Real estate websites are unique.
When it comes to designing your real estate agency website, you need to create and provide a valuable resource to prospective clients. Your visitors expect to be able to search for properties matching their specific criteria, and expect to be able to find what they’re looking for quickly and easily. Your website also needs to be able to handle large volumes of traffic.
Basically, it needs to combine an appealing design, ease of use and functionality.
When you start to plan your real estate website, you should be thinking about three main questions: who, what and why?
- Who are you targeting? Is it buyers, sellers or both? Are they located nationally or within a specific location? Make sure you clearly define your audience and cater for them.
- What do these targets want from you? Each targeted audience group needs to see something just for them as soon as they arrive on your site. If not, they’ll leave. The way you set up your navigation will play a huge role for this question. Make sure you have clear headings for where people should click if they are a buyer or seller.
- Why should they contact you? Giving your visitors free content like listings or advice articles is great, but you should also ask them to do something such as leave feedback, sign up for a newsletter, request information on a listing, download a report, etc. If you don’t ask them to do anything, they’ll stay passive and you may never hear from them.
What are some other areas that your website needs to excel in? We’ve come up with a few main points to think about if you’re designing your website from scratch or giving your current website a makeover.
It needs to be optimised for images
A vital part of listing a property for sale or lease is a set of detailed, high quality images of the property. These play a major role in selling the property, and most buyers will look through these photos before they call you. If your images are not well optimised, you could be missing out on potential buyers.
It needs to have email registration
All real estate websites should offer the ability for visitors to register for email updates on certain properties or alerts for new listings that match their criteria. This automated system is convenient for you and your clients.
It needs to have search engine optimisation
A lot of people will search for property criteria through a Google search, rather than by coming directly to your site and searching. It’s essential that your website is optimised for SEO so that your listings show up in these Google searches.
It needs to have a blog functionality
Getting a real estate blog happening on your website is a great way to increase the amount of traffic coming to your website. It also positions you as an expert in your field and can be a great resource to your clients.
Having a visually pleasing and functional website is one of the most important steps a real estate agency can make in their business. Having your listings beautifully showcased and your target audience well defined will help support you real estate business.