How to Make the Best Home Page for Your Real Estate Website

If you have a website, it should strictly be focused on the purpose for which it was made. It has to be working continuously for you, every day of the year, for providing optimum results. The website must constantly capture leads, promote your brand and help its visitors. These visitors should be able to find information about the local market, to find homes and to receive answers to the most important questions. All these conditions should be met only by using the home page of your website. In the following points, you will be able to see what a real estate homepage should contain.

A Clean Design

The design must be uncluttered and there shouldn’t be any features using automated play. For the layout of a homepage, the experience of the visitors has to be the most important. The layout of your website has to be concise and without the use of too much text. Because loading time is important too, keep the codes simple. If you are using music, videos or voice recordings on the main page, make sure auto play is turned off. Many people don’t like to be bombarded with sound and images when they first visit a website.

Contact Forms and Calls to Action Are a Must

You should not forget the reason for which you made a site for your business, which is to grow your business. This means you have to use tools exactly for that: calls to action and contact forms. Calls to action encourage visitors to take action and become consumers. You will have to guide your visitors to areas of the website that contain the information that they want or need. You can embed links to other pages in your text. Don’t just show your contact information. Use contact forms for helping visitors to have a practical way of requesting an appointment, signing up for getting more information, etc. Contact forms are known to be good lead generators.

Provide a Full IDX Search Function

Don’t forget that people visit your site looking for listings. These listings are not just the ones of your office, so you have to provide them a full IDX search option. If you don’t do this, your website will be quite useless. Another important thing is to place the search box in the center of the page, or anywhere you could make it obvious. This search box has to be the highlight of your home page. Using advanced search filters could make things even better, as people may want to perform short sale searches, school district searches and foreclosure searches. With the boom in the Naples real estate market, having a full IDX search is imperative.

Update Content Frequently and Make It as Useful as Possible

Content is one of the most important parts of any website. Despite this, the majority of real estate companies fail to give updated and useful information on their visitors. Knowing this, you can make content your primary weapon that will help you overcome competition. A good approach can be to maintain that local flair to many parts of your content. You can write about the neighborhood in which you work or about other neighborhoods you would like to work in. Other great details can be information about events in your town, local market statistics, reviewing a business, interviewing a person and so on. You could focus on a specific area of a neighborhood. Don’t just use text. Also add images and videos. If you don’t know what to write about, you can go to members.houselogic.com, where you will find content that is free of charge and shareable. Some blogs may agree to let you repost their content with the condition that you give credit to the author and link back to the original article. If you want to write content that is not local, good examples can be posting news related to real estate, the DIY and financing information.

Always Use Social Media in Your Web Strategies

Doing social media involves much more than linking your website to a Facebook business page or a LinkedIn profile. The best approach can be to use “share this” buttons, or something like them, on each of the pages that have content. Doing this can allow your visitors to pass the content to other people from their network and this option is not hard to install. Social media can be helpful for increasing your site’s traffic and allows you to share any content you want for drawing visitors to different pages of your site.

The High Impact of Videos

Videos have a much higher impact on visitors than text or sound. This is one of the reasons for which YouTube has been grown so much and has been bought by Google. You can see this as an opportunity for your business. You could embed videos on the pages and create a profile video. You could highlight the listings and the community in the videos. The next step is creating a playlist which will increase the traffic and the time spent by visitors on your pages. For increasing traffic even more, you can combine the use of videos with the proper search engine optimization.

Some Tips about SEO

Search engine optimization should not be your main concern. Instead, you should concentrate your efforts on writing awesome content that will give value to the visitor and make him/her a consumer. Yes, keywords may have their importance for getting a good ranking. But, overusing keywords could make your site look silly. Even if you get a lot of traffic through SEO, you may fail to get leads. Over-optimization can ruin the content and your site may end up looking very bad. This also applies to link crammers.

Place Links in Your Texts

Links should be used anywhere on the homepage, where it would be helpful for the visitor to get deeper into the site. A really useful and valuable homepage is the one that functions like a portal, allowing visitors to get easily and fast to any internal pages they need to see for achieving their goals. There are three ways to make this possible: menus should be clear, navigation has to be obvious and links should be added.

End Notes

In the end, what matter the most is the experience that visitors have on your site. This experience is mainly given by content and by an intuitive and natural navigation. Once all the techniques to drive visitors to your website are used and they work, why not provide a fantastic experience to them while they are navigating the website? This will make them enjoy being on your site and they will come back for sure. You can start now by optimizing your homepage and making your website interesting and useful!