So what makes a great website for property professionals? Afterall there’s little point in trying to drive traffic to your website if it doesn’t engage with visitors when they arrive. These are just some of the factors to consider…
Look and Feel
Having a great looking website inspires confidence and trust in your brand, and is a critical decision point upon which visitors judge whether they want to do business with you. Your website design should reflect your brand, if it doesn’t – visitors could land on your website and “bounce” – a term used to describe what happens when someone visits, then immediately leaves. A great tool to help you monitor this is Google Analytics.
Property Listings.
Agents are constantly telling us that it’s their sales particulars that make them stand out from competitors. We think it’s eaxactly the same with your website – which is, after all,a 24/7 sales brochure for your properties. So good property listings are vital to showcase your properties – inside and out.
Photos and Imagery
High quality photos are essential when promoting a property. Whilst some will appoint a specialist photographer, this can prove expensive, so opting to invest in a good quality camera instead can still yield great results. There are lots of tools online that enable you to manipulate photos. Some of the free ones include pixlr and fotor. And there are also low cost otions such as doctor-photo who also provide a cost effective service. The bottom line? Good photos engage users for longer, and result in more enquiries.
Video
Video, in a similar vein to images) can help encourage visitors to engage, and can boost conversion rates by as much as 25%. Hosting images on sites such as YouTube can also boost traffic to your site. .
Property Portals
If you use property portals to promote your properties you need your website to automatically sync with them. This can either be done by your estate or letting agency software (which in turn posts your properties via an api) or directly from the content management system for your website. This is where we come in!
Content
The more content you put on your website the better. Smart agents are now blogging, tweeting, using LinkedIn and many other social media channels to promote their business, profile and client properties. Linking to or embeding social media feeds within your website integrates the experience for your audience and is a powerful way of boosting traffic to your site. But don’t forget, whilst social media has its place Google will rank your site accrding to the quality of content that it finds there. Posting BLOGS, news articles etc are all ways of improving your footprint in Google and the overall authority of your website. .
Include FAQ’s or a Resources Section
By making your website a valuable source of information, not only are you saving your clients and prospects hours of research, but you’re also providing content that will help you rank wihin Google. Think about the questions you asked everyday by clients and include them and your responses online.
Provide a personal touch
Don’t be scared of showcasing your staff, and their qualifications – as this can help build trust. A good agent builds their reputation by being a people person and by delivering on promises and by keeping in touch. Services such as Newsletterhub are a great, cost effective way of providing regular email newsletters to send to your clients – and better still, you do’t have to write them yourself! .
