What if you could generate more real estate leads through the web?
How different would your life look?
Look, we get it: for many people in real estate, they didn’t get into it because they wanted their website to do all the work.
They got into it because they like helping people.
They like the personal connection they form with people who are looking for a real estate broker.
They like the ability to use their expertise to match the right person with the right deal.
Getting leads from the web seems impersonal.
But don’t think about web leads that way.
Instead, think about your real estate website as something that can bring in more people to your business.
Something that automatically funnels leads your way—even while you sleep.
Isn’t that worth investigating?
Isn’t it worth getting right?
If you want a more automatic way to generate leads, then using your website is the first step.
But you can’t have just any website, either.
You’ll want to optimize your real estate website for maximum lead generation.
Here’s how.
1. Cut Your Bounce Rate Down to Size
The first step of your funnel is to collect traffic.
The thing about traffic is that it’s not as hard to get as you might think.
If all else fails, you can always buy traffic through tools like Google Adwords, Twitter sponsored ads, or Facebook ads.
The question is whether you’ll keep the attention of this incoming traffic.
That means optimizing your bounce rate.
It starts by knowing your numbers. According to RocketFuel:
As a rule of thumb, a bounce rate in the range of 26 to 40 percent is excellent. 41 to 55 percent is roughly average. 56 to 70 percent is higher than average, but may not be cause for alarm depending on the website. Anything over 70 percent is disappointing for everything outside of blogs, news, events, etc.
That means if you’re seeing bounce rates of 56% or higher, you can do a lot more to make sure that your real estate website is on point.
But that still leaves one question: how can you optimize your bounce rate?
Here are some of the key strategies. If you haven’t implemented these changes, look into them on your own real estate website:
- Make sure your page loads quickly. One of the top reasons someone might click away from your site has nothing to do with their level of interest. It has to do with their level of patience. If they can click over to a top corporate website with fast load times, why should they wait around for your website to load? If your site isn’t loading quickly, then you need to make sure it is. Use PageSpeed Insights from Google to give yourself a check.
- Make sure the content is well-organized. Speaking of patience, have you ever encountered information online that wasn’t properly formatted? Maybe you saw a big block of text with no indents and no headers. It can feel like an invasion of your time. You just wanted a quick check on information, not to read War and Peace. Make sure that your own site is easy to digest and that people can find what they’re looking for without having to scroll down.
- Do people trust your website? If not, make sure that you include relevant images of what’s going on. For example, if you’re marketing to people in search of their first home, you wouldn’t use stock images of wealthy retirees. You’d use stock images that look like your customers.
2. Practice Clean “Call to Action” Habits
If you have a source of traffic—and you now have a lower bounce rate on that traffic—then it leads to the next question: what does that traffic do on your site?
If you want to generate real estate web leads, you’ll want them to click a “Call to Action” as soon as possible.
But you don’t want just any call to action.
After all, you can send a click to a competitor and you won’t generate any leads.
You want a relevant call to action, usually one that involves gathering their email and signing them up to an automated newsletter that serves as a sales funnel.
Here are the common elements of a successful call to action:
- Relevance. If someone is searching your site for FHA loans, for example, then you wouldn’t give them information on retirement and ask them to click to download your “real estate investment during retirement guide.” You want your CTA to be directly relevant to the customer segment that you’re targeting.
- Low commitment. Make it clear that your CTA is there to avoid jumping through hoops. “Find out if I qualify today” uses the word “today” to suggest that it will be an easy, straightforward process. “Found out if I qualify eventually” would be an example of a major CTA no-no.
- Write for the user. Your CTA should write from the perspective of the user. They want to click on something relevant to them, and it can feel odd if the text of your call to action uses the word “you.” So write the CTA with them in mind.
- Keep the CTA simple. It’s one thing to create a CTA that says “use a mortgage calculator now.” It’s another thing to write an entire paragraph! Keep the CTA simple so that the end user doesn’t feel like it’s going to take them a major time commitment once they click. You want to emphasize the fact that your CTA is going to be easy and that the lead generator you’re using won’t ask too much of the user.
- Make sure the CTA is highly visible. It’s one thing to do all of the above. It’s another thing entirely to do all of the above and then bury your CTA somewhere low on your site, where the user has to scroll down to see it.
3. Create a Compelling Web Presence
What makes a web presence compelling? Well, you’ve already started if you’ve implemented all of the tips above. You’re using traffic more efficiently, building a real estate website that’s ready for an influx of new traffic.
But you also want to get into the psychology of your customer segment. You want to write things from their perspective. You want to keep them in mind when you create a new site.
That’s why we recommend using individualized landing pages for different customers.
When a potential customer arrives at your site, they should feel that the content was written with them in mind.
They should be able to look at your solutions and say, “That’s exactly what I was searching for.”
Yes, it’s easy to create a generalized web page designed to capture all traffic.
But you know what happens?
You just end up sounding vague.
To get more traffic to convert into genuine leads, you’ll want to have a tool in place that can make all of the habits we wrote about here easy to accomplish.
That’s where leadpops comes in.
Use our free trial to give these principles a try—and see if you can’t generate more real estate web leads.
