Building and maintaining a website over time is easier said than done. Many brokerages believe that simply having a website presence is enough today’s age of technology. Rather than treat their website like a continuously evolving aspect of their marketing, they treat it as a placeholder that rarely gets updated.
The issue with this approach is that the website becomes static and does not evolve to communicate the latest trends. Fortunately, there are easy ways to make your brokerage website more effective and stand out from the competition. Here are three ways you can instantly update your website to drive traffic and generate more leads.
- Set Goals & Actions. Each page on your website should have a predefined goal that you want to accomplish. When a visitor engages any piece of content, there should always be an immediate action they need to take. For example, instead of a page with simple text and imagery, place a call-to-action button to keep them moving through the website.
Many brokerage websites do not entice visitors to take the next step in the online journey through their site, which typically results in a bounce or exit. It’s critical to set goals and conversion points for your visitors to increase traffic and generate more leads. You can start by simply adding call-to-action buttons, sign-up forms, emails, or phone numbers on pages.
- Remove Clutter. It’s common practice in web design to develop a site that has less content to clearly communicate your message. However, in real estate many brokerage websites are inundated with content that overwhelms the visitor and doesn’t give them direction. Usability and simplicity should always be top of mind when considering the actions of your website visitors.
Strip away content that doesn’t tie into the purpose of the page. Give visitors fewer choices. By offering less, you are increasing engagement on the elements of the page that matter in that moment. Start by cleaning up website navigation or removing content that is irrelevant to a particular page. View your google analytics data and work on adding/removing content on pages that have a high bounce rate.
- Optimize Pages. How, where and when a visitor finds your website can dramatically impact their first impression of your brokerage. It’s common for visitors to find your website via social media, direct traffic or through search engines. Making sure that each page you publish on your website is optimized will ensure you are creating the most visibility for your website. Most website vendors or platforms allow for easy updates to optimize your pages and some even come with backend tools to visualize the optimization level. Optimization of your website will ensure that you receive more traffic, better quality traffic, faster load times and most importantly, increased conversions.
The quickest way to optimize your website is to identify a set of relevant keywords that you can target for a specific page. Then, create a unique, eye-catching title that includes the keyword that will be displayed to the visitor through search engines or social media. Optimization contains several other opportunities that can be quickly updated including: Image compression, keyword density, outbound/internal links, metadata and subheadings. By optimizing each page to the fullest, your website will gain more visibility and will be perceived as a trustworthy resource for visitors when they are looking to buy or sell a home.
Conclusion
Each of the three elements listed above are connected and should be accomplished through in-house updates. Each one impacts the other. Start by focusing on one page at a time. Once you see the effects and improvements on one page, it becomes a necessity to apply the same changes to the rest. Instead of having a website that acts as a placeholder and becomes stagnant, your website will become a resource that is constantly transforming and evolving to fit the needs of your visitors.
