I get to talk to lots of Real Estate professionals through my travels and various speaking engagements and 1 question I always get is; “Can you critique my website?” I would have to guess that at least 90% of the websites I end up taking a look at completely miss the point! This has inspired me to write a quick post to let you all know that: YOUR WEBSITES SUCK!
Okay, that may be a little harsh but for most of you it’s absolutely true! Good news is, you’re in the right place to start learning how to make your sites suck less. In this post I am specifically talking about your main website, not any landing/squeeze pages you may have. The rules for landing pages are different and I will address those in a later post.
Write this sentence down where you can see them as you’re working:
The only 2 reasons my website exists is to:
1. Solve my visitors’ problems and
2. To entice them to take action
What problems does your home page solve?
Remember This…Most people don’t care about you or your site.
Really…What visitors care about is whether or not you can solve their problems NOW. Most people visit a website to solve one or more of these four problems no matter what the niche is:
- They want/need information
- They want/need to make a purchase / donation.
- They want/need to be entertained.
- They want/need to be part of a community.
Too many organizations believe that a website is about opening a new marketing channel, getting donations, promote a brand, or increase company sales by 15%. No. It’s about solving your customers’ problems and getting them to take action. Have I said that phrase enough?
You should be able to look at the home page of any site and figure out what the site is about in less than four seconds. If you can’t, the site is a complete failure. Visitors should know exactly where there are on your site at all times and what the next step is they need to take.
You should also have a clear and concise headline, a lead capturing Opt-In box with a brilliant call to action and any pertinent contact information all “above the fold” or before your visitor has to scroll down on your website. Many times it also makes sense to have a 2nd call to action somewhere below the fold. And, always always always have an Opt-In box on every page of your website. You just never know when
A good way to keep your visitors attention once they land on your website is to use video. It doesn’t have to be a Steven Spielberg production. You can simply take out your flip video camera and film yourself describing how you can help solve your visitors’ problems, whether they are looking to buy a home or sell their home. If you are absolutely terrified of getting in front of the camera you can create a cool slideshow video by using a service called animoto.com. You can see an example of the videos you can create here:
In fact, if you would like to have one of these videos created for you for only $25 or 5 total videos for only $100 just send us an email on the Contact Us page and we’ll call you to get things set up!
In some follow up posts I will discuss some other ways to increase the conversions and also the visibility of your sites.
Until Then,
