Real Estate Website Testimonials Done Right

Do you have client testimonials on your real estate website? If so, where are they on the site?

This is the top navigation bar from a real estate website, and many sites are much the same. You get solicited and unsolicited testimonials from past customers and place them all on the Testimonials page for interested site visitors to read through them. You're getting very little value from the good ones in this way.

Tip 1: Get Better Testimonials

The "great service," or "awesome agent" testimonials and similar versions are OK for a testimonials page, but they're not really that valuable to you. What you want are testimonials specific to your services to buyers and sellers and even client types.

Action 1: Solicit What You Need

You're going to need to take a more proactive role in getting testimonials, and specifically in getting testimonials that speak to your services that site visitors are seeking. If you're truly making customers happy, then they should be fine with you asking for a short testimonial via email about specific services you provided. For buyers:

• A testimonial that says you went above the call of duty to locate every home that fit their criteria.
• You did tons of research to help them to know if a home was a good deal.
• You provided reports for the neighborhood that helped them to understand the market and the value of the homes they were viewing.
• You were valuable in helping them in the price and repair negotiations; they got a great deal due to your help.

Those are examples, and here are some for sellers:

• A testimonial that you were very detailed in your evaluation of their home, and in sharing easy and inexpensive ways to improve it for showings.
• You were careful to explain your CMA and how you chose comparable properties to come up with a listing price.
• You did another CMA later to make sure the market hadn't changed to call for a price change.
• You were valuable in the price and repair negotiations.

You're getting the idea. You're going to take the lead from things they say that lead you to suggest their testimonial speak to a specific topic. This is extremely important for the next tip and action.

Tip 2: Place Them for Effect

Once you have a group of topic/service specific testimonials, you're ready to place them on the site, NOT on a single Testimonials page. You can still have that page, but now you're going to strategically place them where they'll have the greatest effect.

Action 2: Landing Pages

If you've created effective landing pages targeting prospects by types, mostly buyer or seller related information pages, you're ready to place your testimonials. Depending on your abilities in your website design, you'll want to use bullets, popups, or just accented boxes to highlight your testimonials.

On a page educating sellers about the listing process, place testimonials about how you helped in that process, and place them in the content where they are with the topic of interest. When the seller prospect is reading about repair negotiations, have a testimonial talking about how much you helped in that respect. Carry through the entire site using this strategy of placing testimonials relevant to the content of that page.

Action 3: Tie in Calls-to-Action

Now you take the final step to increase your website leads dramatically. On our example page for the seller and repair negotiations, offer an example copy of a buyer demand for repairs and your seller's response. Offer it as an email attachment and they fill out a form to get it. Of course, you'll purge specific customer information and you'll choose one that shows a successful negotiation for your seller. Carry through this way for the entire site.

You're going to do two things that will differentiate your site from your competitors.

1. Position testimonials where they actually mean something.
2. Offer value added content right there that gets their contact information.

Follow these simple steps and you'll see an improvement in your real estate website lead generation.

To view the original article, visit the WebsiteBox blog.