Real Estate Marketing & Beyond
Are you planning to move your real estate business online? Would you like to build a website or do a website redesign of your existing site that represents your unique business? If yes, it is important to learn the crucial features required in web design for real estate agents.
The internet technology has revolutionized every industry. In real estate, the traditional targeting techniques don’t work anymore as most potential buyers are online.
According to a report by the National Realtors Association (NAR), 90% of people use the internet to begin their home search. The same report shows a 253% growth in real estate related searches over the last four years.
These numbers highlight the importance of a real estate website to find clients online. Your company’s online presence also builds your brand’s reputation. With a website, you also have multiple marketing channels for your property listing, including video, social media, content marketing, among others.
It all starts with good website design. This guide explores the crucial features to look for in real estate-specific web design.
To get the best out of your real estate website, make sure you integrate the following crucial features:
Mobile internet traffic surpassed desktop traffic in 2016. Your real estate website must thus accommodate all internet devices. This is where responsive web design comes into play. It is a web design technique that ensures your website displays the same way on all devices.
You need a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy for your website. This starts with web design. Choose a search-friendly website platform such as WordPress, link properly, and use easy-to-index content, among other features.
These features not only boost traffic levels but also increase the conversion rate. Learn more about SEO and web design here.
Your website’s design must integrate social media to help you target this active market. You should create easy-to-share content and provide sharing buttons on every page.
Integrating social media boosts your brand’s visibility on social media and also drives traffic to your site.
Google has emphasized the importance of great user experience. You can achieve this through clear site navigation.
List a few items, use descriptive page titles, place crucial links in conspicuous positions, and leverage internal linking.
You should also have a powerful search tool and filters to deliver quick, filtered, and relevant results.
When visitors come to your site, you have a great opportunity to convert. You can do this through a clear-call-to-action (CTA), amazing offers, narrowing down on a few listings, offering value, neat layout, and offering social proof.
Using these techniques helps to covert using a landing page.
If you are in the real estate business, IDX comes handy. This policy allows the sharing of property listing data across real estate websites.
It is crucial for capturing leads, sending emails to leads, and saving property searched. Functional IDX integration is thus crucial for your real estate website.
Without great property listings, your real estate website cannot covert. Your site visitors are potential leads, and they need to find as many property options as possible. These listings should have all the relevant details in their description.
Final Thoughts
Other important features in web design for real estate agents include blogging ability, lead capture management, map search, SMS tools, owner’s info, and great videos/ images.
All these features help you tap into the growing online market. They also increase your real estate’s brand’s visibility online, build brand credibility, and help optimize your marketing campaign.
Many of the big name platform "design" hosting companies offer the above. I would add https as a necessity too.
What the consumer must watch out for is platforms selling "SEO" to unsuspecting broker agents. When in fact -like I discovered on one platform recently it was anti SEO.- Improper written robots with no map over to sitemap.xml.
They did allow for crawling via a switch for the meta, but it doesnt work. lol
The sitemap does not show listing/idx pages.
I can go on. But the frosting was that each page links to not just their business overtly which is pretty common sadly. With no option for no follow.
But also a hidden link that goes to an associated url of the company I can only assume
What got me looking at this was that I noticed most of their sites are not very well indexed in Google.