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The Real Estate industry is all about attraction and first impressions. In the world of saturated markets for commercial and residential properties, you must stand out in the industry with better presentation and customer-friendly website designs. Always consider your website as the virtual showroom for your properties. By making use of the hundreds of features available for making the right impression, you will start getting customers and followers in no time.
From smooth navigation to an eye-catching design, the complications of designing a website can tire you out. So, to ease up your job, we’ve curated the must-note points which need extra attention.
Read this article to find the 5 most important things that must be kept in mind while designing a real estate website. Not only will they attract your target audience to your website, but it will also cater to the client’s needs for getting better business opportunities for improving your revenue. As an example, you can also check the website of Prestige Park Grove where you can get a good idea of what things would attract your audience better.
Don’t forget to check the surprise additional tips for creating a user-friendly website that ranks well in the search engine.
- List your expectations
Start by asking yourself this basic question – “What do you want from this website?” Your answer could be any or all of these –
- Getting inquiry calls from customers
- Attracting clients
- 360-degree display of properties
- Creating trust and credibility of your services
Once these points are noted, start researching your target audience. Note their age, preferences in terms of properties or social media platforms (for marketing), their risk appetite, limitations, and their needs. Try to answer all such questions on your website so that the audience turns into your loyal customers.
Another point to consider before designing a website is the client’s section. The primary factor of importance for the clients or prospective sellers is the credibility of the real estate company or agent. Cater to this requirement by providing trustworthy testimonials and client-satisfaction video clips on the homepage of your website.
Thus, to get the requirements right, you must first list down your expectations before asking the designer to start with the website design.
- Choose a meaningful domain name
Even if you offer the best services in the world at affordable prices, no one will actually know about you if your domain name isn’t relevant to your industry.
The best practice is to use commonly searched terms in your domain name. It could be something on the lines of ‘realestatenearme.com’ or ‘friendlyproperties.com’. Even if the content on your website isn’t rich enough, your domain name will guarantee better traffic because of its relatability.
Try to avoid usage of keywords in your domain a lot. For example, if you are a luxury homes broker in atlanta, there is no need for you to have words like broker, dealer or even atlanta in your name. You can take inspiration from luxuryredefined.com which is one of the most popular Atlanta luxury homes website.
Ensure that your domain name is short and easy to remember. Don’t worry if your name is long. Your audience will still remember it if it is something that is commonly used in daily conversations. The best example for this is the domain name we already spoke of ‘realestatenearme.com’.
Pro Tip: You can use online software like Google Trends for finding the most searched terms in your industry.
- Create a responsive website
Responsiveness is the key to driving huge traffic to your website. If your website is responsive, it can be comfortably viewed from a desktop, laptop, tablet, or smartphone, without changing the main design of the website.
A wide proportion of the global audience is extremely focused on smartphones for browsing their daily content. If your website is unreadable or cluttered when displayed from a mobile phone, you are sure to lose a significant part of the audience for your website.
So, ensure that your website is responsive to gain the maximum possible traffic from users of all devices.
- Make the website update-friendly
A good real estate website caters to the need of its customers by keeping up with the trends. Just like any other industry, updating the services and the scope of offerings is extremely important for any real estate website. So, you must keep this in mind before developing your webpages.
If you think creating and designing a website is a one-time job, you might be mistaken. As the industry moves forward, you need to incorporate the required changes in your website. For this to take place efficiently, your website must be optimized for change. The website must be able to integrate new updates easily without altering the design. Ask your developer to make the required facilities to ensure that this task is done properly.
- Focus on SEO
The main motive behind creating a website is to ensure that the target audience sees it while they search for relevant terms on a search engine. Your page can only rank better on search engines like Bing and Google if the content on your website is perfectly optimized for webpages. This has made Search Engine Optimization (SEO) an inalienable part of every website’s design.
Although it is a complicated process, you can still understand the basic factors which create an SEO-friendly design. They are listed below:
- Including most searched terms (also known as keywords) in your content
- Optimizing the webpages for speed or faster loading
- Using less third-party tools to improve the speed of your website
- Optimizing the images uploaded on the webpages
- Improving the user-accessibility by incorporating smooth navigation
- Creating and uploading sitemaps on software like Google Analytics
- Mapping every new update and uploading it on tracker software
- Understanding and using Google Analytics coding for the website
Once these basic steps are taken care of, your website will rank higher compared to your peers.
Advanced Tips
Once the basic features are taken care of, you must start working on the advanced facilities which would improve the user experience for good. Consider adding these features to your website for increasing its accessibility for the customers and your target audience.
- Sorting
- Advanced Search
- Featured Properties or Latest Properties
- Portfolio or Image Gallery
- Map View
- Social Sharing Buttons
- Testimonials
- Contact Form with details
- Blog
With these points taken care of, your website is now ready to feature on the first page of search engines!