These days competition is stiff when it comes to real estate websites. There’s competition from large real estate websites such as Zillow, Trulia, and others. Then you also have to compete with other estate agent websites. How on earth can your estate agent website hope to gain site visitors in the midst of all these sites?
We’ve put together some tips on how you can make your estate website stand out while making it an engaging and useful site for your business. The goal is to provide site visitors with a great impression of your business and then persuade them to review the listings on your site. Our tips will help you with these steps and more!
1). Property Search is Vital
Property search is not only crucial to your business, but it’s also vital for your estate agent website. Savvy homebuyers today go online to start their property search. This means a real estate website must provide site visitors with a search portal. This allows visitors to go through and browse the available listings. However, the search portal must also have some functionality. This means the search must include criteria, filters, and more to help property buyers find what they’re searching for.
So, what information does a homebuyer usually search for? Think like your clients. What factors are the most important to buyers? What categories will buyers need for their search?
- For sale or rent
- Number of bedrooms & bathrooms
- Location
- Type of property (flat, house, and more)
- Furnished or unfurnished
- Price range
These are the basic bits of information buyers need when looking for a property to buy. So, your search portal needs to include these search terms to make the search more functional and faster for site visitors.
2). Make Your Site Fast
Slow loading pages are a sure way to kill your site. Site visitors don’t have time to spend waiting for website pages to load. They need the information now. If a site is slow, visitors will leave for a competitor’s site that’s faster. And your search engine rankings will tumble. Search engines don’t promote sites that are slow; instead, the sites are relegated to the lower rankings of the search. This can lead to a further decrease in traffic to your site.
One of the problems is that an estate agent’s website usually has many images. These are needed to show the listings you have available, as well as convince buyers this is the property for them. For these reasons, the images may be high quality and large. The images then make the website unwieldy and slow it down quite a bit.
Find ways to optimize your site’s speed, and you’ll have happy site visitors, and the search engines will love your site!
3). Information About Each Property – Include as Much as Possible
The goal of your estate agent website is to be a one-stop-shop for site visitors. This means your site needs to provide as much information about each property as possible. The goal is to keep site visitors on your site rather than having them go elsewhere for the information they require.
Consider adding this information for each listing on your site:
- Distance to local school(s)
- Map of local amenities (grocery stores, pharmacies, cafes, restaurants, and more)
- Energy efficiency
- Floorplan
- Council Tax
- And more
4). Keep Listings Up to Date
What happens when you’re looking for a home, only to find a beautiful property you’d like to buy? You find it’s no longer on the market. This can happen to site visitors when an estate agent doesn’t keep their website updated.
Keeping your listings up to date is essential to getting site visitors, as well as business. If you have a busy estate agent business, then it may be a good idea to consider investing in some software that helps you keep the listings updated automatically. A website developer or designer can help you find the right software to keep your listings up to date.
5). Keep Content on Site Updated
Do you keep content on your estate agent website updated? If not, fixing this could also bring more site visitors. Fresh content alerts Google and other search engines that your site is active, which means they will list your site higher in the search rankings.
But the content’s not only created for the search engines. Fresh content is a great way to reach out to site visitors. You can include content that helps them buy the right property, updates about your agency, updates on the local area, and much more.
You can create a blog, create buyers’ and sellers’ guides, include a mortgage calculator, regular market reports, and much more. Site visitors will find this type of information extremely useful so that visitors will come back home in the future.
6). Show the Advantages of Using Your Site
Your website faces stiff competition from Zillow and other large real estate sites. For this reason, it’s essential to let site visitors know why they should be using your site rather than the competition’s website.
How are your website and services unique compared to the larger sites? Why would customers be better off using your site?
You may want to consider including information such as:
- Your agency isn’t a faceless corporation—you’re friendly and offer expert advice and help in buying and selling property.
- You have been in the local area for x years, which means you have knowledge of the local area.
- Properties are listed first on your site, before the larger portals. So, site visitors will see new properties before anyone else if they use your services.
7). Have Useful & Simple Navigation on the Site
Site visitors quickly leave when a site isn’t easily navigated. So, make sure the site is easy to navigate. In addition, place CTAs (calls to action), which help the site visitor know what step to take next. You can use CTAs on contact forms, use a large button to clearly indicate the search bar, and more.
Just let the site visitor know where they need to go next and make it easy for them to find the information they need.
These are some of the best ways to improve your estate agent website’s design. The goal is to have all the parts of the website’s design working together to create an amazing user experience for site visitors.
Remember to always keep your audience in mind when designing your website. Your site may be the first impression many site visitors have of your agency. It’s crucial to make your estate agency website stand out in the crowd.
