An estate agent’s website is a powerful sales and marketing tool which can help win instructions and sell or let properties, but only if it’s a good one. If you want your website to be a true asset to your agency, and one that drives additional business, then start with our ten tips checklist:
- Your site should cater for all the most important use cases, especially that of vendors looking for you with a view to learning more about your business.
- It should be well designed and create a positive first impression. This is your brand online, and for many it will be their first experience of your business.
- It should be completely consistent with all your other branded material, ranging from your signage, stationery and office decorations through to your email signatures.
- It should build an electronic relationship with visitors – it’s your online branch! It can be your best branch manager, establishing trust and building relationships between your brand, your staff and your potential customers.
- It must be found, understood and indexed by Google, so that people looking for you online will find you. For this, it should have clean property details pages, on your own URLs.
- It must work as well on mobile phones, as it does on desktop computers and tablets.
- It must constantly evolve: just as content needs to change regularly, design may need to change periodically, and in addition the features and functionality of your web platform need to constantly evolve. For this reason, you need to build your website on a recognised agency website platform.
- It should integrate with your other online activity, like your social media profiles and those of your staff (as appropriate).
- It should give you the opportunity to present your staff, as people buy from people and a personal presentation is often the best way to show off your business.
- It should also collect user information in a non-intrusive way so you can market sensitively to customers with appropriate email marketing