Landing Pages Are More Important than Your Actual Real Estate Website

The other day, a prospective client called to speak with me about their website. As a naturally curious person, I first asked this gentleman if I could take a look at his current website. I didn't expect to see much in the way of an attractive looking website, but much to my surprise, the website was actually very nice.

Given that this gentleman's website was nice looking, followed SEO best practices (at least on the surface), and followed the newest mobile standards, my immediate question to him was why he felt he needed to change his site at all. The answer was a simple one: it wasn't bringing him any business. Why?

Upon further discussion and examination, we quickly got down to two main reasons the site wasn't performing to expectations. First off, there was an issue with no content marketing strategy being in place for the site. This is a problem. If you aren't putting great content on your website, you WILL NOT show up in enough search results and drive enough traffic.

Much more importantly, it turned out that even if he did get traffic to his site, somehow many, if not all, of those visitors were likely to just move on and not become new leads. Why was this? Other than the "Contact Me" page on his website, nowhere else could a prospective client raise their hand and request more information from him. His website was completely lacking the most important part of any good website that generates leads: LANDING PAGES.

What Is a Landing Page?

Simply put, a landing page is a single page on your website that is devoted to doing only one thing. It is asking for a visitor's information. In return, you are offering them some sort of immediate item of value they can get instantly for giving you their name, phone number and email. The most common example of a landing page in real estate has to do with a homeowner typing in their address and contact information for an instant online home valuation.

The only purposes of these pages are for lead generation. They will match the branding of your website, but they will lack many of the features your other web pages have. I wrote an article on the anatomy of the perfect landing page, but to sum it up, the main difference between a landing page and a page on your website is there are no navigation links, or anything to distract your website visitors on a landing page. You just want them to do one thing. You want them to fill out the lead form on that landing page, getting you a new lead.

Why Are Landing Pages More Important than a Real Estate Website?

Landing pages are more important than real estate websites for quite a few reasons. Here are my three favorite:

1. There are literally HUNDREDS of places homeowners can go to search the MLS

It's true. There are so many places these days that homeowners or home buyers can go online to search the web, for free, that making them register on your website to search the MLS is useless. Searching the MLS is not a draw to build leads on your website.

2. Trying to capture leads actually on your website (and not directing the user to a landing page) can actually lead to confusion

Again, the perfect landing page shouldn't have a bunch of extra links and images that will distract the web visitor. You want them to do nothing but fill out a form and convert them to a lead. With extra links and places to go, your conversion rate is going to suffer tremendously.

3. Landing pages just work

It's true. Hubspot did a study, and what they found were businesses that had landing pages (30+ pages), generated seven times the amount of leads as their counterparts that did not have landing pages. Can you use seven times the leads for your real estate practice? I'm sure you can.

Of course, starting out with 30 landing pages can be daunting. It for sure isn't impossible though, and there are some great ways you can almost instantly come up with a dozen or so right out of the gate.

Looking for some great landing page ideas for your real estate website? Stay tuned for my next article.

To view the original article, visit the Leading Agent blog.