If you’re a real estate agent or broker, then it’s probably safe to assume you’ve already got some kind of web presence (especially if you’re already reading this!) To say you can’t ignore the internet when it comes to marketing your real estate services in 2024 is a bit like saying we need oxygen to survive: So obvious it almost doesn’t bear mentioning.
Even if everybody in real estate knows that you want to get traffic to your website … it’s not always so clear what exactly is supposed to happen to your visitors after they arrive. Lead conversion hinges on your ability to give those visitors what they want — both immediately, and in the future when they’re making a decision to work with you.
This means that every page on your website should have a clear purpose and direction that will ultimately direct visitors into your sales funnel of prospects, whom you can contact and nurture depending on their preferences and their stage in the home sales or purchase process. It’s not enough to have an IDX-driven website with clean designs and customizable branding options; those are must-haves in today’s digital world.
Already have these pages on your website? Pat yourself on the back, and make sure you’re optimizing them so you can turn more of your visitors into future clients.
Missing a couple — or five or ten? Consider which are highest-value for your business today and prioritize adding those. And if you don’t have time or need some help, the Placester Services Marketplace can put them together for you!
1. Home page
If someone is landing on your website because they Googled your name, then your home page is like the front door of your professional house. It should sport curb appeal, but also hint at the space and resources inside the (freshly painted and pristine) walls.
Your home page should clearly announce what you do and give readers clean and clear navigation to all of your website’s “rooms.” Use high-resolution, bold images on your home page that reflect your niche as an agent or a brokerage; maybe it’s a specific home type, or a stunning bird’s-eye view of a cozy neighborhood.
There are some things that visitors are going to expect to see as a matter of course on a home page:
- Your name and logo
- Clear, simple, intuitive page navigation
- Contact information: Phone, email address (or link to form), social media icons
Branding should be consistent across your home page and, in fact, your entire website. If you’re having difficulty creating a cohesive and coherent “feel” to your website, consider hiring a designer to help you finesse your brand and create guidelines for you to follow moving forward.
Note: Every page on your website should have a call to action — except for your home page. Its call to action, or CTA, is to get visitors to click on something presented on the home page. Regularly review your most popular listing pages, blog posts, neighborhood guides, and other traffic, and feature them on your home page alongside newer content and pages you want to test out. And see how clever and creative you can get with your menu and navigation titles … not because you want to be off-brand or cutesy, but because you want to show visitors: “Here’s what you will be most interested in seeing right now.”
2. Contact page
Is it really necessary to include a separate contact page on your website? One reason why you might want to do this is because you can encourage your visitors to fill out some basic information that you would already ideally ask them to include in any email sent: Are they interested in buying, selling, or both? (Or did they come to you for rental help?)
These responses are sent directly to your inbox, and you can reply to your new leads from there. You can also ask visitors to tick a box to prove they’re human, cutting down on spam.
Instead of including your email address directly on your home page or in your footer, consider displaying a mail icon and linking to your contact page. You can customize it to capture whatever lead information will be most useful for you!
CTA: “You’ve got real estate questions? I’ve got answers! Email me directly from this contact form.”
3. About page
This page is your introduction to you (and your team, if applicable), giving visitors an idea of what it’s like to work with you, and why you love real estate, and especially real estate in the region where you’re operating.
Agents should give some details about their history in the area and with home sales, and who they are as humans — interests, hobbies, board memberships or volunteer gigs, and other pertinent information that helps buyers and sellers understand why they’d want to work with you.
If you’ve got a team or a brokerage, then share photos of your team members and your office, and explain who’s who, how long they’ve lived in the area, what drew them to real estate, and why they love working with you.
Do you have any industry certifications or awards? This would be the place to list them!
CTA: “Want to talk about how I can help you buy a house/sell your house? Schedule a meeting!” Use a calendar integration that shows visitors your availability and allows them to book a 15-minute or 20-minute Zoom consultation.
Check out also: Introducing Follow Up Boss, Our New Technology Partner for Helping You Manage Leads
4. Curated IDX listing pages
Searching for houses online is usually the first step a buyer takes when they’re trying to purchase a home — and sellers are going to want to know that you can show their home to as many buyers as possible — so it’s clearly important to include IDX search on your website. But consider that if all your visitors want is a typical IDX search experience, they’re probably going to head to one of the portals, instead
Think about the neighborhoods or regions where you have the most expertise, and ask yourself what kind of niche listing searches people would love to see. Mid-century modern homes of a certain size? Historic fixer-uppers? Homes with ADUs, or other accommodations for long-term guests or multiple generations?
Don’t limit yourself to just one page! Experiment to see which listing niches are most popular, and ask your current buyers what types of homes they’re most interested in seeing.
CTA: “Want to hear about the latest mid-century modern listings in Belleville, as soon as they hit the market? Sign up for newsletter alerts/Set up an appointment with me”
5. Blog
A blog can showcase your personality and market expertise all at the same time, without pressuring your readers to take any steps to work with you. It’s an invitation to get to know you and can keep you consistently top-of-mind for real estate needs, while establishing you as a local expert.
The best way to start building consistent readership is to put together a content calendar and commit to publishing regularly. Maybe you decide that your schedule will be a new post on Tuesdays and Fridays; Tuesdays will be real-estate-related information or background or a personal story, and Fridays will be about the neighborhoods or areas where you help people buy and sell.
You can break it down even further so that every first and third Friday, you’re featuring a different restaurant; maybe the other Fridays in the month are dedicated to retail shops or services.
Promote your new posts on social media, and email them to the list of people who have registered for alerts; you can do this automatically with many publishing services, and use it as a friendly and low-pressure CTA on every blog post.
CTA: “Sign up for email alerts to see new posts as soon as they’re published!”
6. Area and community pages
What’s it like to live where you help people buy and sell real estate? For anyone who’s hoping to move to the area, you can offer a valuable resource to guide them through where the parks and recreation centers are, which businesses or events really make the neighborhood stand out, and what the real estate market has been doing in that particular community.
Start with the neighborhood where you’re most active and make the best resource page you possibly can for anyone who might want to move to that area but has either never been there before, or visited a handful of times. Ideally, your guide will even have details that seasoned residents will find novel!
Odds are pretty good that you’ll have more information than one website could possibly hold about a neighborhood or community. Consider creating a guide or video series that goes in-depth on where people eat, shop, work out, take kids to school, enjoy leisure time outside or inside, partake of the arts, and dance—and what the living conditions in the houses themselves are like, too!
CTA: “Enter your email address, and I’ll send you a guide to Belleville!”
7. Lifestyle pages
Selling real estate in an area known for skiing? Maybe a lifestyle page that shows condos right on the resort slopes (in addition to a section on where to buy gear) would interest some of your visitors. Lakefront property, resort areas, and many other lifestyle-driven real estate areas have multiple opportunities for rich information about what it’s like to live the lifestyle here (and the questions that lakefront property owners might want to ask about water pressure, for example!).
Even areas that don’t seem to have obvious “lifestyle” opportunities might surprise you. What do dog-owners care most about, and how can you cater to their needs if you’re working in a city? How about friends or siblings buying condos together?
CTA: “Ask me more about the paddleboarding lifestyle in Belleville and what lakefront properties might be available soon!” Use a lead capture form, or invite them to book an appointment to talk.
8. Resource pages
Buyers and sellers have a thirst for knowledge that you can satisfy in a number of ways: checklists, e-books, reports, infographics, and guides. Using resource pages to showcase the different assets and tools you offer for free gives them the opportunity to browse a library of knowledge about real estate and what it’s like to buy or sell a house in the area where you’re operating in your niche.
People who have never bought or sold a house before will appreciate some guidance around how the process typically works, and that’s an obvious form of resource page — but there are many, many different types of resource pages you can build that can drive traffic to your website and increase interest in your brand and services.
For example, it’s not always easy to see a list of different events that are taking place in a smaller area, especially if the local newspaper has long since ceased to exist. Consider trying to collect a calendar of events taking place in a neighborhood or community — theater, sports, festivals and markets, craft fairs, clothing exchanges, kid’s camps, or whatever else your neighbors are doing.
Don’t feel discouraged if you don’t have any resources yet. One way to start creating them is to begin with a blog; after you’ve been publishing consistently for some time, look back over your content and ask yourself if there are posts you could pull out for chapters in a “buyer’s guide” or “seller’s guide.” It’s possible you’ve already done some of the work, and it just needs to be rearranged and rejuvenated a bit.
CTA: “Get this amazing resource now — enter your email address.”
9. Home valuation page
Sellers want to know how much their house would be worth in today’s market. This is another example of something that most real estate websites are going to offer a seller, so make sure you’re including more background or context around how that number is getting generated, if you can. For example: “According to the latest sales, homes the same size as yours in this neighborhood are selling for about $400,000. We think yours is worth more/less based on a few different variables.”
You don’t necessarily have to disclose everything, but showing sellers that you have an idea what’s happening in the market and how it relates to their home is more important than your automated valuation being spot-on, especially if you invite them to get a more exact estimate from you after you take a look at their house in person.
CTA: “Would you like a comparative market analysis of your house?” (This can work with an email capture.)
Or: “Book an in-person home estimate consultation today.” (Use a calendar integration for the second)
10. Newsletter sign-up page
If you’re already writing a blog post and covering real estate content on Tuesdays and general community or lifestyle information on Fridays, then it’s not much extra work to set up a newsletter to blast out to interested recipients and entice them back to your website. If you have the interest and bandwidth in occasionally sending market updates or other timely information, you could also create a newsletter around that.
A newsletter page allows visitors to see what you’re offering and sign up for some or all of the different newsletters you’re sending out. You could also offer to send out information specific to just buyers, sellers, and homeowners, depending on their newsletter preference.
CTA: “Sign up for your preferred newsletter (or newsletters) below.” Integrate with your newsletter list and email platform.
11. Consultation scheduling page
If buyers and sellers are ready to hire you and want to meet you in person for the first time, a great place to send them is a scheduling page where they can see your availability for walking them through what it will be like to work with you, and booking an appointment to talk further.
Integrations like Calendly can sync with your calendar and allow you to set up several different types of appointments for different types of clients. For example, you could have a first-time buyer’s appointment, a veteran’s buyer’s appointment, a comparative market analysis request and appointment to go over the results, or a request to schedule a listing presentation with you.
You can set up one or several of these pages, but this way, the visitors who are most serious about buying or selling a house sooner rather than later will have a way to get on your calendar … sooner.
CTA: “Set up your buyer’s/seller’s consultation with me today.”
12. Reviews and testimonials page
Client reviews and testimonials help show that you understand what you’re doing as an agent (or a brokerage), and they’re becoming an increasingly important part of a brand strategy. Read the article in which you find out how to ask your clients for reviews and get great ones!
13. Listing pages
When you’re listing a house for sale, its listing page on your website should be one place people can see absolutely everything about it, from 3D tours to high-resolution and gorgeous photos to detailed property information and history. You can link from here to neighborhood guides, but it’s also helpful to share a few tidbits about the closest places to grocery shop, the local schools, and any other pertinent facts that a buyer might want to know offhand.
You can differentiate your listing page by sharing some details about what makes the neighborhood and the house itself unique — the best place to sit for a morning cup of coffee, or what the sunset looks like from the deck after dinner. Help buyers see themselves inside the house and understand what the current owners love most about it, while protecting everyone’s privacy.
CTA: “Want to learn more about this house/see it in person/schedule a tour? Book an appointment today.” Use a contact form or calendar integration.
14. Sold listings index
Why include sold listings on your website? One big reason: Sellers will be curious to see what other homes you’ve helped sell! Even if you haven’t listed and sold any “famous” or noteworthy homes in the area, it will help your future clients see how many past clients trusted you to help them sell their homes, and ideally, also some details around closing dates and list-to-sales price.
Sold listings are also a fun place to browse if you’re a homeowner in the area who’s just curious about what’s happening but not really interested in selling … yet. It’s another low-pressure avenue to possible future sellers who just might keep coming back to see what else has sold recently!
CTA: “Want to see homes currently for sale in these areas? Check out our current listings.”
OR: “Curious what your house would be worth in this market? Request a free comparative market analysis!”
