blog is search engine friendly by optimizing each of your individual blog posts for terms people are likely searching online. Our blog post SEO checklist should help you with that. This is especially important for your community landing pages.

What else would you add? How are you driving traffic to the IDX listings on your website?