Yesterday I was speaking with a friend who had been researching lake house properties over the weekend. I asked him how he went about his search, and his answer and ultimate tale surprised me.
“I was doing a bunch of web searches,” he said. “And most of what I found were results for listings on Lakehouse.com and other lakehouse listing websites. And while this gave me good visibility to individual properties, it wasn’t helping me answer the question of what lake might be the best place to buy.”
Having identified several lakes, he started typing the lake names into his search query. Surprisingly, he wasn’t able to find anything that gave a good overview of the lakes he was interested in. That is until he clicked out of curiosity on the “Image” search link at the top of Google’s search page.
The image search brought up a host of photographs and one detailed map of a lake. He said he clicked on the lake map and was taken to a realtor’s page who specialized in properties on the private lake in question. Having learned a bit more about the lake in general, he then looked at some of the listings highlighted by this realtor. After viewing several listings, he was required to register in order to see more. He did and eventually found a small lakehouse that really appealed to him.
Within 5 minutes, the realtor associated with the website called to see if she could answer any questions about the lake or the specific properties he was interested in. After a few more e-mails my buddy made an appointment through this realtor to visit the property to have a look for himself.
Talk about a successful conversion funnel! This realtor had generated trial in a matter of minutes, initiated by a search-optimized lake map that was a part of her lake overview landing page. And what a timely example of what Brian MacDonald outlined in his recent post: Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) are the New Home Page.
