In the first part of this article I talked about what your real estate website shouldn’t be. This is as just as important as what it should be. Here are a few more tips on what to avoid with your real estate website:
Website Counters
Don’t bother having a website counter at the bottom of your website. These counters aren’t accurate, and your prospects won’t care even if you have lots of visitors to your website. Moreover, if you have counters on each of your website pages, you’re revealing to your competitors valuable information about the effectiveness of your website’s pages. If they see certain pages have lots of visitors, they’ll copy what you’re doing.
Instead, you should rely on your website’s own reporting for telling you what’s working (and what isn’t) on your website. Keep that data close to your chest. This data is more accurate than website counters and will tell you a lot more about your site. If your website doesn’t have great metrics, install Google Analytics. It’s a free tool and will give you a wealth of data on your website’s visitors so you know what’s working (and what isn’t working) on your website.
Keep Your Pages Simple
More and more in today’s info driven economy, people want information that is readily accessible. So make your pages easily readable to your prospects.
Many people decide if they want to read long articles by scanning it for headlines first. So summarize each paragraph with a few carefully chosen words, bold them, and make that the introduction to each of your paragraphs. Your prospects are far more likely to read part (if the not whole) of the article by being able to readily know which (if any) parts interest them.
It’s also good to break your writing up so that your paragraphs are only a few sentences long. People will often balk at reading very long paragraphs.
Bullet points are as helpful as having bolded headers to your paragraphs. They give a clear indication very quickly about what information you’re conveying and are therefore very readable.
Don’t Make Them Visit Another Website
People judge your website very quickly. In a few seconds they’ll decide what (if anything) they want to look at. So don’t have other website links prominent on your home page that might make them exit your site before they’ve seen how valuable your website is to them. You may have paid ads on your site like Google ads, and Google is adept at showing ad content closely aligned with your website’s content. So make sure your visitors are seeing your content first and foremost.
Learn more about how to have a compelling website and thereby build your prospect database by taking my Building Your Ecommerce Business course. This course has been approved by the Registrar, REBBA 2002 to qualify for 6 credits.
