As a real estate agent, you don’t want people to visit your website for a few seconds and then leave. You want prospects to stay on your page and take action. Prospective clients normally arrive at your page to look at a single listing and then move on. Your goal is to make them look at all your listings, bookmark your page, and contact you. Three strategies are the key to holding on to your web traffic and converting brief visits to lasting relationships:
1. Design each page like a landing page to optimize your site searches and keep traffic on your pages.
2. Ensure that your pages display correctly and work on phones and tablets as well as all types of computers.
3. Maximize your connection with potential customers by texting new leads right away.
1. Posts and Landing Pages: Mirroring your best look
Your three top sources of traffic for real estate web sites are search engines, ads, and social media. The problem is that all of these traffic sources can land people on different pages of your site. Sending people to the most relevant page on your site sounds good, but there is a catch.
Most real estate pages aren’t built as landing pages, sometimes making it difficult for people to navigate from wherever they happen to land to other pages on your site or to calls for action. Work with your web designer to ensure that all pages on your site mirror some elements of your landing page, so that they have all the elements a first-time visitor to your site needs to see.
The benefit? You’ll draw more traffic and keep it there.
2. Pages that Work: Device-friendly designs
What do you do when you land a page that doesn’t display correctly or try to click a button that doesn’t work? You leave the page.
If you don’t want to lose potential clients to tech problems, you need to design and test your site to make sure it is compatible with all the devices visitors may be using. That means you need to accommodate Macs and PCs, iPads and Android tablets, smartphones of all shapes and sizes and even smart watches and virtual reality displays. You should also invest in making your page accessible to the elderly and disabled. Losing potential clients to save a few dollars on web design and testing costs doesn’t help your bottom line.
3. Send Your Best Texts – Fast!
When do you respond to text messages in other contacts from your website? After you show a listing and before you drop the kids off at school? If you don’t have a good lead follow-up system, you can lose traffic – quickly.
To have a higher chance of converting leads, you need to respond in under 24 hours, but if you want a sky-high conversion rate, you should respond immediately, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The longer your response time, the greater the odds that potential lead will look elsewhere and hire someone else.
To be responsive does not mean interrupting showings to answer your phone, working during family dinners, or risking accidents by texting while driving. During regular business hours, have an assistant monitor and respond to messages and hire a service to handle after hours messaging.
By optimizing your pages, blogs, and responsiveness, you’ll see your traffic increase as you make better connections with your customers and turn your leads into sales.
