Why?
The first thing to do is to ask yourself why you have set up the website. What do you want to happen when a visitor lands on your pages? "If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there" (An old saying attributed to many). If you do not know exactly what you want to happen, how can you expect the visitors to your website to know and do it? You are the one who ought to have the site set up to direct people to their destination. If you don't know what that is, then all is lost.
Your visitors probably know why they visited your site. You too must know why they came and help them do what they came to do. If your website does not provide what they need they will move on to another one. Just because you are getting all the traffic you could hope for does not mean that your site will succeed.
Your Website's Conversion Rate
You need to measure your success rate. There are a number of ways to do this. One is the Conversion rate. Simply put, the conversion rate is the rate at which you convert visitors into buyers. If you have one hundred visitors to your website per day and you convert two, your conversion rate is two percent. So what is a good conversion rate? This will blow you away. I've been to several conferences with major franchises and companies who are tickled to death with a 3 to 4% conversion rate! And you thought you could get 10%? In your dreams.
It is a reasonably good measure of the quality of your website. If your site is not converting, you will know that you need to make changes to the site.
SEO & Traffic Generation
The whole point of Website Positioning, or Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is traffic generation. The idea is that we optimize or fine tune your website so that it gets to the top of the search results when people enter a search term that is contained in your website. You do this to get traffic. If your site is not properly optimized, people are unlikely to find it. Unless of course you have found some narrow niche that nobody else has heard of, which will not bring a lot of visitors. SEO involves using the correct keywords in the correct way and arranging the contents and menus in the right way and most important of all is link building.
Increasing Page Rank
To rank highly, the single most important thing to do to rank highly in the search engines is to increase the number of links to your site from quality websites which have content related to the subject of your site. Did you read that? Let me repeat it again. To increase your page rank, increase the number of links to your site from quality websites which have content related to the subject of your site.
Content
It may sound obvious to most people but, the content of your website should be based on the subject of real estate. This could be title insurance, lending, appraisers and especially us. Prospects are visiting your website to get more information about homes, communities, recreation, schooling, etc. They are NOT coming to your website to get a resume about you. And yet what are you trying to cram down their throats?
The content should be keyword rich but not saturated or you may show up on spam radar. The content should be broken up into manageable paragraphs and properly laid out with headers for each section, making it easier to read and navigate.
Navigation
Getting the visitors to your website is only half the battle. You then must give them what they want. What do they want? Well, the first thing they want is to find their way around your website without pulling their hair out in frustration. These days there is far too much competition on the internet for that to happen. They will move to another website at the first sign of difficulty.
Arrange all the links and buttons in a way that is easy to read and understand. Do not over fill each page. If there is too much choice people do not make a choice they just get confused and... you guessed it. They move to another website. The first page they land on, usually the index page should be interesting. It should be obvious to them that they have landed on a page with the content they came for and the way to navigate to that content should be very clear. Do not try to give them everything on the front page. However the front page should make it obvious as to your overall content. (For more on this, email me and I'll send you more details on this and great agent website links)
Overall
Take a step back and ask yourself: "If I was a prospect, would I find this of value?". If not, you have some work to do. Finally, remember what I always tell people: Whatever you give to people represents who you are.
