WhoshouldIsee Tracks

Strakers visit the Site Doctor

What’s in the video?

Homeflow’s Site Doctor has examined the Strakers website in detail.  The results, recorded in this video, look at what’s healthy, and where there are a few aches and pains that could be remedied.

In sum:  The current site is solid and clean, with clear usability throughout. The illustrative style is both fun and powerful, and sets a friendly, whilst professional and upmarket, tone. However, the design would obviously benefit from being made fully responsive. We also cover some thoughts for rearranging the auctions section, which we understand was a specific area in which you were looking for ideas.

Beyond that, there are big opportunities in improving the site speed (which is a real issue as explained in the video) and in sorting out the site structure for SEO, where there are big opportunities for gains.  Both of these points are sufficiently serious that we would strongly recommend an immediate fix. They will yield strong commercial value in terms of lead flow. It’s an elegant site, but unless it works on a mobile, and is effective in getting you new vendor and landlord instruction / valuation requests out of Google, then it’s missing the commercial opportunity. We would love to help you fix these points.

We hope it proves useful. Enjoy…

The Doctor’s Notes…

At various points in the video, we mention we will link to more information below, here they are:

Design:

it isn’t responsive. This is very important and a great opportunity. Other than that, the design is clear, and there is a great, solid framework to build from.

Property Search Pathway:

We could consider adding “Infinite scroll” on the results pages. And it would be great to add in more functionality around results of properties on a map.  We could even look at something like “mapbox” for map styling perhaps?

We could do with adding open page response forms as well as staff profiles on property details pages.  We also mentioned lots of opportunities (on property details specifically, but also around the property search pathway generally) to generate one more page impression in various ways.  You might also want to watch the “Perfect Property Details Page” video for some ideas before you do any work on this page.

Contact pathway:

A good starting point here is our estate agent website structure overview video and diagram of the same.

We’re missing page titles missing on key branch pages for SEO.  And there is also lots we could do for the user on the branch pages…  It would be good to have branch phone numbers visible, one click phone number from mobile.  There are no links to staff profiles from branch pages.  And integrating in area guides would be great.  Plus we could add a link from branch pages to properties for sale/let.  And another big one would simply be adding on page response forms on the branch and property pages.

Content pages:

The easiest wins are simply adding a text title to the page title, and fixing up the fact that there are no “h1” tags again.  And there’s a lot of text in general, which would be great to break up, simplify and perhaps add more photography.

Obviously there is the key requirement for the Auctions section, splitting it up into sections, and cleaning up that page in general.  We’ll put it all into an easy to access, and control yourself, Content Management System (CMS).

Mobile responsive:

Obviously you have a separate mobile, link to responsive vs mobile – this used to be ok as an approach, but we think the world is changing fast now, and would strongly recommend going fully responsive these days.  We also mention the Homeflow Benchmarking Survey in this section as this will compare mobile and tablet traffic.

Speed:

Sorting out page speed will result in more page impressions and much improved SEO, there is a massive opportunity here.  Here is the speed benchmarking chart we discussed in the video to compare yourselves against, and also the speed chart, a few charts down, here.  When we meet, we should look at this point in your Homeflow Benchmarking results too, as the symptoms are often very clear there.

SEO:

You were understandably concerned to protect your SEO moving forward, but, on analysis, we don’t think this is a risk at all.  Moreover, in fact, we believe there is a very strong opportunity to improve it markedly.  Homeflow is very strong in this arena, and there are several, low hanging fruit, opportunities we identify in the video.  So, far from being a risk, on examination, we actually think it is a very compelling reason TO make the changes.

In the video we look at two of the major types of search traffic volume

Key amongst the requirements mentioned in the video is the importance of fixing the site with clean urls for SEO. Note, however that this point goes hand in hand with Page titling work – as there are no page titles in many areas.  Also mentioned in the video was a quick check to compare your domain authority with other similar agents.  And finally we referenced the advantages of a corporate agent vs a single branch independent.  Clearly at your scale, you enjoy, but will also have to play to, the strengths of a bit of each type.

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