by When your website is new, your first focus is generally on getting traffic to your website. After all, without traffic, it’s like having the most beautiful retail location in the middle of the Sahara desert. A nice store with no sales quickly goes out of business.
Traffic can occur quicker than many people realize. The search engines now quickly pick up the latest updates and pay per click ads can bring hungry new clients for pennies each day, but the real question becomes, what do you do with all of that traffic? Unlike a billboard along a major freeway, when you get traffic to your website it is important to convert that traffic into something of value and in the case of real estate that generally means a lead. Traffic is merely an expense and the lead is your reward for paying for all of that traffic!
Converting traffic on your real estate website isn’t as challenging as most people make it. Before trying a particular method, it’s important to think of yourself as one of your visitors. What would make you give up your valuable name, e-mail, and phone number?
Now that you are thinking about what would empower you to give your information online, here are some proven techniques to get leads out of that traffic pouring into your website:
- Call to action – A call to action or a unique selling proposition is absolutely essential to get people to give up their information. Your call to action needs to easily communicate how submitting their information will save them time and money. Consider the following message “Stop driving all over town, access to ALL listings 24 hours a day”. This message saves the user valuable time by simply getting access to the entire inventory in your area. With so many apps (i.e. Redfin, Realtor, Zillow, etc.) making it easy for people to access listings you might want to be even more creative such as “Get Listings Before They Hit the Market” or “Receive Only Listings with Ocean Views”. Each market has different items that can pique the interest of local buyers, think about what your buyers crave most and craft your call to action around that.
- Great content – Too often people drive traffic to websites that are light on content. Even with the most targeted landing pages there is the opportunity for a visitor to look at other pages on your website. A website that doesn’t have much to offer will result in the user leaving to find a better resource of information. Take the time to really dive deep into subjects from significant architects, builders, and even types of real estate (i.e. develop a niche report on raw land even) to show visitors your real estate website is a depth of useful information that they won’t find elsewhere.
- Make it easy – When people are online they are a click away from another website. Give them the power to contact you in different ways easily. This means providing short contact forms, a phone number that is displayed on every page and even access to your social networks so they can reach out to you there. The easier it is for them to contact you the more leads you will be able to generate.
Existing Real Estate Website? Here’s Where to Look for Conversion Opportunities
If you have an existing real estate website, but you have struggled to get leads from it, here are a few key steps to help you find the quickest conversion opportunities.
- Look at your website reporting tool and filter to a period of at least 3 months
- Look at the pages (other than the home page) that have the highest volume of traffic
- Look at each of those high volume traffic pages and ask yourself the following: Is it easy for people to contact me? Is there something compelling on the page that would make someone give me their information?
When you make converting leads on your website a focus you will turn that expense of traffic into a profit center of people ready to take action. With a good source of traffic and simple follow up you will be able to turn those real estate leads into transactions every month.
