3 Things Every Successful Real Estate Website Needs
Creating an effective, up-to-date real estate website is critical to building and maintaining a successful business. Know these three industry trends within the real estate space if you want to keep client leads coming through the door. Even if you’re with any of the big national firms -their marketing dollars won’t help you here!
As you read this blog, feel free to think about your own website and how it stacks up. These trends WILL affect you. Knowing these trends will change some of the decisions you make as a real estate professional over the next 12 to 18 months.
Disclaimer: We’re skipping over the obvious items like your IDX integration and lead capture devices.
Without further ado, here are the three critical things needed for a real estate website:
1. Purpose
Your site needs to be purposeful. Every feature, graphic, page, and tool needs to be designed with meaning. Don’t let yourself be sold on a multi-thousand-dollar website by someone who wants the starting point to be what type of graphics you like. Your site needs to be designed with user flow in mind. This means that when a visitor shows up, they need to be able to find the exact content they’re looking for in no more than two clicks. Many real estate websites fall into the trap of presenting unnecessary fluff. While perhaps attractive on the surface, their flow is disorientating, discouraging visitors from ending up where you want them.
If you want to know if your current website passes the test, write down two or three scenarios your visitors may find themselves in while using your site. Then, play out the scenario, navigating the website like a customer. If you need to click more than twice for your scenario to play out fully, you’re very likely losing potential leads.
For example, a user may want to know how much their home is worth. If they can’t quickly and easily find an answer on your site, they’ll go to another real estate website where they can. In the modern era, human attention is the most valuable commodity in the developed world—just ask YouTube. Just think about how desperate you are to click away from a 3-second ad…
2. Engagement
Even as a business tool, your site needs to be interesting and entertaining. One of the most important missions of a successful real estate website is to help your visitors develop a brand preference for you over your competition. Visitors who are entertained by the content on your site will stay longer and be more engaged. When the time comes for them to buy or sell their property, they’ll look to you before anyone else, remembering the experience of using your site. They might not even come directly to you for help without looking for other options.
3. Domain Authority
If you want your website to be an effective tool, first, you need to make sure people see it. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of crafting the content on your website to be attractive to algorithms. Publishing relevant content regularly is one of the best ways to attract site visitors. Plus, if your content is well-written and engaging, those visitors will stay for a long time on your page. Other, less apparent strategies also play a vital role in SEO. For example, in order for your site to be indexable by Google, all URLs need to reflect your focus keyword, and your focus keywords need to be present in your content.
Proper SEO is complex, and many otherwise well-built real estate websites fail to attract business because they’re simply not well-optimized. To ensure that your attention gets the attention it deserves, consider working with a dedicated SEO expert.
Get the Most Out of Your Real Estate Website
Don’t let your client leads disappear as a result of your poorly designed site. Your online presence needs to be purposeful, engaging, and present your content in a way that allows search engines to recognize it as high-quality. As important as web design is, however, devoting too much time to these details can draw you away from your core business of actually working with clients. Whether you’re building or updating your real estate website or developing any other aspect of your business, having the right partners can make all the difference.
At Joseph Studios, we pair our proprietary Deep Insight® methodology with expert market research, intelligence and analysis, customer profiling, writing, and design to create and implement a strategy to create and capitalize on the relationships your business needs to thrive.
In addition to our top-notch technical and SEO specialists, our team of experts comes from a wide variety of disciplines and backgrounds, each bringing a unique set of benefits to your business. Want to learn more about how informed, multi-disciplinary organic marketing can transform your company? Schedule a free consultation call with us today!
