If you’re getting traffic, but not converting, something’s wrong. You need to rethink your home page, your landing pages and your Calls To Action.
Think about what you want people to do when they land on your website…
- Search for homes?
- Call you?
- Click on something?
- Subscribe?
- Register a name and email (to use your IDX for example)?
What specifically do you want people to do? And is your web copy communicating that effectively? If it’s not, you’ve got some work to do.
Here are three areas that I would focus on…
1. People are coming to your website primarily to search for homes so make it obvious to them how/where they can do that.
One of the primary reasons people are coming to your website is to search for homes. So when a consumer lands on your website (whether a blog post or your home page), it should be obvious to them what they need to do next to access your home search.
Here’s an example from joshgonzalez.com:
You can access the IDX home search in a couple of different ways:
- By clicking on the “Search Homes” tab in the navigation.
- Conducting a search using the “Phoenix Home Search” widget on the upper right-hand side of the site.
- That same “Home Search” widget is accessible at the very top of the sidebar on all of the interior pages.
So I always know what to do/where to go to search for homes.
Remember, the easier you make it for people to do what they came to do (in this case, search for homes), the more likely they are to stick around your site and contact you with listing questions.
2. Create specific landing pages for communities and/or special reports.
This example from The Phoenix Real Estate Guy comes to mind:
If you want to know more about selling your home in a short sale, and you’d like to register for a no cost, no obligation consult with an experienced short sale expert, no problem, just fill out the form below.
Pretty simple right?
That form drops right into your contact management system where you can set an auto-responder to deliver a series of messages over a period of time and it serves as a marketing engine 24/7 for anyone researching “Phoenix Short Sale” info on “The Google.”
Are you using specific landing pages to convert site visitors? If not, could you be?
Over to you…
What else can you do to convert more of your site visitors into quality leads? What more can you do to engage in conversations about real estate with those site visitors? What’s worked for you?
Good post! I had someone recently tell me I should have 40 landing pages. I have 3. haha! Going to work on that this month!
40 is quite a lot of landing pages, heh. My advice, just work on the one’s that matter (to you). What’s your goal? Then build the one’s that’ll get you there.
Yea, I thought 40 was a little over the top. But they were also counting all the A/B testing pages, etc. So… maybe somewhere between 3 and 40. Haha!
Ricardo,
I have been thinking about this live chat idea for a few weeks. I don’t know any Realtors who do that here yet…sounds interesting. I also should build a contact form on the short sale page of my site…great idea. Thanks for the informative post!
You’re welcome Rachel!
As for the live-chat, @9316d76a4d25bd9a09c8ee800132261b:disqus commented on another post and testified (that sounds funny to say) to having receiving 3 leads as in 3 contracts as a result of using the live-chat over a period of 6 weeks. Not bad if you ask me 🙂
I think the chat feature is a really underutilized feature of real estate websites. It definitely requires a commitment to be available to answer questions, and I can absolutely say that it generates business daily.
Great topic Ricardo – you speak the truth my friend!