Any successful realtor knows that a good website can drive leads and conversions and serve as the basis for digital marketing. It’s much easier to attract clients and sell homes when you have an online landing place that draws buyers and sellers.
But many real estate professionals still like to focus their time and efforts on face-to-face work with clients instead of building their online portfolio. As a result, they let their digital marketing go undeveloped.
Building in-person relationships is certainly a worthy and even necessary activity, it’s not the only thing for building clientele in today’s market. A good website is essential for getting yourself noticed by the search engines.
When people Google search “Realtors in Katy, Texas,” you won’t come up in the list if you don’t have a well-designed website to match the query. If you haven’t already, you need to do the smart thing as a property agent and create a website for your business.
If you already have one but aren’t seeing much engagement, you need to update it. Here are a few suggestions for how to do that.
According to research, the brain processes visual images 60,000 times faster than it can process text. It could be argued that this fact makes images worth 60,000 times more than text on your website. You need to showcase great images of the properties you’re selling so they entice buyers to stop in and clients to do business with you. Without a great photography platform, your website will be missing something essential.
By community pages, we mean pages within your site that focus on the towns and neighborhoods you specialize in. For example, if you operate in the Katy area, you would include a Google map integration of Katy and highlight some of the city’s more charming attributes and amenities.
Buyers like to be thoroughly informed about a neighborhood before they move in. They’re particularly interested in local businesses, city events, school districts, and recreational opportunities.
Make it easy for visitors to share listings and interact with your website by integrating social media. In your social efforts, include relevant links back to your homepage to drive more traffic. On your website, include social sharing buttons and icons on each page. You might also offer a sign-in with a Facebook or Google Plus option to gather more data about your users.
You’ll particularly want to focus on integrating Facebook into your design. “Facebook is by far the most lucrative network for marketing your rental property,” says another of our articles on the Green Residential blog. “Seventy-one percent of all adults have a Facebook account, which is approximately three times as many people as those who use any of the other social media networks.”
If you want to see your visitors return, you must give them reasons to do so. A great way to get return visitors is to use pop-up subscription forms that urge guests to subscribe to your blog or a newsletter. Through these publications, you can offer useful information and tips that will show readers the value you can offer. When they need a realtor, your site will be fresh in their minds.
There’s no point in having an online presence if no one can find you. That’s where search engine optimization (SEO) comes in. Obtaining great search rankings for your website is a lot easier when you optimize the site for search.
Search engines are smart, but they still need help to recognize your site as an authority in its niche. There are several things you can do to optimize your site, such as using plugins that naturally optimize SEO, putting relevant and useful keywords in headlines and title tags, formatting your content so it looks professional, and increasing the speed of your website.
Of course, making your website authoritative and of high quality will lead to a better overall experience.
Content is essential for both SEO purposes and for offering insightful content. Every realtor’s site should have a blog that discusses the latest news in your particular housing markets, useful tips, and more timeless knowledge to encourage return visits.
If your “About” section only contains the facts about your business, it’ll be dull and less likely to engender customer loyalty. People like to see a story. Start with your About page and integrate the storyline throughout your site.
As you craft the story, talk about how you got to where you are. Think about where you want to be. What helped you find your place? Do you have any significant achievements or lessons to relate?
Putting details into your website’s story will give your business personality and make you look more human.
A report from the Google Research Blog says, “Our experiments demonstrate that slowing down the search results page by 100 to 400 milliseconds has a measurable impact on the number of searches per user of -0.2% to -0.6% (averaged over four or six weeks depending on the experiment). That’s 0.2% to 0.6% fewer searches for changes under half a second! Furthermore, users do fewer searches the longer they are exposed … [For] longer delays, the loss of searches persists for a time even after latency returns to previous levels.”
A slow website may be the reason you’re not receiving lasting visitors. Speed up your website using plugins and backup technology to cache and store files that may be slowing it down. Your ideal loading speed should be less than three seconds.
There’s nothing more frustrating to a web visitor than a broken link. If your website sports non-working links to blog posts that have been taken down or landing pages whose URLs have change, it sends a message to the viewer that you don’t take pride in your work. Your website is a reflection of you, and broken links will make you look shabby.
Mobile friendliness and responsive design are critical to every site’s success, according to Awwwards. “We live in a world where our sites are not only being visited by a variety of different devices and screen sizes, but the same customers are returning to our sites at different times using these different devices, says one of their blog posts.
“This means that, to best support their experience, our sites must work well regardless of which device they may be using at a given time. The same content that they have access to on one devices must be present when they return on other devices to ensure consistency in the information that they are seeking.”
This isn’t possible without mobile-friendly design. Since more than two-thirds of the nation searches on their mobile phone every day, it’s vital to offer a platform that delivers undistorted images and content that loads quickly. Your real estate business depends on it.
Whether you’re looking for feedback on your website or assistance in the home sales process, Green Residential has the expertise to help. Our talented team of professionals can offer a variety of selling services that will help your website and business excel.
For more information about what we have to offer, contact us today.
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