A quality website is an important weapon in the arsenal of any real estate agent. You can widen your customer base, show your true brand personality, and you gain credibility as a business. So how should you go about setting yours up?
The most important thing to remember is the people who actually have to engage with your site – your target audience. So, keep them in mind at every turn, and focus on these six key tips for setting up your real estate agent website.
User Experience is Key
People are coming to your website because they want clear, easy access to information. If you’re not offering this, then people are quickly going to find the information they’re looking for somewhere else, and you’ve lost a potential customer.
User experience errors drive people crazy, so make sure you’re taking care of the UX basics, and that you’re presenting information in an easy to consume way. A large part of this is making sure your website works well on all devices, lots of your traffic will be mobile, and you need to cater to these people as well as desktop users.
Make Sure it’s Fast
People don’t like waiting for web pages to load. Every second your page takes to load risks a person leaving your site without consuming the information, so make sure that’s not an issue for your business.
As a real estate agent, you’re naturally going to have a lot of high-quality images that are going to draw in the attention of your audience. However, these can be quite large and slow your site down. Therefore, it’s important to make sure you’re optimizing everything and making sure it loads as quickly as possible.
Providing the optimal speed customers are looking for, though, shouldn’t come at the cost of your great images and videos. It is possible to have both. First, you will need to consider the web host and the server you will be using. Will they provide you with the speed you need to keep visitors on your website? Will they be able to handle large volumes of traffic? If not, then keep looking until you are 100% happy that they will be able to cater to your needs.
Then, with the right web host, you can get to work optimizing your website itself. This means compressing all those images, choosing the right plugins, and keeping this number as low as possible, and then testing the speed on a different computer. Performing this check is vital if you want to see what your customers will be experiencing.
Integrations
There are different plugins to help give your users an even better experience with your website. You can find some really handy integrations that help you do things like offer virtual house tours, book people in for viewings, and much, much more.
Again though, you’ve got to remember your site still needs to be fast, so make sure you’re not overloading it with lots of plugins that you’re not using.
Offer Quality Content
You’re not just limited to putting pictures of houses with short descriptions on your website. You can write whatever you want, and this is a great way of bringing people to your site. If you’re going to create content for your website, though, you must be making sure it’s high-quality. You can achieve this by:
- Bearing in mind Google’s E.A.T algorithm. Your content needs to show a high level of expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthy. If you want to rank, draw in organic traffic, then this is crucial to get right.
- Researching what your customers’ needs are. Do they want to know more about new builds or how to go about buying a house, or whether renting is right for them? Then start to pull together a content strategy that will cater to all these needs.
- Optimizing your content with keywords – be careful not to overuse these keywords, though, as this could hinder your SEO efforts.
- Finding an engaging tone of voice
- Being unique. You need to find out what makes you stand out from your competitors. Is it your expert knowledge, your specific skill sets your team possesses, or the type of real estate work you do? Once you know what makes you stand out, you can start tailoring the content to your audience and rank for keywords that your competitors can’t.
When you put out good content that answers the questions your target audience is asking, then you’ll find you start to bring in traffic that converts. You can quite often build up trust through your content, too, so even more reason to focus on producing top quality content. You can make the most of multiple rewards.
Show Your Trustworthiness
Your website is the perfect platform to showcase why people should trust your business.
Make sure you’re clearly displaying things like T&C’s, the fact you’re covered through the right insurance plans for real estate agents, and all the great reviews you have from previous clients. All of this and more will start to instill trust within your brand, and could even lead to referrals. Remember, many customers will decide to work with a company based on previous experiences that customers have had with you. When combined with the above means, you are boosting your chances of turning a lead into a client.
Make the Most of Website Visits
You work hard to get people onto your website, so you want to make the most of people who do visit. This means finding ways of getting people to fill out contact forms and become leads. The best tactic for attracting attention and getting clients to follow through with an inquiry is using call to action buttons. Your visitors won’t miss this and can easily see exactly what they need to do.
However, when someone visits your website, and they don’t click on these call to actions, you have no real way of communicating with them further. When you get an email address, it’s much easier to build those contact points, though. People don’t mind giving you their email address, but you’ve got to offer something in return, so figure out what it is your audience wants.
