Most agents and brokers count on their real estate website to support their business growth and close a certain number of transactions per year. It would be nice if you could just set up a real estate website with IDX property search to make this happen, but that’s not enough. That would be similar to launching a successful retail store without a business plan.
Turn Your Wish Into Specific Goals
While you hope that your website will bring you the volume of business you need, you’re much more likely to succeed with that objective if you identify and pursue specific goals required to make that happen. If your goals are not clear and cannot be measured, your objectives are less likely to be met.
Here at iHomefinder, we base a lot of our work around the concept of SMART goals. They’re called SMART goals because they’re Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely goals. You don’t have to use the SMART goal approach to reaching your business goals, but it brings a lot of clarity and efficiency to your efforts. You can learn more about SMART goals in this video. They can even be applied to your personal life!
Using the SMART goal approach, we saved you some time by identifying specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely goals to help you plan your real estate website success. You’ll still have work to do (or work you’ll need to pay someone to do), but at least you’ll know you’re going down the right path. We’ll also discuss some of these in more detail in future articles, so stay tuned!
Real Estate Website Technology Basics
Your website obviously needs to be dependable, quick to load, and provide a great experience across all devices. About half of your website visitors will be on mobile devices, so your website needs to appeal to these visitors, or they’ll simply leave.
IDX property search is an important ingredient for your real estate website in order to provide the most up-to-date listing data. Your property search experience should help buyers and sellers quickly find the listing and market information they’re looking for.
In addition to property search, providing saved searches on your website for popular locations helps visitors browse listings immediately by location.
You also want to keep your website navigation simple and easy to use. If it’s too complicated and confusing to get around, your visitors will get frustrated and leave.
Website Traffic
If you’re counting on your website to bring new leads that turn into transactions, you’ll need to understand your average conversion rate from your website traffic. How many new website visitors turn into registered leads? How many registered leads turn into transactions for your business? Once you can get some rough numbers, you can better understand how much traffic you will need in order to reach your targeted number of conversions.
Where will you get your website traffic? Examples of different traffic sources include:
- Organic traffic – visitors who conducted a search in a search engine like Google and clicked on a link to your website in the search engine results page
- Paid traffic – visitors who clicked on an ad you purchased through search engine marketing services like Google and Bing or paid ads on social media
- Referral traffic – visitors who followed links to your site from other web locations outside of the search engines
- Direct traffic – visitors who typed your website address into their web browser
Pursuing organic and paid traffic growth requires expertise and time which most business owners do not have, so these efforts are typically outsourced to vendors who specialize in providing these services to businesses of all sizes.
Conversion strategy
To get new business from your website traffic, you’ll need to convert website visitors to registered leads and effectively engage registered leads so they transact with you instead of your competition.
Here are some specific things that will help with your website conversion:
Are you easy to contact?
Make sure your contact information is always visible throughout your website. The more contact opportunities there are throughout your site the better, as long as they do not get in the way and are not overbearing.
Relevant content
You always want to deliver the right content to the right visitors. If you don’t know what your visitors’ specific interests are, make sure you make it easy to discover listings and other information anywhere in your market. As mentioned earlier, it’s helpful to have saved searches on your site for different locations in your market for visitors to easily find and explore.
If you’ve purchased ads or you’re sharing links to your site that target specific locations in your market, make sure listings and other market information for those locations is immediately available on your landing pages for those ads or links.
Registration prompts
These are usually an option in IDX property search technology, so take advantage of these options if you have them.
Engage and nurture leads
Once you have a registered lead, keep them engaged with personalized content related to their interests to move them closer to a transaction. Content that includes relevant listings and market data will be more effective at doing this than generic drip emails.
For a competitive edge, use technology to handle auto-responses and personalized email campaigns for every new lead. Many studies have shown lead conversion rates drop significantly with each minute that passes, so you can’t afford to let hours or days pass by from new lead inquiries.
Wrapping up
There are a lot of distracting bells and whistles when it comes to choosing website features but it’s hard to go wrong by staying focused on these important factors of your website. We’ll share some more tips related to some of these topics in future articles.
Original source: https://www.ihomefinder.com/blog/agent-and-broker-resources/planning-your-real-estate-website-success/
