Increasing traffic to your website is a challenge for a lot of businesses, and there are many ways to get those site visit numbers shooting up and to the right. But more traffic doesn't always equate to more sales. What you want as a home builder is to attract the right traffic -- the kind of visitors who repeatedly use your website as a destination for answers to their questions while they grow from a curious potential home buyer to someone ready to start working with you.

5 Actionable Steps to Get More Home Buyers to Visit Your Website

1. Identify and document your ideal customers. You may have a general notion of your ideal customers, but do you really have a clear understanding of their concerns, their wants, their budgets, what a day in their shoes feels like? In the digital marketing world, we call these fleshed-out profiles "buyer personas." And developing buyer personas takes a commitment to a bit of research in the form of exit surveys for customers, internal meetings, and interviewing. The amount of time and resources, however, that you put into researching your ideal customers can be spread across your entire marketing program. Once you have developed a few personas, we recommend displaying them throughout your office as a constant reminder for your staff during marketing and sales meetings and tasks.
2. Brainstorm a list of questions that home buyers may be searching for online. This is a great content marketing exercise for the entire staff because each member of your team interacts with customers in a different way. Your customer service team will hear an entirely different set of questions than the sales team or your project managers. A single brainstorming session can produce enough questions to create targeted blog posts and premium offers for up to a year.
3. Create content for each stage of the buyer's journey. Using the list of commonly heard questions, prepare blog posts, videos, infographics, case studies, and premium content offers (such as checklists and ebooks) that follow your ideal customers' paths to purchase. In other words, plan an editorial calendar that utilizes a variety of content and addresses common questions for home buyers regardless of their readiness to work with you.
4. Promote your new and existing content. This step often gets ignored. As a general rule of thumb, we recommend that you spend just as much time and effort promoting your content on various channels as it took to create the content. In addition to any social media platforms that your ideal customers are active on (Houzz, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter), be sure to also promote your content through email campaigns, newsletters, and even print marketing or trade show materials. Here's a quick tip: add a few appropriate blog post links to your email signature when communicating with prospects and customers.
5. Repurpose existing content. Content creation is an ongoing beast. Much like an experienced baker uses old dough to kickstart new bread, dig into your existing content to create fresh material. A few high-performing portfolios or case studies with a common theme could become an ebook. That old blog post on building an energy efficient home may have some outdated stats that need tweaking, or it could be enhanced with mentions of new materials, techniques, or technologies. The trick is to use the existing content as a springboard for updated material. Another tip is to go back and optimize your existing blog posts for search engine rankings using best practices for title creation, meta descriptions, keyword placement, and image optimization. Learn more about search engine optimization for blog posts here.

Your ideal customers are searching online for answers related to buying a new home. The purpose of going through these steps is to get noticed on search engines and social media. By focusing on specific buyer personas and developing a list of their concerns, you are prepared to develop content that will attract qualified traffic over time.