Building a site that your visitors will love can be a lot easier when you keep in mind a few important principals. A great site incorporates professional design, has purposeful content, and is easy to navigate. Together these principals lead to higher conversion rates and more leads.
Great design means better conversion
Time and time again agents have reported seeing an increase in business after redesigning their website. This makes sense, as great design supports a better user experience. If a website visitor can easily find what they are looking for, they are more likely to reach out to you and view you as an expert. As a real estate agent, you want visitors to be able to search for listings easily and without much effort. Mark Slade, a BrandCo client and KW agent, recently stated in New Jersey REALTOR® Magazine, “…I was hearing from consumers that they didn’t want to go through the motions of using the IDX setup to drill down and answer a lot of questions”. That is why Mark added buttons for each town in his geographical area right on his homepage. This simple design element allows users to quickly navigate to a town without digging around.
Making it easy to find the right information
The minute a visitor lands on your site, you are up against the clock. According to research, visitors will leave your site in as little as 10 seconds if they don’t see a clear purpose and the value a page provides. This is why it is imperative to create pages that have a defined purpose. Create pages that center around one topic or one line of logic. For example, you could create a page focused on schools in a specific area. With a single focus, search engines can more easily index the page for a specific keyword and visitors can hone in on pages that interest them.
Make it easy to navigate
A site that is easy to navigate means more than a simple menu structure. You want to guide visitors through your site, with links to important pages on the homepage. Don’t clutter the nav bar, consider adding a resource page with links to articles, vendors, or other resources. Repeating your navigation in the footer is also a good idea, it allows visitors to move on to another area of your website without having to scroll back up to the top. With more than half of all web traffic being generated from mobile devices, easy navigation means thinking about navigation on all devices. A responsive website design allows for a site to be scaled with ease, with finger-friendly navigation for phones and tablets.
A reputable web design company will help you achieve these principals and allow you to extract the most value from your site. As the web grows and quickly becomes the starting point for real estate related searches, your website matters more than ever. With a great site, you not only have a strong presence on the web, you have a valuable resource your visitors will love.
