How to increase the effectiveness of your real estate website

When home buyers and sellers look for properties in your area, will they find your real estate website front and center or will your site be an invisible no-show? In the competitive world of real estate marketing, having a website that ranks high on searches is not just important, it’s essential.

90 percent of home buyers search online during their home buying process, according to a recent study by NAR and Google.

This means that if your website doesn’t show up in property searches, the majority of real estate customers in your area may not even be aware that your agency exists.

Competition for the top spots in real estate related search terms is fierce, especially since the emergence of Zillow, Trulia, and realtor.com.  These sites, along with the other giant online real estate directories, tend to nab the top places on many real estate search terms, leaving agent sites fighting to get noticed.

To help your real estate website gain the notice it deserves, the marketers at For Sale Marketing have joined together to create an easy guide to improving your onsite real estate SEO.

Our guide addresses several key factors that can affect your real estate website’s search engine performance, from the design features you should include in your website to the type of content you should offer and the best ways to follow-up on initial contact. Use them to fine-tune your real estate website and get ready to see a definite upswing in your website’s lead generating ability.

Improving your Real Estate Website Design

To increase your real estate website’s ability to achieve a top ranking on search engines, you should incorporate search engine-friendly characteristics into its basic design. Begin with a responsive real estate website design with the following features:

Fast Loading Pages
Consumers are so used to fast loading websites that an extra delay of as little as 3 seconds can cause customers to seek another website. Make sure all images on your webpages are compressed to 70 MB or less so pages load quickly. Don’t forget to optimize that beautiful background so it loads quickly when visitors open your home page!
Mobile-Friendliness
Google now considers your website’s performance on mobile devices when determining its position on search results, so make sure your site features responsive real estate website design that automatically adjusts to perform perfectly on every type of device.

Easy Navigation
Make sure your real estate website features large buttons, text that resizes automatically, and a viewing screen that only scrolls vertically, not side to side.

Increasing your Website’s Real Estate SEO Value
You should optimize all critical areas on your real estate website to ensure it gains the highest possible ranking on search results. Apply real estate SEO to all essential areas, especially:

Keywords
Incorporate real estate-related keywords into the essential areas of your website in the correct density and positions

Images
Optimize your images for search, with keywords inserted into the titles, alt tags, descriptions, and captions

Links
Include social sharing buttons and links to your social marketing strategies. You should also arrange to get backlinks from reputable real estate industry websites to build your website’s SEO value.

Nurturing Real Estate Leads Using Content

One of the best ways to improve the SEO value of your real estate website is through well-written, relevant content. This content serves two purposes: first, it gives you a way to update the keywords and refresh information on your website. Secondly, you can use this content to nurture your real estate leads, give them the vital information they need about the purchasing process as they move from interested visitors into signed clients. Incorporate the most popular forms of real estate content, including:

Real Estate Blog
A bi-weekly real estate blog is one of the primary ways to attract new visitors to your website. As your blogs appear in searches, new readers are directed to your website where they can learn about all you have to offer.

This short-form content provides visitors with concentrated bits of information about specific areas of the purchasing process, in an easy to read format that keeps them interested in your new content while giving you a convenient way to keep your website continually updated with new, relevant keywords.

White Papers
White papers that provide in-depth information about the purchasing process are great tools for nurturing leads. For the greatest effectiveness, you should pair them with lead generating forms, offering the white papers as incentives to encourage visitors to sign up for email subscriber lists. As visitors download more white papers, they provide you with additional information that will help you to know how best to meet their needs.

How-to Guides
Many of the visitors to your website will be first-time home buyers and sellers who may be confused about the purchasing process. When you provide How-to guides that explain the steps of the home selling/purchasing process, these newcomers will return to your website again and again, learning to rely on you as a trusted source for information. This growth of trust is an essential step in developing real estate leads into signed customers.

As a leading South Florida Real Estate SEO Agency, For Sale Marketing can provide you with everything you need to improve your onsite SEO and make your real estate website more effective at nurturing leads.  Our marketers will help you enact a comprehensive real estate SEO strategy that includes a responsive real estate website design, along with expert SEO content creation services for real estate blogs, white papers, How-To guides, and more. We also provide monthly SEO maintenance packages to ensure your SEO strategies stay on track.

Contact us today at For Sale Marketing at 954-779-2801 for expert real estate SEO services to improve your website so you can nurture leads more effectively!