Part II: How to capture real estate leads on your website
Before you do lots of ads or invest in SEO, you need to ensure your website is built to capture leads. Read more about how to capture real estate leads on your website.
A common bugbear amongst agents is that their websites are not generating the leads they were expecting. You may have a beautiful looking site, but that is only one part of the equation.
Just like selling a home is a multi-step process, so is online lead generation. In this blog, we explain the pieces of the puzzle you need to turn your website into a lead generation machine…
1. Real estate website design
Of course, how your website looks is important, but even more important is the user experience (UX).
User experience is defined by how a person feels when using a program, app or website. If your website is easy to navigate, loads quickly and the user can find what they’re looking for quickly, we can say that’s good UX.
- Website accessibility
Mobile and tablet optimisation is one of the biggest factors for improving your website ranking on google.
That’s because more people are using their phones to start their property search than ever before. If your website isn’t optimized for mobile, you’ll immediately miss out on a load of traffic.
Along with property search, you also need to make it easy for vendors to find out who you are and why they should trust you, so ensure your ‘about’ and ‘services’ pages are also easy to find on your site.
- Website ‘feel’
You’d be familiar with the idea that perception is reality and how potential leads perceive you will become the truth in their minds.
If your website looks professional, you’ll be perceived as professional.
Everyone has their own preferences for design but remember to put your potential customers at the heart of your website. It’s more important to appeal to that demographic than showcase your own design preference.
- Website speed
The faster your website loads the better – not just because you risk losing traffic if it takes too long, but also because it impacts your Google ranking.
Minimizing plug-ins and reducing the size (not quality) of the images you use can help speed up a sluggish site.
2. Lead generation tools for real estate leads
Once you have the user experience covered, you can move on to the tools that allow you to capture more real estate leads.
The tried and tested ‘book a free appraisal’ should definitely be one of the calls to action on your website, but we expand on that with our list below:
- Pop-ups – we don’t recommend those annoying pops up that take over the page and are hard to close. Instead, a relevant and unintrusive pop up to the side of the page that anticipates what the user might be interested in based on the page they are on can prompt a response.
- Lead magnets – pieces of content like buyer or seller content add value to your website visitors and in order to access this content, users provide their contact details and qualify themselves as potential leads for you to follow up with.
- Landing pages – a purpose-built landing page offering potential sellers a customised home evaluation is another way to generate leads and offer value to your website visitors.
- Schedule a call – while most website visitors may not be ready to talk to you right now some will. Add a ‘schedule a call’ button on your website to make it easy for those serious about buying or selling a home to make time to speak to you.
- Live chat – some visitors may have questions but don’t want to commit to making a call or scheduling a meeting. Live chat can be switched on or off and when it’s off, will generate an email for you to follow up on.
- Remarket – both Facebook and Google gather information on your website visitors and even if they haven’t yet become a lead on your website, you can target them with future advertising, get in front of them again and again and encourage them to visit your website again. This increases your chances of staying top of mind with them and potentially encouraging them to complete a form on your website.
Building a real estate website that drives consistent leads isn’t difficult once you understand the steps required.
By taking into account the impact of user experience and experimenting with the numerous lead generation tools available, you can start to turn your website into the valuable marketing asset it should be to support your business.
