Top tips For Web Success

 

Almost every estate agent has some form of web presence, most likely a website but finding success and establishing your business online is a lot more difficult than the majority of estate agents realise.

As a business owner, you will understand the importance of planning any growth or development within your company and your website should be no different. It’s not as simple as finding a web designer and leaving it in their hands; you should sit down and create a clear brief, outlining what you want from a website. This will involve some research in order to discover exactly what an estate agency website needs to be successful.

To help you get started, here are 5 great tips that every business owner should consider when planning a new website or redesign:

1) Go Responsive

Responsive websites are becoming the standard for estate agency web design. A responsive website will adjust to fit any screen size that it is loaded on; making the site clear and easy to use no matter what device it is being viewed on.

This is easy to overlook as your website looks awesome on your desktop computer, but it may be unusable on a tablet or mobile device and as a huge percentage of your audience (40% and rising) actually view your website from a mobile device, having a user-friendly website on every device is now crucial. If you aren’t catering to this audience you could be potentially losing almost half of your potential customers.

2) Get search engine friendly

A huge percentage of your websites traffic will find you through a search engine, most likely Google. In order to make an impact and be as visible as possible within Google you need to have written high quality content, avoiding any errors such as broken links, formatted the content correctly into the right header tags and have a good quality backlink portfolio.

It is also important to do an extensive keyword research to ensure you aren’t wasting your time optimising your website for the wrong phrases.

3) Actually get social

It is easy to set up a social networking account such as Facebook or Twitter but actually being social is a completely different matter and also a difficult and timely process.

Most estate agents have got involved in social media but haven’t taken the time to learn how to correctly use it. The mistake many estate agents make is using these platforms solely to self-promote.  Social media is more beneficial to a business if they use it as a brand awareness platform, instead of constantly self-promoting try to post something informative or education which your audience would actually like to read and share.

By doing this you will see much more success from your social efforts.

4) Be user-friendly  

Your website has to be easy to navigate, clear and simple. Try to ensure that your website isn’t too crowded, that it flows in a practically manner and that it has a fast loading speed (the page needs to load within a few seconds).

5) Keep testing

Many people think once the site is up and running then you are done. However up until this time your audience still hasn’t seen or even tested your website.

This means you have to continue testing and monitoring your website, ensure it is being found on Google, that people are staying on your website for a decent period of time and are using it in the way you intended.

It is a good idea to get as many people testing your website as possible; this may be your employees, family, friends or anyone else that may be able to help you find small problems with your website that could be rectified.

Remember, even after your website is live, you can still make improvements so don’t stop testing and improving.