Welcome to this week's edition of Agent Insights! Today, you'll be hearing from Sean Carpenter, an avid blogger out of Dublin, Ohio who came up with a clever blog post about the parallels between new drivers and real estate agents. WIthout further adieu...

It’s quite common to come across some pretty terrible listing descriptions and accompanying property photos when searching for homes online. And by terrible - I mean downright awful – like, embarrassingly bad. 

The good news for real estate agents is that this creates an easy opportunity to stand out from your less dilligent competition. All you have to do is invest an extra bit of time in to crafting impressive listing descriptions. As an added bonus, you’re far more likely to generate more interest in your properties (and more leads) with an optimized approach to building your real estate listings.

Ready to give it a shot?

Follow these four easy steps to optimize your real estate listings for leads and, ultimately, sales! 

Good search engine optimization can act as a lead magnet for your website - but it doesn't happen overnight.

Being discoverable by search engines can provide huge benefits to agents looking to maximize their online presence. This is largely due to the fact that today 92% of all consumer home searches begin online. In order to reap the benefits, you need to take a critical look at your IDX website, corporate site and or real estate blogs to make sure you're making the most of your digital footprint.

Recently, we discussed the importance of Google visibility and have covered proactive steps you can take to make sure your site is showing up in search results. Now, it’s time to dig a little deeper and talk about keyword optimization. This article will cover how you can use keywords to grow your online presence and drive more traffic to your website. Let’s start with the basics:

In this week's Agent Insights guest blog, we've got some great advice from Amanda Thomas, a Broker / Owner (and fantastic blogger!) from Plano, Texas. In this post, Amanda shares 8 avoidable real estate agent mistakes rookies make early in their careers. Heed Amanda's advice and avoid your own agent mishap! This content was originally posted in Amanda's Active Rain blog.

Here's Amanda: 

Although the Code of Ethics serves to guide all Realtors toward best practices and the fair treatment of our clients, our colleagues and the public - there is notably quite a bit to learn when a rookie is getting started in the business. From software to field protocol, handling oneself professionally takes time and practice.

Gaining knowledge and wisdom takes experience.  The good news is that we can learn from the experiences of others and leapfrog over the rookie learning curve.  Consider the following list of 8 common rookie mistakes and learn how to avoid them.

Search engine visibility is important… really important. Why? Because, according to the National Association of Realtors, 92% of today’s home shoppers are starting their search online.

So how do you make sure your site is indexed by Google? We went straight to the source to find out.