Do you want to reach more clients? How would you like it if your listings were shared widely with very little effort on your part? Are you wondering how your marketing dollars are best spent?
With just a little investment, you can start improving your real estate website and put it to work for you. Here are 5 tips to help you make the most of this useful sales tool.
Hire a Professional
If you want to raise the visibility of your real estate office and improve your sales, the best investment you can make is in a professionally designed real estate website.
You may be tempted to simply use a template for your website in order to “save money.” A template may seem like the cheaper option, but it will leave potential clients less than impressed.
Your website is your best salesman – it’s the first place that potential clients will go to when they’re thinking about purchasing a new property. If the layout is sloppy and the links don’t work, clients will get frustrated and move on.
Think of your website as your storefront. If customers were to go in person to a place of business and the building was falling down, they wouldn’t hesitate to drive past. It’s the same with your site – if it’s in poor shape and looks unprofessional, potential clients will think it’s a reflection of your business and will go to another realtor’s site instead.
Accessible and Easy to Search Listings
This is why most potential clients come to your site – they want to see what properties are available. This should be one of the very first things that customers see when they visit your website. Don’t make the search options difficult to find, buried on some random page. Put them front and center on your homepage so people don’t have to waste time looking for them.
You also need to make sure that the listings are easily accessible. Some realtors force people to create an account or submit and e-mail address before searching through listings. This is a sure way to lose potential clients. Providing customers with the information they want will keep them interested.
A Variety of Shareable Content
Listings are essential, but they’re not the only type of content you should include on your site. The more information you can provide to potential clients, the better. Pictures help to sell homes, but videos sell an experience. Posting videos of homes and the neighborhoods they’re in will not only keep visitors to your site engaged, they will also help improve your ranking in search engine results.
Providing regular written content is a highly recommended practice towards improving your real estate website it also improve your visibility in search engines. When a search engine like Google ranks results, it takes into consideration how often and how recently a site is updated. Regularly posting informative and engaging articles on your site’s blog will help bump up your site’s ranking, which draws in more customers.
You also need to be sure that the content you provide on your site is sharable on social media. If someone sees an amazing home on your site then shares it with their friends and followers on social media, you’ve just received a bit of advertising for free. Those who are interested will click on the link, driving more traffic to your site.
Include Social Proof
Social proof is when people take others’ opinions into account before making a decision. An example of this would be looking at an online store to see how many “stars” a product has received before making a purchase.
For a realtor, testimonials will be the best way to offer social proof. The process of buying a home can seem overwhelming at times. Potential customers will feel reassured and be more confident in contacting agents if they know that others in the past have had positive experiences.
Fast Website Download
It is an absolute must to have a fast loading website in fact real estate websites that take a very long time to load risk losing potential clients, there has been several studies made proving that websites taking longer than 5 seconds to load lose a large percentage of their visitors. There are several tools to help you evaluate the website speed and performance and many other easy ways to speed up your website and optimize it for top performance and improve the website’s SEO Ranking positions.
Contact Forms
In order to generate real estate leads through your website make sure you include an easy-to-use contact form on your site. Don’t expect that a potential customer will come to your site, find a listing they like, then call you directly. Technology has changed and people are changing with it. Of course you should provide your phone number for those who prefer that method of communication, but the more options you provide, the more people you can reach.
It’s time to put your website to work for you. Make the investment to upgrade and start improving your real estate website, and watch the leads come funneling in.
