After analysing countless estate agents’ websites, we’ve found six main estate agent website mistakes you’re making. Mistakes that mean:
- You’re losing leads to your competitors
- You’re not generating enough enquiries from vendors
- Your website isn’t getting enough traffic
You need to sort this out ASAP so let’s get stuck straight in.
1. Your website targets the wrong type of audience
The main goal of your website is to sell houses, right?
Wrong.
The main goal of your website is to generate more enquiries from people selling their home. The more people who sell their home with you, the more ‘sold’ boards you have around town.
The more ‘sold’ boards you have around town, the more enquiries you get. Which ultimately means that the more enquiries you get, the less you have to rely on expensive aggregates like Zoopla and Purple Bricks.
2. Your website doesn’t stand out
Most estate agent’s websites look the same: they’re clunky, confusing, and have too much going on.
So how do you stand out?
One of the first things we do for estate agent websites is create a video animation that takes potential sellers through your end-to-end process.
That means instead of landing on your website and seeing houses for sale, vendors learn all about why you’re the best agency in their area and what it feels like to sell a house with you.
Think about it: people don’t sell their house very often so even if it’s not their first time selling their home, they need help with what to expect.
Who would you pick? The agency with a website that tries to sell you houses or the agency that has taken the time and effort to make you feel comfortable and ‘in the loop’?
3. Your website isn’t search engine optimised
Your website is wasted if nobody visits it.
But how do people find your website? Through searching online on Google, Yahoo and Bing.
We go into a lot more detail about search engine basics for estate agents in this article but for now, all you need to know is it’s common for estate agents to not have a clear SEO strategy in place.
This means that when you do, you’re ahead of the game.
4. You’re not retargetting website visitors
When someone visits your website, you need to show them adverts everywhere they look online to make sure your agency stays top of mind.
We call this ‘retargeting’ and you do this using paid social media advertising.
The way we see it, it’s like putting up a ‘sold’ board everywhere they look online. The social media adverts will promote things like properties you’ve sold recently, feedback from happy customers, awards you’ve won and more information about your process.
5. Your website is too slow
Estate agent websites are data-heavy because of the number of images you need.
This is a quick way to make your website very slow.
Your website needs to load fast (we look in detail at why and how to improve your site speed in this article).
6. You don’t have a handle on your data
- You don’t know how many enquiries you get a month.
- You don’t know how many of these you convert.
- You don’t know which pages are your best performing.
- You don’t know how many pages your visitors read on average.
And worst of all, you don’t know how to fix any of the above.
The good news
All of the above estate agent website mistakes can be fixed – if you know what you’re doing.
We’re one of the UK’s leading digital agencies who specialise in SEO and websites for estate agents.
We know what it takes to take an estate agent website from average to great – meaning you sell more houses, generate more enquiries from vendors and leak less leads to your competition.
Email Kathy, our estate agent strategist at kathy@staging.white.digital and we’ll set up a call to discover how we can help you.
