What if you could improve the amount of leads generated by your real estate website without increasing traffic numbers?
You’re probably investing time and money on promoting your site in the attempt to see traffic improvements month to month.
If you’re not also maximizing ways to optimize the website for lead flow, then you’re most likely missing out on revenue opportunities.
Let’s look at eight ways to optimize your website for lead generation that don’t take long to implement.
1. Deliver Excellent User Experience (UX)
Your real estate website should provide a quality user experience (UX) so that visitors easily find what they’re looking for.
UX continues to be a critical factor in 2023 for retaining visitors and converting them into leads. Bad UX causes visitors to leave your website. You lose because visitors don’t stick around long enough to become interested in becoming a new prospect for your business.
What’s more, UX is a pretty elusive SEO factor most people aren’t really aware of.
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). You could add a section discussing the importance of accessibility and tools such as WAVE or AChecker to evaluate it.
Website speed, look & feel and responsive design are three of the most important UX factors.
Site speed: Test your website to make sure it loads quickly. Statistics reveal that 25% of your visitors will leave your site if it takes more than four seconds to load. Use tools such as Pingdom and GTMetrix to gauge whether your site’s load time needs improvement.
Look & feel: Ask yourself if your website looks professional enough. Has it been designed to appear modern or will visitors think it looks out-of-date and old? Make sure you choose a flexible website builder that gives you modern customization capabilities.
Responsive design: Does your website deliver excellent UX no matter which type of device it’s viewed on? Make sure it loads well on desktops, laptops, tablets and mobile phones.
Web Content Accessibility and UX
One trend that has picked up momentum, particularly with real estate websites, is accessibility. It’s not enough for a website to be fast, attractive, and responsive; it must also be accessible to all users, including those with disabilities. So, the website must comply with the
Take a few minutes to make sure your website’s user experience is above average.
2. Create An Enticing Lead Magnet
Before you can expect your website to deliver consistent real estate leads via the next set of steps, you need to create at least one solid lead magnet.
What’s a lead magnet?
It’s a free resource that you give away in exchange for your new lead’s contact information. It is basically what is going to help you grow your email list.
A lead magnet might be a:
- Video
- Cheatsheet
- Industry report
- Ebook
- Free educational course
- Audio
- Checklist
- Quiz
- Case study
- Interactive quizzes
- Mortgage Calculators
- Virtual tours
Your lead magnet must sound exciting and enticing to your audience or else it will fall flat on its face.
Consider these three factors when creating it:
- Deliver exactly what you promise
- Set up a landing page with a compelling headline that’s clear and easily understood
- Create a strong call-to-action
Lead magnets don’t take long to put into place.
For example, let’s say you’re going to use a list of homes in a certain neighborhood selling for under $350,000 as your lead magnet.
All it takes is a bit of research and adding those listings to a Google doc. Then, turn it into an easily-downloadable pdf file.
Next, use a simple landing page creator to set up your opt-in landing page. These types of software come with pre-built templates that you customize slightly with your specific copy:
When your site visitor clicks on the red “Send Me Updates First” button from the above image, they enter their contact information in the popup that appears next:
You should be able to implement a lead magnet idea within 60 minutes or less once you get familiar with your landing page software of choice.
One of the best lead magnets in 2023 is video.
Video content continues to reign supreme in 2023, playing a critical role in lead generation. Not only are videos more engaging, but they also offer a richer storytelling medium that can create a more profound connection with the audience. Leveraging different types of videos such as explainer videos, testimonials, live videos, webinars, and interactive videos can help businesses generate more leads.
We like the Canva Video Editor for it’s user-friendly interface and extensive suite of features that allow even novice users to create professional-grade videos. With an extensive library of templates, effects, and stock footage, it takes the complexity out of video editing, making it accessible to everyone.
3. Use An Exit Intent Popup
No matter how well your site’s user experience is, you’ll never achieve a 100% success rate when it comes to keeping website visitors on your domain until they decide to engage as a new prospect.
For keeping your website visitors engaged, you can add chatbots for enquiries, sharing images and videos, brochures, and schedule appointments.
Getting 30% of website visitors to return to your website at some point is considered typical.
What can you do to capture more of the 70% who leave your site and never return as new leads for your real estate business?
Implement an exit intent popup strategy.
An exit intent popup is a box that appears the moment your visitor indicates that they’re about to leave your website by moving the cursor toward the back button or their browser’s “close” button.
Guess what you provide them?
One of your lead magnets, of course!
How many more leads do you think you might start generating if you offered something like this the moment a visitor tries to leave:
“Thinking about buying or selling in (enter your city)? Click below for this year’s complete real estate report.”
Think of this strategy as your last-ditch attempt to bring a website visitor into your world so that you can communicate via email over time.
Paid software like ThriveThemes or free software like Sumo make it easy to set up your first exit intent popup offer in a matter of minutes.
Consider personalizing your exit intent popup.
Providing a personalized offer in the exit intent popup by leveraging data from the user’s session is a great way to address a visitors interests and pain points. If you are using WordPress to build your site there are some great plugins to help:
Poptin
Poptin is a versatile popup builder and contact form creator that employs exit-intent technology to increase conversions by capturing more leads, growing email lists, and reducing cart abandonment. Its suite of features includes advanced overlays, inline forms, exit popups, and unique tools like gamified pop-ups and dynamic visitor targeting, making it an ideal tool for various marketing needs.
Picreel
Picreel is a powerful exit-intent popup builder for WordPress, popular for its AI-enabled features and competitive pricing. It’s designed to help businesses optimize their lead generation and conversion rates by offering targeted, enticing pop-ups to visitors as they attempt to leave the website.
4. Generate Leads On Your 404 Page
Have you thought about the user experience provided to site visitors who land on your 404 page? How about the amount of new prospects you’re missing out on by failing to optimize that page for lead generation?
A typical 404 page says:
“We can’t find the page you’re looking for. Sorry about that.”
What a missed opportunity this is!
Let’s help you become more creative and use this valuable website space to provide additional value to your visitors and generate more leads at the same time.
Start by thinking about why a visitor lands on your 404 page.
They’re looking for something specific on your website.
For example, they might have been reading one of your blog posts where you linked them to a specific page that supports the post.
Maybe you’ve removed the page you just linked them to for some reason.
Maybe you linked to it incorrectly.
In any event, you’re causing frustration for your potential new client if you only give them the standard “the page you’re looking for is no longer here” message.
Instead, take the 30 minutes or less that it takes to offer them options to re-engage with you.
Here’s an example of a quality 404 page:
Notice the various ways a visitor can click through to explore more options.
While the above approach is a good one, one problem with it is that it doesn’t lead to direct lead generation.
What if you ethically borrowed this idea from Jerry Jenkins instead:
Jerry helps people write books but you can take this method and apply it to your real estate business by offering one to three of your best lead magnets on your 404 page to pick up new leads instantly.
Why not have a little fun with your 404 page?
Another great approach to reducing the frustration of a 404 page is to try a creative and humorous approach. Instead of just offering a lead magnet why not greet them with w funny message or image, it can make the experience a positive one. In addition, an interactive game or puzzle could also serve to engage the user and may lead them to explore more of the website.
5. Add a Lead Magnet To Your Homepage
Most website owners notice that their homepage is one of their most viewed pages when digging into their Google Analytics accounts.
It’s likely that your website performs the same way.
Are you using that page to its maximum capability for generating leads for your business?
If your homepage does a lot of explaining but doesn’t provide an enticing lead magnet, then it’s time to take a few minutes to fix the situation.
Take a fresh look at your homepage and ask yourself if there are too many options.
Many real estate agents confuse their audience by listing multiple homes for sale, giving a long “About Me” description and pointing visitors to various blog posts.
More choice isn’t always better.
In fact, studies reveal that too many choices on any webpage cause decision paralysis. Your website visitor becomes overwhelmed and backs out of your website instead of making any choice at all.
You should test whether removing some homepage elements and streamlining your message works better than providing too many choices.
Focus the page toward gathering a lead by offering a quality lead magnet that your visitors can’t wait to receive.
Here’s a solid example from an out-of-the-box example from Leadpages:
Remember this:
Your job isn’t to explain everything possible on your homepage. Instead, you need to figure out how to say less, generate more leads and then explain more details via email over the next several days and weeks.
The lead magnet you choose to add could be a number of things.
You could create a monthly downloadable PDF full of interesting data about the local real estate market, you could write a guide helping people understand what steps to take to get the most value when selling their home, or if you really wanted to go all out, you could build an in-depth online course that explains what it takes to invest in real estate.
6. Get Lead Magnets To Go Viral
How would you like to get your brand new subscribers excited about helping you get more qualified leads?
You can accomplish this by using a tool like GoViral.
This free tool lets you generate special thank you pages that encourage new subscribers to share your content with their social media networks.
Imagine this:
A website visitor opts in to get one of your lead magnets. You show them a thank you page that offers them a special bonus if they share your lead magnet opt-in landing page on their Facebook or Twitter profile.
The result?
Your offer goes viral and exponentially increases the possible new leads for your real estate business.
Here’s an example of how it looks in action.
You entice a website visitor to opt-in to book a tour, for instance:
They’re met with a page that might look like this after opting in:
As you can see, your subscriber has the option of playing along or clicking the link at the bottom of the page to forego sharing with their social media contacts.
The big benefit for you is that anyone sharing for the extra bonus lead magnet helps expand your audience, traffic and leads.
Go viral the organically by staying active on Social Media
Social media platforms continue to be a rich source for leads in 2023. Regularly posting engaging and valuable content, hosting live sessions or webinars, running contests, and implementing a robust social media advertising strategy can be a strong lead magnet.
7. Add Content Upgrades To Your Blog Posts
Don’t make the mistake many real estate business people make on their blog posts:
It’s all too easy for those in the real estate business to let their blog posts come to a halt without guiding the reader towards any action. This leaves the reader at a dead end, without any invitation to engage further. That’s not why you’re creating blog content, is it? Your aim is to transform those visiting your blog into actionable leads. You aren’t creating blog content to generate visitors who fail to take any measurable action.
The best way to accomplish that is to add a lead magnet to each blog post on your website.
One effective strategy to do this is by including a lead magnet – or a “content upgrade” – in every blog post on your website. A content upgrade is a way of enhancing the value of the blog post by offering the reader a logical next step.
For example, if you’ve written a blog post called “The Top 5 Ways To Improve Your Home’s Curb Appeal”, then you might offer a content upgrade that says, “Grab My List Of 4 Additional Curb Appeal Tips To Improve Your Home’s Value By 16%!”.
This is far more enticing than, “Sign Up For My Newsletter”.
Look at each blog post currently sitting on your website and ask yourself what the next logical step is for the reader.
Leverage AI tools to help
To ensure you’re consistently providing relevant and engaging content upgrades, consider utilizing AI tools such as ChatGPT or Jasper.ai. With machine learning, these AI tools can help generate creative, engaging, and contextually appropriate content. It can help you brainstorm content upgrades that are tailored to the specifics of your blog post, enhancing the user experience and increasing the chances of converting visitors into leads.
With Chat GPT your can write simple prompts to get ideas for supporting articles. Using the above example you can write a simple prompt such as “Please provide me with 20 topic suggestions for complementary articles to the main piece, “The Top 5 Ways To Improve Your Home’s Curb Appeal”.” Give it a try, you’ll be amazed.
So, why not give your current blog posts a review and consider what the next logical step for the reader might be. Then, let AI tools like ChatGPT help you create captivating content upgrades, set up the corresponding landing pages, and link your visitors to these upgrades. Watch as your flow of leads increases over time as a result.
8. Use Other Types of Popup Forms
Don’t limit your popup options to exit intent forms only.
Consider how to use timed or slide-in pop ups to increase leads from your current website traffic.
One word of caution:
Don’t litter your website with too many popup forms because they can become distracting and annoying to your visitors.
However, a well-crafted lead magnet that pops up after a visitor has read a blog post for 30-60 seconds might work.
Typically, the key is allowing your visitor a little time to enjoy what they see and start trusting your content.
Then, float a form in from the side of the page, for instance, with an enticing lead magnet offer.
Summary
Each of the above website optimizations will increase your overall lead flow if you put them into action.
The key is to create a plan to implement them gradually over time.
Set aside 60-90 minutes weekly and start adding them into your website optimization work until you’ve tested each method.
If you take a few minutes to implement each strategy over the next few weeks, then you should see a nice uptick in leads without increasing website traffic.
Great tips to implement immediately!