Homebuilder Photo Galleries - Intro to the blog series (1 of 5)

Homebuilder’s aren’t using photo galleries to their full capabilites so we’ll be spending the next week discussing what builder’s should be doing to use photos as a tool to drive search traffic and engage prospective home buyers. With today’s down housing market we are all doing business differently than we did just a few short years ago.  Most of the old marketing stand-bys don’t work like they used to, and we are all looking for new ways to make our marketing dollars stretch further. 

It’s all about the numbers
Ask any new home sales professional or Realtor and they’ll tell you it’s always been about the numbers. X number of traffic units leads to Y number of sales. Increase the traffic to the model homes and in turn increase sales. Since we know that over 78% of visitors will visit your website before they visit your model home we are going to discuss one of the best ways to increase traffic to your website. Search optimized photo galleries. 

Digital photography is now part of our everyday lives. This became blindingly obvious during our last presidential campaign. Do you remember watching  Barack Obama give his acceptance speech?  When the television cameras panned the crowd all that could be seen was a sea of humanity and flashing lights. It looked as though each and every person in the crowd was holding a camera and snapping pictures.

Both AOL and Yahoo bring us the latest news as picture slideshows. Digital photography is everywhere and the public wants to see more and more every day.

Facebook users upload 850 million photos a month to the social networking site and Flickr users reportedly upload over 330 million pictures a month. Just those two sites alone account for over a billion pictures a month posted online. We hope that by the end of this blog series you’ll understand that uploading pictures is not enough. You need to make the photos work for you.

In this blog series we’ll be giving you insights to drive traffic to your website and engage prospective home buyers. We’ll help you get your photos online, help you understand how many and what kind of photos to include and help you make your photos a viral part of your online marketing efforts.

When done correctly you can turn your photo gallery into a tool that will generate organic search traffic to your site and will help buyers talk about you and your homes. Next up - find out how homebuilders should be using online photo galleries.