Real Estate Marketing & Beyond
Conversion rate optimization, or CRO for short, has become increasingly important for online marketing. As the measure of how well your website or landing page is converting prospects to sales, CRO is an essential metric for anyone trying to drive business to their website - and that includes real estate professionals. Without a solid CRO, you’re not going to see the client interaction and retention figures you’re hoping for so that you can grow your business.
Thankfully, there are ways to ensure the CRO on your real estate landing page is at its best. Optimizing your approaches to site design with an eye toward capturing and nurturing leads involves a systematic approach, understanding how users experience and navigate your site, the actions available to them on your site, and what types of things are standing in their way of completing the goal you have in mind for them. Here’s even more about how to use optimization to boost your real estate landing page CRO.
CRO is an important aspect of nearly all business websites. Yet in real estate, good CRO is even more critical simply because the real estate industry is highly competitive. Whether you’re courting investors, sellers, buyers, property managers, tenants, or anyone else, visitors to your websites need to be presented with a landing page that ticks all their boxes. Otherwise, you run the risk of one of those potential clients taking their business elsewhere to a different real estate business that offers better ways for them to meet their real estate needs.
Conversion rate optimization is a varied subject, and there are dozens of different strategies to employ when attempting to improve your real estate website CRO. Here are just a few of the most essential methods for doing so.
Your landing page is, typically the first experience that prospective clients have when they click a link or visit your site. This means CRO is primarily about optimizing for the best visual impact of that landing page. Whatever need you’re hoping to serve for these visitors, the solutions for that need must be highly visible. This includes not just your logo but also your value proposition, a menu with basic and easily navigable elements, contact details (including both email and phone number) as well as a highly visible search feature.
Perhaps most important is the inclusion of a strong, high-resolution image that’s emblematic of the real estate business. In many cases, this can be an image of a property for sale. This image should change regularly to prevent it from becoming static and stale. Tools to automate images, such as sliding carousels, were once the norm but today have since fallen out of style; static images that are changed on a set cycle are often more advantageous.
The internet might have gotten started on desktop computers in the 1990s, but today the majority of website visitors tend to come from mobile devices. Phones and tablets present websites in a vastly different configuration than the screen of a desktop, and to ensure you’re not turning mobile viewers away your landing page must be designed with this in mind.
In fact, search engines like Google have leaned into this core design philosophy by prioritizing mobile-friendly results for their search engine queries. In other words, if your site isn’t optimized for mobile, your search engine results page ranking will suffer. This is just another reason why it’s now so important for your website to be not just mobile-compatible but mobile-first.
The performance of your landing page is another crucial component of a good CRO. If prospects have to wait more than a few seconds for the content on that page to load, it’s likely that they won’t - they’ll grow frustrated and seek solutions at a competitor’s site that has better page performance. This is why keeping the loading times short on your website is so essential to conversion rate optimization.
Using lightweight images is one of the best ways to speed up your page’s loading times. Big, high-resolution graphics are a feast for the eyes, but they’re also larger in terms of data requirements. Mobile internet speeds are getting faster and faster all the time, but too many large images will still slow down how quickly your site loads. Keep things brisk to prevent frustration among visitors for the best results.
The above CRO strategies are just the tip of the iceberg; there are plenty of other good ideas for improving conversion rate optimization for your real estate landing page. One of the best tools is undoubtedly A/B testing, which allows you to create two different configurations for a piece of online content like a landing page and then see which one performs better. This sort of testing helps inform your design choices going forward.
Other excellent methods for CRO include using high-quality calls to action (CTAs), integrating new technologies like virtual property walkthroughs, and including positive reviews and testimonials from previous and current clients. Finally, be sure to include an “about us” page that offers visitors a glimpse into the real people behind the page. Real estate marketing is all about building relationships, and this provides a face to the name that fosters that relationship.
Real estate landing page CRO isn’t necessarily difficult, but it does take hard work and dedication to improve the user experience for visitors. Present your landing page in the best possible light by making sure it fits the needs of your visitors, and you’ll see your conversion rate metrics increase.
