Articles >> The Lead Corner >> Website Organization
Organizing Your Real Estate Website to Increase Leads
by Brandon Cornett
Website usability plays a major role in real estate lead generation success. With all other things being equal, a website that's easy to use will produce more leads than a difficult website.
This is where organization comes into the picture. Organizing your website in a neat and logical way is the first step to improving usability. Organize your website content so people can find things easily. Keep things clean and uncluttered. Within ten seconds, people should be able to identify the correct path to the information they seek or the tool they want to use. If they can, your website will generate more leads for you.
But therein lies the challenge. Many real estate agents have so much information on their websites — articles, mortgage calculators, links to other sites, pictures, virtual tours, listing tools — that they overwhelm the reader with too much at once.
How do you balance these things? How do you provide enough information and tools to make your website useful ... without making it confusing? Rest assured, it can be done. It may take some trial and error, and you might have to map things out on paper. But even the most information-rich websites can be organized well.
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For example, look at the menu mockup I've created to the right. The upper portion of this website menu contains several lead generation tools and techniques (chat, Q&A program, property listings, etc.), but it's all well organized and inviting. This special menu could sit right up above the main website menu, and it could be adjusted or expanded as necessary. Apply a similar method or organization to your real estate website and your lead generation program will benefit from it. |
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It's not important that your tool menus look exactly like this one. It's the organization that's important. The easier your tools are to find, the more people will use them. When your website visitors are able to find and use things with ease, there's a better chance they'll stay on your website longer. And by extension, the amount of time they spend on your website directly influences the number of leads your produce through the site.
With a real estate website — or any type of business website, for that matter — the goal is to people down a certain path. Typically, this path will end in some form of desired action or response. Within our context, that desired action is either an inquiry or some form of lead capture. Granted, you can't control where people will go or what they will click on when they visit your website. But if you present the path you want them to take, and you make it easy to follow, a certain number of people will follow it.
On the contrary, a real estate website that's overloaded with too many items (with no thought to order and organization) will divide the reader's attention and create distraction. Aside from killing your lead generation program, this will make people more inclined to leave your site altogether.
You can begin to see how all the components of the website — content, tools, organization, usability — all come together to support your lead generation goals.
About the author - Brandon Cornett is an Internet marketing veteran and the creator of several resource websites for real estate agents, including AdviceForAgents.com, ArmingYourFarming.com, and TopTenAgent.com. Visit the author's website at www.AdviceForAgents.com.