Have you ever asked yourself: “How do I generate leads with my real estate website?”
It’s an important question to ask. One that should be easy to answer. Since 68% realtors say their website isn’t generating leads, I wanted to take the time to write this article.
Too often we see the same pattern. You pay to get a website up. Then you spend a bunch of money on ads and/or SEO services. Wait for the leads to come rolling in and… nothing happens. You threw away your whole marketing budget and have nothing to show for it.
It’s unfortunate that this happens. Usually, it comes down to bad services (particularly SEO, most companies are scamming you out of your money), uneducated advertising (throw a bunch of money on ads and see what happens), and a bad foundation. The foundation is your website.
Before doing any ads or SEO, you need to make sure your website is built to capture those leads. Want to know how? I’m going to give you the keys to creating a real estate website optimized for lead generation.
In this article, you will learn:
The different types of lead capture
Tools you can use to capture leads
How to make a great call-to-action
Authority building to increase opt-ins
Let’s start with the actual structure of your real estate website – and the tools you can use to prep for generating the most amount of leads.
Real Estate Website Design
When creating your real estate website, there is one item you should worry about first and foremost. User experience.
User experience is defined as “how a person feels when interfacing with a system”. You can think of UX as the design of your website and it’s usability. For our purposes, we’ll want to focus on two things primarily.
The Usability of Your Real Estate Website
Is your website optimized for mobile and tablet browsers? Is it professional looking and easy to navigate?
If you answered “no” to either of those questions, start here. Remember that mobile optimization is now one of the biggest factors for ranking your website on Google. It’s why we put an enormous emphasis on it with every real estate website we build at AgentFire – and you should too.
The Speed of Your Site
Your website speed will come down to your structure (the coding languages it’s built on and the plug-ins you have running) as well as your hosting provider.
We try to minimize the amount of plug-ins running. Plug-ins on WordPress websites play a large part in how fast a website is. At AgentFire we control this by creating optimized plug-ins in-house… But you can do the same by testing which plug-ins speed up or slow down your site.
As for hosting, we use RackSpace. It’s one of the best hosting solutions available. Simply because it ensures our sites are always fast and our servers won’t be hacked like the 30,000 sites per day that are.
Generating Real Estate Leads
Once your website has the user experience covered, you can move into the tools that will allow you to capture leads.
At AgentFire, we’re data guys. That means we look at the hard numbers and find what works. Then, we implement it into our clients’ real estate websites. Let’s first cover the types of lead capture we use.
- Pop-ups
- Slide-ins
- Landing pages
- Lead magnets
- Delayed Force Registration
Pop-ups I’m sure you’re aware of. If designed well and targeted, they’re not as invasive as you may be thinking. Slide-ins are CTA’s that slide into your users’ view when they scroll down your page.
Landing pages are set up for various purposes – many times used in combination with lead magnets… Which we will elaborate on shortly, along with Delayed Forced Registration.
Home Valuation Reports
Offering your website visitors an automatically generated CMA is one of the best ways to generate seller leads. It’s high value (people want to know what their homes are worth).
They also don’t have to speak to anybody face-to-face right out of the gate, which is a bigger investment on their part.
Buyer and Seller Guides
We’ve found these to be one of the most powerful lead magnets for real estate websites specifically. Just make a form where users can enter their information and have your guides sent to their email address (or given a download link).
I’m going to write an article about how to make these buyer and seller guides. For the time being, if you want to check out what ours look like, just send me an email and I will send you a sample: support@agentfire.com.
Two other great real estate lead magnets:
- The best investment opportunities in [your city]
- Monthly/yearly market reports
Subscriptions and Social
Set up a simple pop-up, sidebar or “in-content” CTA. You can do this for email subscriptions or social media, prompting visitors to like or follow your profiles.
This is a great way to generate leads. Or build your list of fans so you can continue to market, using exposure to build trust and brand recognition in your community with potential home buyers and sellers. I’ll talk more about remarketing later as it’s important.
Delayed Forced Registration
Assuming you have property search set up on your real estate website, you can use DFR. This feature allows you to force users to sign up once they have conducted the allotted number of searches. A great tool to get buyer leads.
A quick note: Many realtors set up IDX property search on their site but fail to realize certain solutions are iFramed. These solutions offer zero SEO value for your website. This is why we only work with specific IDX providers, like Showcase IDX.
