What Are The Most Important Elements To Look For In A New Real Estate website?
What are you trying to achieve with your real estate website?
When designing Real Estate websites, our Realtor clients want to provide a valuable resource to their clients and prospective clients. They want to provide easy search functionality, large formats for photos, and quick access to their featured listings. These are all simple requests and easy to accomplish in a variety of formats.
…but what else should a real estate website have in order to serve a Realtor’s business and their clients?
We have helped Realtors optimize their existing websites and develop new websites for their business and we have found that there are specific features that every Realtor should require in their website.
While our design tips support visitor engagement and easy real estate searching they also drive traffic through social media, digital marketing, and organic search results. You do not have to spend a fortune to get a site that is optimized for the current visually oriented and highly informed real estate buyer.
So, What Should Every Website Include?
Optimized For Photography
All real estate websites should be oriented around real estate photography. Make sure your site supports the use of high-quality photos in slide shows and listings to allow for better property viewing. Today’s buyers search properties extensively online before they pick up the phone to talk to a Realtor so help them out by giving them access to great pictures.
Visitor Registration
Once a client or prospect gets to your site you want to encourage them to come back to your website and use your site as their online real estate home base. All real estate websites should offer the ability for clients or prospects to register for updates on certain properties or alerts for new listings in certain towns.
Facebook Tab Integration
Social media is proving to be a wonderful playground for Realtor engagement with prospective clients, clients, and partners. Providing easy access to your listings via your Facebook real estate business page (yes, this is good to have too!) ensures that you are giving your clients easy access to good information.
Community Pages
Sites that provide quick searches for towns and communities make it easier for their visitors to find what they are looking for. We encourage our Realtors to include community pages for every town in their area, which include all MLS listings and are numbered on a map and featured on the page.
Featured Listings Slideshow
This enables Realtors to highlight their own listings on their home page. Customizing a site to reflect your region and your listings will provide your clients with an easy view of what you have available and further market your existing properties.
Search Engine Optimized
Many websites today come with the SEO framework enabled but not completed. The challenge is that Realtors are busy focusing on their own listings and their own clients and they don’t have time to learn how to optimize a site for SEO. Make sure that the website you implement is search engine optimized for your towns, your region, and your name. SEO is one of the most important things that your website MUST have to be found online.
Integrated Blog Functionality
Writing a blog on your website is a fantastic way to increase your site’s Search Engine value and make sure your website comes up earlier in Google search results. Maybe you are not ready to commit to writing a blog, but if you’re getting a new website make sure you have a platform that supports blogging so that you have the option to blog in the future.
Having a visually pleasing website is one of the most important steps a Realtor can make for his or her business. The design process can be exciting as you define or refine your personal real estate brand and pick and choose the colors, images, and photography that reflect your style and what you believe will appeal to your clients.
A new website design will help you tell your story and can help you attract new customers by being easy to use and visually appealing. Your listings can be beautifully showcased and your communities can be well defined. All of this will help support you real estate business. As you enjoy the process, keep in mind the elements in this post so you can get the most out of your new site.
