Originally posted on https://thewebsitemarketingpro.com/blog/digital-marketing/real-estate-website-success-tips/

 

Setting up a new real estate website or redesigning their current site is a major step for agents. There are a ton of options, and the price of doing everything varies. Many agents don’t know what makes a website successful. With that said, we have put together an extensive list of real estate website success tips. These tips will help you generate more traffic, leads, and make your site run more smoothly.

1. Develop Priorities For Your Site

You probably want to build a real estate website because you know you need one if you want to compete in 2019 and beyond. The key to creating a successful real estate website is to know what your objectives are. Your objectives can include things such as generating inbound leads or educating prospective clients or increase your overall sales via email marketing or eCommerce.

2. Generating Traffic To Your New Website

The truth is that traffic to your website won’t come on its own. When you launch your site, there are several things you’ll want to do if you want search engines and human visitors to notice it. There are many options out there, such as paying for display advertising, online advertising, submitting your website to relevant business directories, and implementing an SEO strategy, as well as a social media marketing strategy.

3. What Does Your Web Designer Need

When you know what your web designer needs, then give it to them as soon as possible. Providing these assets will help to avoid delays in the process of building out your site. While you’re at it, take the time to learn common web design terms. Being able to “speak the language” will make it easier for you to understand what your designer wants.

4. Choose A Good CMS

CMS is short for a content management system, so choose a good one. Going with a common CMS is a good idea because it allows you to add more stuff to your site later on. Be careful if you choose to get a custom-built CMS because getting support or making changes down the road could be a bit challenging.

5. Site Speed Is Important 

Mobile users now make up the majority of internet users, which means your website needs to load fast. Your human visitors and Google expect your site to be fast. Plus, Google considers site speed when determining how to rank a website. Generally speaking, your real estate website should load in three seconds. If you want to test your site speed, then use tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights or https://webpagetest.org.

6. Make It Easy For The Search Engines To Index Your Site

Google, Yahoo, Bing, and other search engines look for certain things on sites. These include relevant keywords, content structure, and sitemaps, to name a few. When you build out your real estate site, do it with SEO in mind. A good place to start is WordPress. If your web designer isn’t an expert in SEO or knows about the basics, then hire additional help. Experts can help with SEO, and they will work within the Google Webmaster Guidelines.

7. Choose Fast Website Hosting 

Your website hosting platform plays a major role in how secure your site will be, as well as how well it will perform. The hosting company you choose should be reliable and known for keeping clients’ data safe. Speed and performance is another crucial consideration.

8. Keep Things Basic 

Keep things basic and simple. If your website is cluttered and it’s difficult to navigate, then your visitors will leave your site as soon as they arrive. Keep your website design simple, clean, and easy to navigate. The more user-friendly your site’s design is, the better. Plus, a clean design that has modern elements will make your site stand out from the crowd.

9. Mobile First

In 2016, Google announced its Mobile-First index. In short, it means websites should be mobile-friendly. If your site isn’t able to be properly viewed and navigated on all mobile devices, then your site’s rankings in the search engines’ results pages can suffer. The bottom line is to make sure your real estate website offers a great experience for users of all mobile devices.

10. Don’t Use Outdated Tech

Outdated tech will make your site look outdated and out of touch. The only exception to this rule is if you run an antique business. Your website should be fresh, relevant, and modern. Stay far away from outdated tech.

11. Capture Leads

You want to capture inbound leads via your website. Most of your visitors will likely want to do a bit of research, which means they won’t want to purchase anything right away. Capturing their email address is one of the best ways to keep in touch with them. There are opt-in forms you can add to your site. Just make sure your opt-in forms aren’t intrusive or come off as spam because Google and human visitors are not fans of anything that remotely looks like spam.

12. Brand Identity Should Be Consistent

Before you start working on your site, you want to be consistent with your brand’s identity. This consistency means you want your fonts, brand logo, colors, and so forth to be consistent with your website. Your site’s design should complement any existing marketing material you have. This consistency applies to both print and online marketing material.

13. Meet The Expectations Of Your Visitors

When visitors arrive on your website, they will have some expectations. What you want to do is compellingly tell your company’s story and showcase the best services and products you offer. Provide examples of how you deal with real customers. Furthermore, make sure all the info is easy to search for because your website’s visitors will want to find it as quickly as possible.

14. Keep Your Website Updated

Over 20% of real estate websites only update their site once per year, so don’t be one of them. Your site should always contain the most current and useful info. The monthly updating of your blog is one of the key ingredients for a successful content marketing strategy. It will keep people coming back to your site. If you see outdated info on your site, such as a Christmas special, then remove it right away.

15. Focus On The Crucial Stuff

Your real estate website needs to make you money, so it needs to do more than sit there looking pretty. What you want to do is engage with visitors and prospective clients. Focus on the most important areas of your site, and you will be just fine.

Implementing The Above Real Estate Website Success Tips 

One of the most significant issues facing real estate websites is that their owners are usually trying to do everything on their own. There is more work; however, that goes into creating a real estate website than most people know. Chances are you might not have the time to put in the kind of effort it requires for your site to become a huge success.

Plus, there are a lot of different things you have to take into consideration when creating a website. These include creating quality content, building links and implementing a solid SEO strategy, Doing everything on your own can be a daunting task, which is why it makes more sense to hire a highly-skilled professional.

If you do decide to pursue this on your own, then make sure you follow the above tips, and remember, hiring a professional is perfectly fine, and it’s what we recommend. If you want to get results fast and you don’t want to be faced with the challenges that always come up when creating a new website, then hire a professional web designer.

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