These Real Estate Website Mistakes Can Hurt Your Reputation — Here’s How to Avoid Them
Not seeing any results from your personal real estate website?
Real estate website mistakes could be holding you back.
The best-looking design and snappiest copywriting won’t mean a thing if you’re making critical errors elsewhere.
Time to check your site before you wreck your site.
Here are five of the most common real estate website mistakes that could be robbing you of leads and hurting your reputation — and how to avoid them.
Confusing Navigation
If a visitor to your website can’t quickly find what they’re looking for because your site navigation is confusing, they’ll leave. And if they leave, then you’ve lost a potential lead.
A content-rich website is one part of the solution to this real estate website mistake. Clear navigation that easily points the way to that content is the other.
Website navigation is the menu of links to other pages on your website. It can appear as a drop-down menu or buttons along the top or side of the page.
Here’s what makes for clear and effective website navigation:
- The navigation menu is obvious; visitors don’t have to hunt for it
- The navigation is accessible from every single page of your website (including subpages, such as individual blog posts)
- There are links to every main page (e.g., about me, listings, blog, testimonials, and contact)
- The link text makes it clear to users where they will be taken upon clicking
- The links do not open in new windows or tabs (that can be irritating to the user)
Poor Mobile Experience
A website that looks great and functions well on a mobile device is not a nice-to-have — it’s a must-have.
The likelihood that your next real estate client accesses your website for the first time via their phone is high. So high that a poor mobile web experience is a disastrous real estate website mistake.
A good mobile web experience means that a website visitor doesn’t miss out on any functionality when they explore your site from their phone or tablet. While aspects of your site may not look exactly the same as when they’re seen on a desktop or laptop (because of the very different dimensions), the site still needs to look great on mobile, too.
A bad mobile experience is enough to make your visitor click away from your site and to create a poor first impression. It’s clunky, and clunky doesn’t communicate professionalism or success.
Any website template worth using (like myRealPage websites) will be optimized for viewing on a mobile device.
With Google’s move to mobile-first indexing, more website owners will be compelled to pay attention to their mobile sites. Since Google now uses the mobile version of a website for search indexing and ranking, having a poor mobile experience will result in poor search performance.
Lack of Valuable Content
Visitors to your website need a reason to stay on your website. Ideally many reasons.
Those reasons = rich content that educates, enlightens and motivates.
Content like…
- A real estate-focused blog (one that includes evergreen content)
- MLS® listings and sold data
- An “About Me” page
- Testimonials
- Lead capture forms (such as a newsletter sign-up)
Creating content-rich pages and keeping them up to date takes work, but it’s work that pays off.
Inconsistency
Consistency is key to achieving success in almost every area of life. That includes real estate websites!
To be consistent on your website means that everything from your key messages to your page titles to your fonts to your voice and tone are uniform, unvarying and cohesive. They don’t change from page to page, or paragraph to paragraph.
Inconsistencies on a website are a subtle but noticeable mistake that can add up to a less-than-glowing first impression.
If the tone of your writing, the information you’re sharing and the styles you’re using change from page to page, your website is conveying a sense of disorganization and lack of care.
That’s a bad impression that your visitor may extend to you, the real estate agent, as well. If their website is this all over the place, will they be the same way?
No or Few Calls-to-Action
An effective real estate website is a website that generates real estate leads.
Your website should attempt to turn every visitor into a lead by giving them a call-to-action (a CTA) — a step they should take.
The best CTAs are those that give you the contact information of your visitor and their permission to be contacted, so that you can follow up and nurture them down the path towards becoming a client.
Every page of your website should have some sort of CTA. It could be a CTA to sign up for your newsletter, download an eBook or guide, register for an event, provide credentials in order to search for and save listings, or contact you with questions.
A website with only a few calls-to-action isn’t reaching its full potential. Not maximizing opportunities to capture your visitors’ information is a big-time website mistake.
