7 Tips for Delivering an Amazing Website Experience

Whether you are an agent, team or broker, having a compelling online presence is crucial to your real estate business success. This means a user-friendly, value-driven website experience, a strong social media presence, and plenty of good content and opportunities to capture leads and initiate conversations. The ideal marketing strategy is focused on delivering a combined, comprehensive experience across multiple channels that all link and support each other in the lead capture, nurture and conversion life cycle.

Many real estate professionals feel frustrated with their online website because, many times, it fails to deliver a thoughtful experience for the end-user, resulting in little to no lead capture and engagement. Sound familiar?

No worries, we've developed a great checklist of considerations and elements that your website should include in order to increase awareness, provide better service, and capture more leads.

Tip #1: Incorporate IDX

Whether you are new to real estate or a seasoned pro, you have likely heard the term "IDX." In simple terms, IDX (Internet Data Exchange) is what allows your website visitors to search for MLS properties on your website. Trust us when we say, you WANT and NEED this on your website, otherwise your site visitors will be off searching for properties on Zillow, realtor.com and Homes.com, providing valuable user information and leads to those services instead of you!

Tip #2: Work with the Pros

Incorporating IDX into your website is tied to rules and regulations overseen by your MLS and can prove challenging for a DIYer, not to mention addressing visitor privacy, DMCA, and other required terms. We recommend working with a tried and true website development company that can ensure your website is 100% compliant and offers the highest level of engagement and entertainment for your visitors.

Tip #3: Deliver Consistent Content

Let's face it, a static website will NOT rank well in the search engines. It's important that your website is regularly updated with fresh content featuring lots of keyword-rich material. We love a built-in blog that features listing updates (pulled automatically from your IDX feed), relevant lifestyle content, and hyper-local information. If you don't have the time to create all of this content yourself, a solution like Elevate will do a lot of the "heavy lifting" for you, providing you the SEO-friendly content you need and keeping your audience engaged.

Tip #4: Connect to Social Media

All of that great content that's being posted to your website in tip #3 above? Make sure that it's being syndicated across your social media channels. The average American spends over two hours PER DAY on social media, so linking your website and social media together makes it even easier for prospective clients to find you on whatever online platform they may be using. And, make sure that whenever you post content to your social media channels, that you are linking back to your website (and not a third party) to keep your audience engaged with YOU.

Tip #5: Build in Lead Capture

Make sure that your website features LOTS of easy opportunities for capturing leads. Every listing should allow people to "raise their hand" for more information, as should your blog posts. We also LOVE websites that feature value-added downloads, calculators and other helpful tools and resources that not only provide stellar service to your site visitors, but also capture the lead for easy follow-up.

Tip #6: Make It Easy and Obvious

In order to deliver an amazing web experience, it's important to make sure that your site visitors are able to quickly and easily find the information that they are looking for. Statistically, website visitors will spend a total of seven seconds attempting to search your site before they click away for another option. Keep your home page simple with the most important information easily accessible. Think simple navigation, obvious call-to-actions, and easy search functions.

Tip #7: Be Personable

People want to work with people they like and feel a connection to. Make sure your website reflects your personality and showcases your strengths, specialities and expertise. Let your audience know how you can help them and provide information that establishes credibility and builds rapport.

Your website is important for supporting that "first impression," establishing your professionalism, and serving as a resource for your online audience. Take the time and effort to invest in delivering an exceptional experience and your audience will come back again and again.

Here are a few of our favorite resources to help you along the way:

• Need a good website partner?
  Start with the team at Elevate. They offer affordable websites with customizable packages including online lead generation, social media automation, CRM, email campaigns and more to help you streamline and automate your day-to-day marketing.

• Looking for a truly custom website experience?
  Connect with the Creative Team at 3sixtyfive.agency to explore a uniquely, one-of-a-kind web experience designed to engage and entertain your audience.

• "Rocking Website SEO" free guide
  Want more great SEO-friendly tips, tricks and strategies for your website? Download this FREE guide and learn the secrets to getting found on Google!

About Elm Street

Elm Street Technology offers a growing portfolio of real estate technology and marketing services with the goal of providing one vendor and one point of contact, fully fused into one singular platform – Elevate – to capture and nurture more leads into closed business. Elm Street's portfolio of products and services allow busy real estate professionals the ability to streamline and automate their marketing and day-to-day business objectives by offering high-end IDX websites, lead generation tools, a powerful CRM, email, social, text and blog marketing automation, recruiting and retention tools, and more.

To learn more, please visit ElmStreet.com.