A business website is one of the easiest ways to connect with prospects. It is the very first source of communication between the consumers and service providers these days. Therefore, if you already have a business website or are interested in a new one, below are some features to make it more reliable and useful for your target audience.
A highly engaging website is the one that even the first time visitors find easy to navigate. The most important pages of your website should be easily accessible for the visitors from the home page or a navigation bar, i.e., the top bar that contains links for the about us and contact us page. Also, visitors find it easy to locate navigational links on a webpage that excludes clutter like ads, CTAs, and too much promotional content.
If you have too many animations on your site, you can also provide a tutorial of how to perform the most frequently used options like search listings, enlarge pictures, or use the carousel.
The featured listings section is required to display properties for rent & sale. It helps in bringing popular properties to the notice of visitors. There can be a featured listings section on the home page and a dedicated inner page for the same. The listings should be a confluence of both images and text. In addition to that, your home page should connect visitors to the most appealing real estate properties.
Recommended Read: 101 Actionable Best Tips: How To Make Your Website Sell
Business websites that aren’t optimized for mobile often fail to deliver a smooth customer experience. The reason behind this is the overdependence of people on smartphones. According to Statista, mobile visitors generated 51.53% of the entire internet traffic in the second quarter of 2020. To satisfy these mobile visitors, who are more than half of the population on the internet, responsive website design is required. It scales to any handheld device and is optimized for mobile usage
Going one step further, you can also develop a mobile app for enhancing the mobile browsing experience of your listings.
To get the maximum benefit from your online marketing & promotional campaigns, you need a dedicated landing page to focus on the offers you announce in PPC ads. It is not wise to divert all the visitors to your home page and leave them struggling to find the relevant content.
Informational blogs are a place for two way communication. They offer a great platform to share your knowledge for trust-building and engage your customers. With your real estate blog, you can:
Sharing the qualifications and experience of your brokers and real estate agents on your websites highlights your broad expertise in the industry. On the profile pages, you can also share the social media links and LinkedIn handles of your agents. Customer testimonials, ratings, and reviews are some other elements that render profile pages more relevant. SEO friendly URLs for the profile pages will also help your agents receive direct leads & queries.
Visitors on real estate sites want to find the property they are looking for as easily as they can. When you don’t have the correct sorting options to help them do so, they feel a little disappointed. A good example of providing sorting options is that you place an advanced search option tool at the top or either side of the search results. The common filters that should be present on a real estate website are the size, price, location, furnishing, property type, and architecture style.
Numerous real estate agencies might be operating websites in your area. They are your active competitors targeting the same audience as you. To prove yourself as more capable than them on the internet, you need to focus on improving your customer experience. Needless to say but prospects in real estate want to compare all their available options. Navigating through different pages of a website or even shuffling between different Chrome tabs is detrimental for providing smooth user experience and quite inconvenient. The solution for this problem is to provide a comparing feature on your website with which visitors can pitch the merits of two properties and pick their favorite one.
Contact us forms are like a short snippet of your contact us page. They are easy to fill out, create engagement, and are only used when a prospect promises some interest in purchase. You can place a short contact form along with your listings so that the visitor can fill up his email or mobile number for a revert/callback. From a marketing point of view, contact forms also help you prepare a repository of valuable prospects for cold calling and future negotiations.
Another way to improve customer experience via business websites in the real estate sector is to provide navigation through Google Maps or some other map service provider. This way, your prospects won’t face difficulty in reaching the property they found on your website. If the navigation feature sounds a little overboard, the minimum that you can do is provide a map view of the property, which will provide your prospects with a basic idea of the location.
IDX refers to Internet Data Exchange. It is a set of policies governing the rules for the sharing of listings in real estate. The benefit of integrating an IDX plugin on your website is that you will be able to sync all the listings present in the local MLS (Multiple Listing Services) database. This way, your visitors won’t need to leave your website to check the listings that your local competitors present. Also, as the IDX rules govern, all the information present in your MLS listings will always remain up-to-date.
Bringing the latest design features to your real estate business website is a lucrative idea considering the fierce competition you’re in. When you provide real estate services virtually, your goal should be convenient along with sales.
UI and UX of websites are the two main elements that assist online businesses in bringing that convenience to the visitors, which is a big enough reason not to skip design upgrades. Apart from improving customer experience, the second factor that applies to design upgrades is pricing. However, in an industry with huge profit margins like real estate, even steep website design pricing shows promising ROI.
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Comments (1)
Angel Mary
Thank you soo much for this blog. Its really great and informative for my real estate website